DrugBust

Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of their time, and ill people's money, patenting medicines.  They then have a legal monopoly on those medicines, which allows them to charge a great deal for them.  For example the anti-cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin) costs about €30,000 per year for one breast cancer patient.

Trastuzumab is a monoclonal antibody, so it is not as easy to make as making carbon dioxide by adding sulphuric acid to chalk, but it isn't that hard either.  You fuse cancer cells and spleen cells in a mouse that has been injected with whatever substance that you want the monoclonal antibodies to bind to.  In the case of trastuzumab, that's human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, which is a protein that makes breast cancers grow.  (In that particular case, you also can't use ordinary mouse cells as people react to mouse proteins, you have to use cells that make the human version.) Finally, you clone the cells to increase their number then use them to make the antibody.

These days all this sort of messing about is done by robots with pipettes, not by the pharmaceutical company employee above with the conical flask.

How much would such a robot cost? I build robots all the time, and I estimate that such a robot might - if mass produced - cost a couple of thousand Euros at most.

Here patent law (in Europe, not America) gets interesting: any private individual can make any patented object for their own use without infringing the patent.  They can't sell it, but they can, for example, eat it or inject it.

This means that national health services could loan patients a drug-synthesizing robot that cost less than a few-months supply of some drugs.  The patients could make their own drugs and thereby treat their disease with the latest medicines.

The health services would save a fortune.

BounceFractal

One standard way to make a fractal curve is to take a straight line, cut it in half, and move its mid-point a random amount. You then do the same with the two halves, but move their midpoints by a smaller random amount. If you keep going you end up after a few times with something like the picture above.

This is a way to generate artificial coastlines. If you do it with a triangle instead of a line and move the midpoints of its edges out of the plane of the triangle, you make an artificial fractal landscape (shown here flooded):


Here's a new way to do this sort of thing.

Take a box (blue) with a single diagonal line in it (black). Split the line in half and move it as far as you can without a disc on the split-point hitting anything. You get this:

Then repeat this on the two halves, with the exclusion disc reducing in radius at each stage and being imagined to be on every vertex of the curve:

That's it after six steps. Note that, although it looks random, it is entirely deterministic and its shape is set by that simple rule: split, and move as far as you can without the straight lines overlapping the discs.

Here it is after splitting ten times.

If you start with the four edges of a square (filled in red here so you can see what happens):


And let it run you get this:

For more on this idea see here.

SweatShirt

We sweat to dump excess body heat.

Sweating is an elegantly efficient mechanism that takes advantage of the fact that our most readily available liquid - water - carries an exceptionally large quantity of energy away when it evaporates. The enthalpy of vaporization of water is 2257 kilojoules per kilogram. This means that if you are exercising at 500 watts for half an hour (which is a good aerobic workout) you only need to evaporate 400 grams of sweat to carry away all the heat you generate. That's one large glass of water.

In practice, it works even better than that because you also lose heat by radiation and convection as well. But just because something marvelous has evolved, it doesn't mean that we can't improve on it.

As anyone caught in a rainstorm in light clothing knows, a wet shirt is very cold indeed, especially when the wind blows. It is sweating for you when you don't need it to.

We also deliberately get our clothes wet once each time we wear them: we wash them afterwards.

Poly-(N-IsoPropyl-AcrylAmide) is hydrophobic above 37^oC and hydrophilic below 32^oC. This means that at low temperatures it holds onto water, and at high temperatures it expels it. There are other materials with similar properties.

Suppose we were to make clothing incorporating these materials? If we were to wash them on a warm wash, they would absorb some of the final rinse water and then retain it when cold, feeling dry to the touch. But when we exercised in them, or simply found ourselves in the warm sun, they would start to give up their stored water.

Our clothing would keep us warm and dry when it was cold, then sweat for us when it was hot.

EPlane

Most electric aeroplanes tend to look like this. Make no mistake, the achievements of electric aero researchers are impressive. But the results always tend to look a bit fiddly and - both more importantly and more understandably - lightweight.

That example (Helios) is solar powered. Sunlight has a density of about 1 Kw per square meter, and conversion efficiencies don't get much above 30%. This means that you don't have a lot of power to spare, given a reasonable wing area. That is why the plane looks like it does.

The obvious solution - replace the sun with batteries - stumbles because batteries don't give a lot of power either. Worse, they are heavy.

Suppose we want to carry 300 people like this:


The source of power here (oil) has a specific energy of about 45 megajoules per kilogram. But the battery in your car only has about 0.15 megajoules per kilogram.

However, the battery in your car is 100-year-old technology. The specific energy of batteries has been increasing, and increasing more rapidly in recent years. The best we have today (lithium ion nanowire) gives about 2.5 megajoules per kilogram.

And batteries don't have to get to the energy density of oil to compete in aircraft propulsion. This is because electric motors are much more efficient than gas turbines. Typically, you can't get more than about 40% out of a gas turbine, but you can easily get 80% from an electric motor.

So when batteries get to ten times the energy density of the best now, it will start to make sense to power aircraft with them. And with the rate of progress in battery development that will probably take less time than most would imagine.

But there is a research gap. As far as I can find out, no one is trying to develop an electric aircraft turbine for passenger aircraft. Given the lead times for this sort of technology, this seems short-sighted to me. We are in danger of having the batteries for planes, and then having to take ten years to make engines to go with them. Engine development doesn't need to have the batteries available, as all the testing can be done on the ground.

A final point. At half the energy consumption of an equivalent gas turbine, an electric turbine will generate half the heat. This will have to be got rid of in the airflow, where it can be put to good use expanding the air and generating extra thrust.

PictureFrame

Having a picture framed is an expensive business - if the frame is going round a print it can cost three or four times as much as the print itself. And even if the frame is for an original painting it can cost a significant fraction of what the painting cost (unless you are the sort of person who needs to re-frame a Caravaggio).

It's also a difficult job to do yourself. Even the most careful amateur carpenter can have trouble mitering the corner of the moulding to get a perfect 45^o cut.


My father was a painter, and he would frame his own pictures for sale. The machine on the right used to live in our kitchen when I was a child. It is a Morsø mitering machine, and it makes the cutting of a perfect 45^o miter easy; anyone can get a good result with one of these. It guillotines the moulding to form two mitres simultaneously.

But it obviously makes no sense for everyone to have such a machine for themselves for use on the one occasion every two years when they want to frame a picture.

There are many products that are designed to break once cleanly. Think of the perforations around postage stamps, or of the ring pull on a Coke can. Why not make picture frame mouldings that have a series of 45^o indentations along the back every few millimeters designed to snap cleanly? The indentations would have to be symmetrical about the middle of a length of moulding with -45^o to the left and +45^o to the right. You could then buy two lengths a little too long for the width of your picture, and another two a little too long for the height, and make your own frame of any size you liked.

It ought to be possible to do the design with added clips that would fit into the remaining indentations to hold the corners together, so you wouldn't even have to use a hammer and nails.

FlySafe

Deaths of passengers from airline terrorism are, of course, fabulously rare. The worst decade was the 1980s, when about 150 passengers per year were being killed. The figure has fallen steadily since then, and is now around the same level as it was in the 1960s - about 40 deaths per year.

Today there are many more flights than there were in the 1960s, so the relative figures are even better than those numbers imply. The reduction in deaths is due to a combination of factors, the two principal ones being better airline security and the general fact that terrorism - airline and otherwise - is much rarer now than it was.

The world's airlines fly about two billion passengers each year. If each passenger spends an extra three-quarters of an hour getting through airport security over what they would have spent in the 1960s, then 2,300 human lifetimes are taken up in airport security per year.

So airport security takes about sixty times more human lives than the threat that it protects against...

LightTight

Loctite Blue glue is remarkable stuff. In the presence of oxygen it is a liquid, and it only sets hard when oxygen is excluded. This means that when you put it on a bolt thread it is easy to screw the bolt onto its nut. But once the bolt is tight (which excludes the oxygen) the glue locks up, preventing the thread coming undone.

Even cleverer, the reaction is reversible. Thus, when you loosen the thread a bit with a spanner, the ingress of the air releases the bond, and the bolt can easily be undone the rest of the way. Rather neatly, the bottle in which the glue is sold is permeable to oxygen, so the glue stays easy to pour.

There are often photochemical reactions that are equivalent to this type of reversible bonding. So how about a glue that sets solid in the dark and is liquid in the light?

You would paint it on a surface, where it would stay happily liquid (well, it would till dusk...). But when you put down the other surface to be stuck on top of it, the glue would instantly set solid as the shadow fell, holding both fast.

If one of the two items to be stuck were translucent, but covered (except for the sticking surface) in an opaque paint, the glue would still work. But you could release it simply by opening a window in the opaque paint. It would be possible to set up all sorts of complicated simultaneous sticking and release mechanisms that were worked by allowing light in and excluding it.

It might even be possible to have the material respond to different wavelengths if the no-stick chemistry were only triggered by photons of a specific energy. Different coloured lights could then be used to release different bonds.

You could also have an electric release mechanism: simply bury LEDs in one of the surfaces...

PuffAddiction

Tobacco, notoriously, is not very good for you. Consequently there is an ongoing battle between the people who sell it and - more-or-less - the rest of the human race. The former want to push more cigarettes; the latter want to stay alive. The battle is quite instructive in a game-theoretic way. In particular, the sellers carefully manipulate the level of the addictive component (nicotine) to maximize the number of cigarettes that they sell.

When there is a large number of smokers, it makes sense for the tobacco companies to reduce the nicotine level; that way they sell more (and so make more money) as people have to buy more to get the level of nicotine in their blood up. But as the number of people smoking drops, the companies raise the nicotine level in order to create more addicts among people (particularly teenagers) who only try two or three cigarettes. The reduction in the number of smokers in recent years (at least in the developed world) is the reason that the companies have been cynically upping the dose. (See, for example, this article in The Washington Post.)

Those on the other side who are concerned with keeping us all alive deprecate this, and advocate controls on the maximum nicotine levels allowed. Jack Henningfield and Neal Benowitz in a British Medical Journal editorial, say: "Possible strategies to be overseen by the Food and Drug Administration could include ... restrictions on the amount of nicotine in tobacco products..."

A single cigarette contains about 10 mg of nicotine. It is one of the more poisonous substances known - about 60 mg will kill a non-smoker and about double that will kill a smoker. It is a particularly effective insecticide, which is why tobacco plants have evolved a metabolic pathway to make it, of course. But nicotine is one of the less harmful ingredients in tobacco. The things in there that really kill people are the tars, benzene, formaldehyde, and so on in the smoke, and the carbon monoxide that is consequent on the combustion that creates it.

So it may well be that restricting nicotine levels in cigarettes is the wrong way to go. The authorities should require them to have a minimum nicotine level. That level would be set so high that non-smokers starting would immediately throw up, thus putting them off, and so that smokers would only need to smoke one cigarette a day to get their dose, thus much reducing their exposure to all the substances that really harm them.