future technologies

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4-5 - Biotech HackMice healed three times faster than normal after their broken bones were

fl ooded by proteins naturally used to regrow new tissues.

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6-8 - Genetic Secrets of living to 100A massive genetic study of people who lived for more than 100 years has found

dozens of new clues to the biology of aging.

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9 - PlaceholderRandom Placeholder text.

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10-11 - Dark MatterDark matter collecting inside exoplanets could heat some cold worlds enough to

support life, even without the warm glow of starlight.

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12-13 - Islands at the Speed of LightA recent paper published in the Physical Review has some astonishing

suggestions for the geographic future of fi nancial markets.

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14-15 - Infl atable Greenhouses on the MoonResearchers at the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture

Center have devised a “lunar greenhouse” that “could be the key to growing fresh

and healthy food to sustain future lunar or Martian colonies,”

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4-5 - Biotech HackMice healed three times faster than normal after their broken bones were

fl ooded by proteins naturally used to regrow new tissues.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

6-8 - Genetic Secrets of living to 100A massive genetic study of people who lived for more than 100 years has found

dozens of new clues to the biology of aging.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

9 - PlaceholderRandom Placeholder text.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

10-11 - Dark MatterDark matter collecting inside exoplanets could heat some cold worlds enough to

support life, even without the warm glow of starlight.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

12-13 - Islands at the Speed of LightA recent paper published in the Physical Review has some astonishing

suggestions for the geographic future of fi nancial markets.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

14-15 - Infl atable Greenhouses on the MoonResearchers at the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture

Center have devised a “lunar greenhouse” that “could be the key to growing fresh

and healthy food to sustain future lunar or Martian colonies,”

CONTENTS

2- Future Technology - 2011

Semi-Natural Biotech Hack Makes Bones Heal 3 Times Faster

Mice healed three times faster than normal after their broken bones were flooded by proteins naturally used to regrow new tissues. The discovery raises the possibility of a stem cell–free route to regeneration. The Wnt family ofproteins used in the mice are involved in healing many other types of tissue; the researchers hope they will find many other uses for them. “Gut, skin, brain, muscle, cardiac muscle, corneas, retinas — people have studied the role of Wnt signals in all those tissues,” said Stanford University reconstructive surgeon and study co-author Jill Helms. “Maybe there could be a therapeutic approach to all this.”

The experiment, published April 28 in Science Translational Medicine, is rooted in two decades of research on Wnt genes and proteins, which play a variety of regenerative roles. They help embryonic stem cells make copies of themselves, keeping a body’s supply fresh, and guide the maturation of stem cells into specific cell types.

Wnt proteins are found throughout the animal kingdom, from sponges and flatworms to mice and humans, and their function seems to be consistent. When tissues are injured, Wnt genes in surrounding cells become more active, pumping out extra Wnt proteins. Arriving repair cells divide faster and grow more rapidly. Study co-author Roel Nusse, a cell biologist at Stanford, has pioneered much of the Wnt research. He was responsible for cloning the Wnt family genes, allowing proteins to be produced in tissue cultures in a lab. His success encouraged the study’s other authors to see if the proteins could be used therapeutically.

“This pathway may be the key to regenerating, or at least rapidly repairing, tissues,” said Helms. “We’re augmenting nature’s own response to injury.” The researchers started their tests by genetically engineering a strain of mice that produced exceptionally high amounts of Wnt proteins. Three days after their bones were broken, they grew three and half times more new bone tissue than regular mice.

That test’s purpose wasn’t to investigate a role for genetic engineering, but rather to see if extra Wnt had an effect. The researchers next injected lab-grown Wnt proteins into mice with broken bones. These again healed three times faster.

There were no obvious side effects from the treatment, though the tests were preliminary. Somewhat disturbingly, Wnt genes were originally identified while malfunctioning in cancerous cells. The likelihood of causing cancer is also a major obstacle to developing safe stem cell therapies. But Helms is confident that it won’t be a problem with potential Wnt therapies.

“In cancer, mutations cause the pathway to be always on. Delivering the protein only causes the pathway to be turned on for a moment,” she said. “Mutations in the insulin pathway also cause cancer, but insulin treatments do not.”

According to Thomas Einhorn, a Boston University biochemist and orthopedic surgeon who wasn’t involved in the study, Wnt is an alluring therapeutic target. Malfunctions in Wnt regulation have been linked to human bone disorders, underscoring theirimportance. But he cautioned that “animal studies are animal studies, and human conditions are something else.” In mice, challenges still remain. A broken bone is relatively easy to target with an injection, but many conditions are less localized, involving entire organs or large amounts of tissue.

The researchers are now conducing mouse tests of Wnt proteins for skin wounds, stroke and heart-attack recovery, and cartilage injuries. “Nature uses this recipe over and over again,” said Helms.

Image Below: Healing in the skeletal tissues of mice given a pla-cebo (top) and Wnt proteins (bottom).Science Translational Medicine.


GENETIC SECRETSOF LIVING

TO 100A massive genetic

study of people who lived for more than

100 years has found dozens of new clues

to the biology of aging.

The findings won’t be turned overnight into longevity elixirs or lifespan tests, nor do they untangle the complex interactions between biology, lifestyle and environment that ultimately determine how long — and how well — one lives.

But they do offer much-needed toeholds for scientists studying the basic mechanisms of aging, which remain largely unexplained.

“It shows that genetics plays an extremely important role at these extreme ages. And it begins to be a not-unsolvable puzzle,” said Boston University gerontologist Thomas Perls. “If we start looking at these genes and what they do, we better understand the biology of extreme longevity.”

The findings come from gene tests of 801 people enrolled in the Perls-founded New England Centenarian Study, the largest study in the world of people who’ve lived past 100.

People who’ve reached that mark tend to have lives that are not only exceptionally long, but unusually healthly. Unlike most people, they rarely develop diseases of aging — such as heart disease, metabolic disease, cancer and dementia — until well into their 90s.

They’re also more likely to bounce back from disease, rather than entering a spiral of declining health.

People who’ve reached that mark tend to have lives that are not only exceptionally long, but unusually healthly. Unlike most people, they rarely develop diseases of aging — such as heart disease, metabolic disease, cancer and dementia — until well into their 90s. They’re also more likely to bounce back from disease, rather than entering a spiral of declining health.

That manner of aging is a goal for most people, and a public health necessity. Modern medicine has had success in slowingindividual aging diseases, but when one is postponed another soon emerges. Americans are living longer but not healthier. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. health spending now goes to treating diseases of aging. That proportion is rising.

In the last decade, scientists using animal models of disease have identified numerous genes and biological pathways implicated in aging. That animal research is valuable, but the gold standard of longevity science involves long-lived people.

6 - Future Technologies - 2011

GENETIC SECRETSOF LIVINGTO 100Other studies suggest that whether or not someone lives to their 80s is mostly a result of common-sense lifestyle choices: moderate drinking, no smoking, plenty of exercise, a vegetable-centric diet and low stress. But beyond that, “genetics plays a stronger and stronger role,” said Perls. The concentrations of telltale gene profiles found by his group suggest “that the genetic influence is very, very strong.”

Perls’ team surveyed the genomes of 801 centenarians, focusing on “hot spots” where people are most likely to have mutations. They compared the results to genome scans of 926 random people from the general population. From this came a list of 70 gene mutations found mostly in the centenarians. After comparing those to genome scans of 867 people with Parkinson’s disease, the list was whittled down to 33 key mutations.

The researchers used these results to develop statistical models of longevity-associated gene profiles. Used to evalu-ate anonymized sample genomes, the model could predict whether the sample came from a centenarian with 77 percent accuracy, underscoring the importance of genetics in extreme long life. Centenar-ians also tended to fit

one of 19 different gene profiles. Some of the profiles tracked with especially low rates of cardiovascular disease, dementia and hypertension or diabetes, suggesting specific genetic pathways for those dis-eases.

Perls emphasized that the profiles — which came from Caucasians, and are likely different in other ethnic groups — are not intended as guides for drug cocktails or diagnostic tests.

“We’re quite a ways away still in understanding what pathways governed by these genes are involved, and how the integration of these genes, not just with themselves but with environmental factors, are all playing a role in thislongevity puzzle,” he said in a press conference.

Other were excited about the findings, but echoed Perls’ restraint.

National Institutes on Aging neuroscien-tist Donald Ingram called the study a “very impressive genetic and statistical tour de force,” but one that leaves environmen-tal influences unexplained. According to Perls, one of the study’s most intriguing results is that roughly 15 percent

of the general population has some of the longevity-associated genes. Yet only one in 6,000 people currently live to be cente-narians — many fewer people than seems to be suggested by the genetics.

Some of the discrepancy can likely be at-tributed to standards of infant care and public health at the beginning of the 20th century, when these centenarians were born, said Perls. Lifestyle and genetics are also sure to play a part. There will also be genetic factors missed by the study’s nar-row focus on hot spots.

According to Jackson Laboratory geron-tologist David Harrison, who called the findings “very interesting,” researchers will use animals to explore the roles of genes and pathways flagged in the study.The findings will also need to be replicated and expanded in more human studies, said National Institutes on Aging gerontologist Winifred Rossi.

“It’s groundbreaking work,” she said. “But science is not fast. It’s slow. It takes a lot of steps to get to something with an im-pact. We’re only at the start of exploringlongevity.”


Alien-hunting astronomers generally search for planets that lie just far enough from their stars to keep from boiling off or freezing any liquid water, which is thought to be a prerequisite for carbon-based life. But other heat sources could potentially warm up a chilly planet that is outside this habitable zone.

One possibility is radioactive elements decaying inside rocks, which already give the Earth about 0.025 percent of its geothermal energy. Another is a thick atmosphere to drive a greenhouse effect, which renders Venus an inhospitable hot house. Some have even suggested that planets that have been kicked out of their solar systems could still support life beneath a thick atmosphere or a shell of ice.

In a new paper posted on arXiv.org and submitted to the Astrophysical Jour-nal, physicists Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen of Fermilab in Illinois suggest an exotic internal radiator for cold, rocky planets: dark matter. In certain parts of the galaxy, they say, dark matter could effectively outshine the sun.

Dark matter collecting inside

exoplanets could heat some cold worlds enough to support life,

even without the warm glow of

starlight.


Whenever one weakly interacting massive particles meets another, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy.

It’s not something that’s likely to produce a lot of habit-able planets,” Hooper said. “But in very special places and in very special models, it could do the trick.” Dark matter is the name given to the mysterious stuff that makes up about 83 percent of the matter in the universe, but gener-ally ignores regular matter. No one knows exactly whatdark matter is, but one of the most popular theories says it’s made of hypothetical particles called WIMPs — weakly in-teracting massive particles — that interact with regular matter only through the weak nuclear force and gravity. WIMPs are also their own antiparticles: Whenever one WIMP meets another, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy.

If those explosions happen inside a planet, they could warm the world enough to melt ice, Hooper and Steffen suggest.

Physicists are still waiting for WIMPs to show themselves by colliding with detectors in deep underground mines. But the fact that the detectors haven’t seen anything conclusive yet puts limits on how heavy and large the particles can be. If WIMPs were bigger or heavier than a certain theoretical limit, physicists reason, the particles would have shown up by now.

Hooper and Steffen considered two possible model WIMPs that interact as often as they possibly can while still being consistent with the experiments, one particle that’s 300 times heavier than a proton and one that’s just 7 times the proton’s mass. Then they calculated how much energy the explosions from colliding these hypothetical dark matter particles would contribute to the planet’s overall warmth.

On Earth, they found, dark matter doesn’t make a difference. Earth lies in a part of the Milky Way where dark matter is relatively thin, so it contributes at most one megawatt of energy to Earth’s internal thermostat. By contrast, the Earth absorbs about 100 petawatts, or 100 quadrillion watts, from the sun.

But in the dark matter-rich centers of galaxies, WIMPs could be a contender. The researchers considered rocky planets that lie within 30 light-years of the galactic center, and found that planets with masses 10 times greater than Earth’s could scoop up enough dark matter to generate 100 petawatts of energy. That could be enough energy to keep liquid water on their surfaces, even without the aid of a nearby star.

“This is a fascinating, and highly original idea,” said exoplanet expert Sara Seager of MIT, who was not involved in the new study. “Original ideas are becoming more and more rare in exoplanet theory.”

She points out that the idea is limited to WIMPs, though — if dark matter turns out to be something else, it won’t work. She also notes that these planets would be too far away for followup observations, a point on which Hooper agrees.

“I don’t foresee any way of detecting such planets any time in the near future,” he said.

If dark matter-heated planets exist, it’s not clear that they would resemble Earth at all. They may not have solid, rocky surfaces for liquid water to pool on, or a molten mantle to drive plate tectonics.

“It’s very possible that this would look like a very different type of planet than the ones we’re used to,” Hooper said.

But dark matter-heated planets have one advantage over planets that are tied to a star. Halos of dark matter can sit undisturbed at the centers of galaxies almost indefinitely, much longer than the lifetimes of individual stars.

“You can imagine planets being heated in this sort of way forliterally trillions of years,” Hooper said. “In the far future when all the stars have burnt out in our galaxy, all the surviving civilizations may find themselves migrating to these sorts of planets. They’ll be the ultimate bastion of civilization.”

Image Below: An artist’s rendition of the planetary system around the star 55 Cancri. Credit: NASA/JPL-

11- Future Technologies - 2011

ISLANDS AT THE SPEED

OF LIGHTA recent paper

published in the Physical Review has

some astonishing suggestions for the

geographic future of financial markets.

Its authors, Alexander Wissner-Grossl and Cameron Freer, discuss the spatial implica-tions of speed-of-light trading. Trades now occur so rapidly, they explain, and in such fantastic quantity, that the speed of light it-self presents limits to the efficiency of global computerized trading networks. These limits are described as “light propagation delays.”

It is thus in traders’ direct financial interest, they suggest, to install themselves at specific points on the Earth’s surface—a kind of light-speed financial acupuncture—to take advan-tage both of the planet’s geometry and of the networks along which trades are ordered and filled.

They conclude that “the construction of rela-tivistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes across the Earth’s surface” is thus economi-cally justified, if not required.

Amazingly, their analysis—seen in the map, below—suggests that many of these finan-cially strategic points are actually out in the middle of nowhere: hundreds of miles off-shore in the Indian Ocean, for instance, on the shores of Antarctica,


and scattered throughout the South Pa-cific (though, of course, most of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Bos-Wash corridor also make the cut).

These nodes exist in what the authors re-fer to as “the past light cones” of distant trading centers—thus the paper’s multi-ple references to relativity. Astonishingly, this thus seems to elide financial trading networks with the laws of physics, imply-ing the eventual emergence of what we might call quantum financial products. Quantum derivatives! (This also seems to push us ever closer to the artificially intel-ligent financial instruments described in Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando). Erwin Schrödinger meets the Dow. It’s financial science fiction: when the dollar value of a given product depends on its position in a planet’s light-cone.

These points scattered along the earth’s surface are described as “optimal in-termediate locations between trading centers,” each site “maximiz[ing] profit potential in a locally auditable manner.” Wissner-Grossl and Freer then suggest that trading centers themselves could be moved to these nodal points: “we show that if such intermediate coordination nodes are themselves promoted to trad-ing centers that can utilize local

information, a novel econophysical effect arises wherein the propagation of secu-rity pricing information through a chain of such nodes is effectively slowed or stopped.” An econophysical effect.

In the end, then, they more or less ex-plicitly argue for the economic viability of building artificial islands and inhabitable seasteads—i.e. the “construction of rela-tivistic statistical arbitrage

trading nodes”—out in the middle of the ocean somewhere as a way to profit from speed-of-light trades. Imagine, for a mo-ment, the New York Stock Exchange mov-ing out into the mid-Atlantic, somewhere near the Azores, onto a series of New Babylon-like platforms, run not by human traders but by Watson-esque artificially intelligent supercomputers housed in wa-terproof tombs, all calculating money at the speed of light.

“In summary,” the authors write, “we have demonstrated that light propagation de-lays present new opportunities for statis-tical arbitrage at the planetary scale, and have calculated a representative map of locations from which to coordinate such relativistic statistical arbitrage among the world’s major securities exchanges. We furthermore have shown that for chains

of trading centers along geodesics, the propagation of tradable information is effectively slowed or stopped by such arbitrage.” Historically, technologies for transportation and communication have resulted in the consolidation of financial markets. For example, in the nineteenth century, more than 200 stock exchanges were formed in the United States, but most were eliminated as the telegraph spread.

The growth of electronic markets has led to further consolidation in recent years. Although there are advantages to cen-tralization for many types of transactions, we have described a type of arbitrage that is just beginning to become relevant, and for which the trend is, surprisingly, in the direction of decentralization. In fact, our calculations suggest that this type of arbitrage may already be technologi-cally feasible for the most distant pairs of exchanges, and may soon be feasible at the fastest relevant time scales for closer pairs. Our results are both scien-tifically relevant because they identify an econophysical mechanism by which the propagation of tradable information can be slowed or stopped, and technologi-cally significant, because they motivate the construction of relativistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes across the Earth’s surface.


Inflatable Greenhouseson the Moon

Researchers at the University of Arizona's Controlled Environ-ment Agriculture Center have devised a "lunar greenhouse" that "could be the key to growing fresh and healthy food to sustain future lunar or Martian colonies," Wired Space reported back in

October. Under the guidance of Gene Giacomelli, “The team built a prototype lunar greenhouse in the CEAC Extreme Climate Lab that is meant to represent the last 18 feet (5.5 meters) of one of several tubular structures that would form part of a proposed lu-nar base. The tubes would be buried beneath the moon’s surface to protect the plants and astronauts from deadly solar flares, mi-crometeorites and cosmic rays. As such, the buried greenhouse would differ from conventional greenhouses that let in and cap-ture sunlight as heat. Instead, these underground lunar green-houses would shield the plants from harmful radiation.”

As Popular Science describes it:The 18-foot, membrane-sheathed system collapses into a 4-foot wide disk for easy packing on an interplanetary mission. When extended,


it is fitted with water-cooled lamps and seed packets prepped to sprout without soil. They hydroponic system needs little over-sight, relying on automated systems and control algorithms to analyze data gathered by embedded sensors that optimize the controlled ecosystem. The whole system takes just ten minutes to set up and produces vegetables within a month.

Giacomelli himself explains that lunar rovers—or “robotic bulldozers”—would first bury the greenhouses, installing them in advance of human arrival. Then, “When the spacecraft sets down, the idea is that [the buried greenhouse] expands outwards, opens by itself, like a robot would. The seeds are already in place. We start it up, turn on the lights, turn on the water, and the plants can begin to grow, even in advance of when the astronauts arrive.”

Interestingly, Antarctica supplied a kind of natural test-environ-ment for this architectural experiment: “the extreme conditions of the South Pole helped his team fine-tune their lunar greenhouse, and also allowed them to figure out how to remotely control con-ditions like temperature, humidity and light. He said similar tech-nologies could also be used someday in cities—in a greenhouse in the middle floor of a skyscraper, for example. He added that, at least right now, the technology, and lighting, especially, are too expensive for daily commercial use.”


THE MOON HIDES ICE WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE

The moon is pockmarked with cold, wet oases that could contain enough water ice to be useful to manned missions.

A year after NASA’s Lunar Crater Obser-vation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) smashed into the surface of the moon, astronomers have confirmed that lunar craters can be rich reservoirs of water ice, plus a pharmacopoeia of other surprising substances.

On Oct. 9, 2009, the LCROSS mission sent a spent Centaur rocket crashing into Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, a spot previous observations had shown to be loaded with hydrogen. A second spacecraft flew through the cloud of de-bris kicked up by the explosion to search for signs of water and other ingredients of lunar soil.

And water appeared in buckets. The first LCROSS results reported that about 200 pounds of water appeared in the plume. A new paper in the Oct. 22 Science ups the total amount of water vapor and water ice to 341 pounds, plus or minus 26 pounds.

Given the total amount of soil blown out of the crater, astronomers estimate that 5.6 percent of the soil in the LCROSS impact site is water ice. Earlier studies suggested that soils containing just 1 percent water would be useful for any future space ex-plorers trying to build a permanent lunar base.

“The number of 1 percent was generally agreed to as what was needed to be a net profit, a net return on the effort to extract it out of the dark shadows,” said NASA planetary scientist Anthony Colaprete in a press conference Oct. 21. “We saw 5 per-cent, which means that indeed where we impacted would be a net benefit to some-body looking for that resource.”

Water could lurk not just in the moon’s deep dark craters, but also as permafrost beneath the sunlit surface. Based on the impact data, water is probably mixed in to the soil as loose ice grains, rather than spread out in a concentrated skating rink. This distribution could make the water easier to harvest.

“The water ice is in this rather malleable, dig-able kind of substrate, which is good,” Colaprete said. “At least some of the water ice, you could go in and literally just scoop it up if you needed to.”

But the plume wasn’t just wet. A series of papers in Science report observations from both LCROSS and LRO that show a laundry list of other compounds were also blown off the face of the moon, including hydroxyl, carbon monoxide, carbon di-oxide, ammonia, free sodium, hydrogen, methane, sulfur dioxide and, surprisingly, silver.

The impact carved out a crater 80 to 100 feet wide, and kicked between 8,818 pounds and 13,228 pounds of debris more than 6 miles out of the dark crater and into the sunlight where LCROSS could see it. Astronomers, as well as space enthusiasts watching online, expected to see a bright flash the instant the rocket hit, but none appeared. The wimpy explosion indicates that the soil the rocket plowed into was “fluffy, snow-covered dirt,” said NASA


chief lunar scientist Michael Wargo. The soil is also full of volatile compounds that evaporate easily at room temperature, suggests planetary scientist Peter Schultz of Brown University, lead author of one of the new papers. The loose soil shielded the view of the impact from above.

Data from an instrument called LAMP (Ly-man Alpha Mapping Project) on LRO shows that the vapor cloud contained

about 1256 pounds of carbon monoxide, 300 pounds of molecular hydrogen, 350 pounds of calcium, 265 pounds of mercu-ry and 88 pounds of magnesium. Some of these compounds, called “super-volatile” for their low boiling points, are known to be important building blocks of planetary atmospheres and the precursors of life on Earth, says astronomer David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Compared to the amount of water in the crater, the amounts of these materials found were much greater than what is usually found in comets, the interstellar medium, or what is predicted from reac-tions in the protoplanetary disk.

“It’s like a little treasure trove of stuff,” said planetary scientist Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new studies.

Astronomers picked Cabeus crater partly because its floor has been in constant shadow for billions of years. Without direct sunlight, temperatures in polar craters on the moon can drop as low as -400 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough for compounds to stick to grains of soil the way your tongue sticks to an ice cube.

Other factors, like micrometeorite impacts and ultraviolet photons that carry little heat but significant amounts of energy, can release these molecules from the moon’s cold traps. The composition of the lunar surface represents a balancing act between what sticks and what is released.

The fact that so many different materials, most of which are usually gaseous at room temperature and react easily with other chemicals, remain stuck to the moon gives astronomers clues as to how they got there.

“Perhaps the moon is presently active and there’s all kinds of chemistry going on and stuff being produced, continually collecting in these polar regions,” Delory said. “Maybe it’ll tell us the moon is in fact a much more active and dynamic system than we thought, and there’s water being concentrated at the poles by present-day ongoing processes.”

Another possibility is that these materi-als hitched a ride on comets or asteroids, Schultz suggests. Compounds deposited all over the moon could have migrated to the poles over the course of billions of years, where they were trapped by the cold or buried under the soil.

There’s only one sure way to find out.

“We need to go there,” Delory said. Wheth-er the water will be a useful resource for future astronauts or not, the ice itself is a rich stockpile of potential scientific infor-mation, he said. “That’s as much a reason to go there, for the story that this water tells.”


future technologies

Documents

future lunar

new tissues

contents2 future technology

broken bones

lunar greenhouse

dozens of new clues

genetic secrets of living

times fastermice