Just like any kid of my generation, one of the answers I gave to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is that I want to become an astronaut.

Back then, I was around 7 or 8 years of age and I had absolutely no idea of exactly how one becomes an astronaut. Later on, I found out that most astronauts came from the US Air Force or the Navy and had degrees in engineering, biological science, physics or mathematics. Basically you need to be certified geek with an excellent vision, military-grade health and thousands of hours of flight experience in jet-powered aircraft.

Seemed doable and attainable given that I took up a course in Human Biology, and that’s just about it. Forget about my vision, my health status and even the number of flight hours I have under my belt. It would take some miracle for me to become an astronaut.

And recently, it has been made even a lot more difficult as NASA has added a new essential requirement for one to become an astronaut: having a high proficiency in speaking and writing Russian. No, this is not a joke. Read below an excerpt from Fox News Online:

The rules are plain and simple: If you flunk the foreign language requirement, you can’t go into space.
A handful of NASA astronauts have taken Russian language training since the U.S. and the Soviet Union began work on the Mir space station in the ’80s, Duane Ross, manager for astronaut candidate training, told FoxNews.com. But in 2009, the space agency revamped its rules — and now all U.S. astronauts will have to learn Russian.

“English is the agreed-to language in space,” Ross explained. But due to the close collaboration with the Russian space agency, it’s now mandatory for America’s astronauts to speak Russian, he said.

NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles in July, leaving Russia’s Soyuz rockets as the sole means of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station, a sign to many that the Russians have “won” the space race.

It’s no longer fiction pulled from Transformers 3, continuing the space program has really become a lot more expensive for the United States so they have made dramatic budget cuts which has greatly diminished the capabilities of NASA.

Now, US astronauts hitch-hike to outer space on board Russian rockets and spaceships for a fee. Though on one hand it’s a perfect opportunity to further strengthen the partnership between the two former Cold War rivals and it also opens the opportunity for other countries to band together and conduct their own space programs as well.

But of course it does hurt the ego of America, once the sole leader when it comes to space exploration. With Astronauts required to be proficient in Russian, Hollywood would have to train its stars to speak the language as well if they’re going portray astronauts with an updated sense of realism.

• New Earth-like planet and Hubble’s birthday (7)

In the vampire vs werewolves sci-fi movie Underworld, vampires have developed the technology to create artificial blood, thus eliminated or minimized their need to go after humans whenever they needed to feed.

Humans and vampires had managed to live in a peaceful co-existence. Or so it appeared.

The same thing could arise once the US has fully developed the technology to create artificial petroleum. Such a technology has now taken root from the study of researchers from the University of Minnesota in the US, led by graduate student Janice Frias whose team has just figured out how to create ketones using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.

The U of M team is using Synechococcus, a bacterium that fixes carbon dioxide in sunlight and converts CO2 to sugars. Next, they feed the sugars to Shewanella, a bacterium that produces hydrocarbons. This turns CO2, a greenhouse gas produced by combustion of fossil fuel petroleum, into hydrocarbons.

Their study funded by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-energy will appear in the April 1 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

And even as this news is spread in print and on the Internet, the University of Minnesota is filing patents on the process.

If the study would progress as it is envisioned, perhaps within a decade or two, the US would now have a technology to produce its own petroleum thanks, again, to bacteria, sunlight and CO2.

Perhaps by then, the American thirst for oil would be tamed. This would then minimize the need for their active involvement in the Middle East, assuming by that time that the region’s oil reserves have not yet run dry.

Though I am uncertain how OPEC members would react to such a situation that the US with its artificial petroleum technology would become one of their competitors. I am also uncertain as to whether the US would be willing to share such a technology (wishful thinking, I know) with the rest of the world but since a patent for it has already been filed, then it would become another way for them to maintain their global economic dominance.

Nevertheless, it’s still good news that renewable petroleum is much closer to becoming a reality than fiction. As more sources of alternative energy become available, the more chances we have of saving our plant from destruction while we continue on with our civilization.

• E. coli strain engineered to produce biodiesel directly from biomass (0)
• 3Tier Group’s Map of Solar and Wind Energy hot-spots (0)
• Flat-screen-TVs can contribute to global warming? (1)
• 1 Billion PCs and counting, plus more e-junk (2)
• Where are the Pinoy eco-bloggers? (4)

Seawater all around, but none for drinking. Image by egroj.

The taste of seawater is a dead giveaway: too much salt can damage the human body.

Remember that seawater is 3.5% or (35 g/L, or 599 mM) salt or dissolved minerals¹. If you drink seawater in a desperate attempt to survive out in the ocean you would just do more harm to your body and increase your chances of dying instead of living long enough until rescue arrives.

This would lead to Hypernatremia (hyper= too much + natr= sodium + emia=in the blood) a condition of having too much salt and too little water in your body². Simply because your body will work extra hard to get rid of the increased excess salt. This process requires water and since your body is the only source of water with lower salt concentrations, you would actually need more water to survive. It would make your situation much worse than before.

Dehydration would worsen and your chances of making it out alive is greatly decreased. That’s one of the perils of being lost at sea, you’re surrounded by water and yet not a single drop is readily safe for drinking.

Image by egroj

1. salinity measurement is a total of all the salts that are dissolved in the water. Although 35 parts per thousand is not very concentrated (the same as 3.5 parts per hundred, o/o, or percent) the water in the oceans tastes very salty.Source
2. This water loss can occur from illnesses with vomiting or diarrhea, excessive sweating from exercise or fever, or from drinking fluid that has too high concentrations of salt. Source.

• James Watson resigns, Arroyo should follow (4)
• HIV Replication: How the HIV Virus spreads (5)
• Longer legs are more efficient, doesn’t work for me (4)
• Organ trade bridges gap between rich and poor (6)
• Of staying slim, green tea and green coffee (7)

In my two decades of living on this planet, I’ve only visited the dentist just two years ago to have my teeth thoroughly cleaned and the cavities filled up. It’s almost everyone’s nightmare, going to the dentist and having all sorts of tools, pastes and tubes stuck in your mouth and who knows how painful it could be.

Fortunately, science is going to make things better by making a trip to the dentist in three to five years’ time a much pleasant experience.

Researchers recently demonstrated that a small, blowtorch-like device emitting a relatively cool beam of purple plasma can eliminate oral bacteria in cavities, leaving more tooth structure intact than a drill does.

Yep, the stuff that makes up the sun itself, is going to help us get rid of those cavity-inducing bacteria without the pain, invasive and even destructive effects the age-old dentist’s drill which have been around since 1887!

Recalling your physics class in high school, plasma is the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas. It is an ionized gas which behaves almost like gas, having no definite shape nor definite volume but it can be manipulated using magnetic fields. Common samples are lightning, the sun and some flames.

We don’t have to fear about being fried by plasma, because the specific type that’s being developed for dentistry is a “cold plasma” having a temperature of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). It’s made in the lab by partially ionizing helium gas with pulses of microwaves lasting just millionths of a second.

The cold plasma works far better than drilling off parts of the teeth that have been invaded by bacteria by having a direct effect on the germs itself. Just 12-18 seconds of exposure, the plasma kills off the bacteria by charging oxygen gas in the surrounding air, giving rise to highly reactive molecules which break down the bacteria’s defenses and punch holes in its cell wall causing its death.

Scientists reckon that in three to five years, the plasma jet would be ready for commercial use and would soon be used by dentists world wide. Come to think of it, it’s like cleaning your teeth with a lightsaber the size of a toothpick!

Via LiveScience

• Biological Lasers – first step towards Cyclops? (0)

We commonly know the E. coli (Escherichia coli) as the bacteria that can cause serious food poisonings and a PR and marketing disaster for food manufacturers. But this only caused by a strain of E. coli called O157:H7, the rest of other strains are harmless and in fact have been living inside the intestines of warm-blooded organisms like cattle and humans.

Just recently, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered a strain of E. coli to produce bio diesel fuel directly from biomass without the aid of additional chemical modifications.

“Biosynthesis of microbial fatty acids produces fatty acids bound to a carrier protein, the accumulation of which inhibits the making of additional fatty acids,” Steen says. “Normally E. coli doesn’t waste energy making excess fat, but by cleaving fatty acids from their carrier proteins, we’re able to unlock the natural regulation and make an abundance of fatty acids that can be converted into a number of valuable products. Further, we engineered our E. coli to no longer eat fatty acids or use them for energy.”

After successfully diverting fatty acid metabolism toward the production of fuels and other chemicals from glucose, the JBEI researchers engineered their new strain of E. coli to produce hemicellulases — enzymes that are able to ferment hemicellulose, the complex sugars that are a major constituent of cellulosic biomass and a prime repository for the energy locked within plant cell walls.

Plant waste, such as those from the food industry can now be a source of bio diesel fuel thanks to this engineered strain of E. coli. Another use would be to directly farm plant matter, the kind that we humans don’t use for food, and we have ourselves a source of bio diesel that is renewable, sustainable and potentially cheaper.

Hopefully, this would not lead into a genetic nightmare or be used by the West to retain control over the fuel-producing industry. Then again this might be just another exercise in wishful thinking.

• A step towards creating renewable petroleum (0)
• Bio fieldtrip photos, WordPress 2.1 and Cutline 1.1 (8)
• Genetically-modified peanut butter (3)
• New paint kills microbes with spikes (5)
• What happens when a human drinks seawater? (1)