Sometimes Warped Thinking Is A Good Thing

The Star Ship Enterprise could achieve faster

than light travel due to its warp drive. Only the

saucer was the ship, everything else was just for

creating the warp bubble.

Alpha Centauri is the closest solar system to Earth. It has at least one exoplanet orbiting the binary A and B stars, so it could be our first stop outside our solar system. Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away, so traveling at the average speed of a space shuttle, it would take 165,000 years to reach it. Even at the speed of light it would take 4.37 years. But the Starship Enterprise could do this in a matter of days. Is that really possible? Approaching the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek, science says--------could be.

The warp drive on Star Trek allowed them to travel faster than light, a phenomenon now believed to be at least possible. For decades physicists believed that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, that light speed was the upper limit of out universe. It was an idea put forth by Einstein, so people tended to accept it.

While the limit may still be true for the parameters that Einstein placed on it (traveling in space-time), there may be ways around it. For instance, what if you expanded or contracted space-time itself? Or what if you attached yourself to the power of the expanding universe, it's speeding up to such a degree that it will at some point be traveling faster than the speed of light.

So - right off the bat we have a Star Trek concept (faster than light travel) that at one time seemed silly, but now - not so much. Maybe there is more to this warp drive than we imagine. Let’s see how Star Trek imagined it and then how it may actually come to be.

Mr. Scott’s babies – his warp core, dilithium crystal, matter/antimatter engine and warp drive really break down to two basic principles. The energy to create the warp was derived from harnessing the power of matter/antimatter collisions.

In Star Trek, dilithium crystals somehow gave them

control of the matter/antimatter annihilations in

the engine. In real life, dilithium is usually a gas

made of two lithium ions. But University of

Huntsville (AL) scientists have made a stable form

of lithium, that, along with deuterium, can be used

as fuels for an impulse engine. Not the same thing,

but still dang cool.

For particles of matter – protons and electrons – there are antimatter equivalents, antiprotons and positrons. They are equal particles, it’s just that their charges are reversed. Antiprotons are negatively charged and positrons are positively charged electrons. Sound like science fiction? Well, it’s not – and many people are still alive due to antimatter.

Some chemical elements naturally give off small amounts of positrons, and we can use the energy of their annihilating collisions with electrons to achieve positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the human body. PET is a powerful tool for visualizing the 3-D functional ability of human organs and tissues and is important for diagnosis of many diseases.

So don’t scoff at antimatter – Star Trek had it exactly right. In fact, CERN in Europe made anti-hydrogen atoms last year – although they didn’t last long. And the Santilli telescope has confirmed the presence of antimatter galaxies at the edges of the visible universe. That issue resolved, let’s move on to how antimatter was used in Star Trek.

When a particle of matter meets its opposite, they annihilate one another and release lots of energy. The warp antimatter engine on the Enterprise used heavy hydrogen, called deuterium, and its antimatter equivalent as their power source.

They had to keep the antimatter in a strong magnetic field so that it wouldn’t touch any matter (except the deuterium they wanted it to), otherwise it would annihilate the warp core and destroy the ship. This is the containment Scotty was always yelling about.

Because E=mc² can go both directions, the

annihilation of a up quark and an anti-up quark

produces energy, but that energy can fuse into

gluons and the release matter in the form of a top

and anti-top quarks. So the universe is till producing

antimatter. Look up how quarks help form protons,

neutrons and electrons.

Matter/antimatter engines are coming closer to being real. A Case Western/Kent State paper from 2012 described the concept for a beamed core antimatter propulsion engine using annihilation products to produce thrust. The computer simulations stated that the engine could be produced with today’s technology. This is another example of how Star Trek got it right - and had it first.

The whole purpose of the matter/antimatter energy was to use the released energy to run the ship’s systems and to produce plasma.  Plasma isn’t science fiction either – it’s matter that has been stripped of its electrons. A positive hydrogen ion is just a single proton that has lost its electron – this is plasma, although you could do it with larger atoms as well. Neon lights glow because the electricity strips the electrons from neon gas – that’s plasma as well. On a very large scale, plasma repels matter with electrons, so it can create sort of a vacuum around whatever is creating it.

The Star Trek plasma was sent through the warp nacelles (those cigar shaped pieces to each side of the hull) to generate a plasma bubble around the ship. This bubble would warp space-time around the ship and allow it to travel faster than the limits within space-time. Again, not so far from possibility.

NASA and others are developing wings and

fuselages that generate plasma bubbles on their

own. This creates lift, reduces drag, eliminates a

radar signal, and….. glows!

There is speculation that some Russian jets (SU-37) of a couple decades ago used a plasma bubble to create a stealth capability and reduce drag on the fuselage. This possibility was confirmed in 2000 in a paper in the Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer. So, on a small scale, plasma could reduce drag and speed up jet planes. On a large scale, could it warp space-time and allow a ship to travel faster than light in a bubble?

In 1994, a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre did the math to determine if this possible. Called the Alcubierre hypothesis, or Alcubierre warp drive, his math says it is possible to warp space-time around a ship, while leaving unwarped space-time inside the ship, so that the crew would experience normal time flow. About 10 years ago NASA rated this at the conjecture level, but it has moved to reasoned speculation. For scientists, this is a big change.

The reasons for the move was that the original calculations suggested that a huge amount of energy would be needed – equal to that released if all of Jupiter’s mass was converted to pure energy. But more recent changes to the shape of the warp disc need (more round than football shaped) reduced the amount of energy needed to a few thousand pounds (converted to energy – that’s still a whole bunch).

This is conceptual design of the IXS Enterprise, and

warp drive ship. The circular parts will generate the

warp bubble instead of the nacelles behind and on

each side of the original Enterprise. Despite that

difference in shape, Roddenberry’s Enterprise

was pretty doggone close.

NASA believes in this concept enough to have started designs on a warp drive ship (of course it's called the IXS Enterprise) and on experiments to generate and detect warp bubbles. Headed by NASA scientist Harold White, the program still has some conceptual problems to overcome. The largest one, and stick with me here, is this. If you want to generate a negative energy warp/plasma bubble around the ship, then that would include putting some plasma in front of the ship.

Even if the warp allows you to travel faster than light within the bubble, the front edge of the bubble would have to be maintained, meaning that you would have to keeping building the bubble in front of the ship at a rate faster than light speed. Since that would be outside the warp bubble, it would then break the laws of physics in space-time. We’re back to the limit that nothing can move faster than light. Darn you, Einstein!

Next week, yet another Star Trek idea that is coming closer to reality – is a transporter just a pipe dream, or a pipe from one place to another?

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

S. Beghella-Bartoli, P.M. Bhujbal, A. Nas (2015). Confirmation of Santilli's detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with concave lens. America Journal of Modern Physics, 4 (1)
 
Alcubierre, M. (1994). The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11 (5) DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001

Ganiev, Y., Gordeev, V., Krasilnikov, A., Lagutin, V., Otmennikov, V., & Panasenko, A. (2000). Aerodynamic Drag Reduction by Plasma and Hot-Gas Injection Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, 14 (1), 10-17 DOI: 10.2514/2.6504

H. White (2013). Warp Field Mechanics 101 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 66, 242-247

Ronan Keane, & Wei-Ming Zhang (2012). Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization J.Br.Interplanet.Soc., 65 arXiv: 1205.2281v2

The Song Remains The Same

If you’re going to copy a song, best avoid one called “I Won’t Back Down”. If you’re over 40 and happened to hear the hit song “Stay With Me” by Sam Smith, you probably had a sense of déjà vu, since the song’s chorus sounds a lot like Tom Petty’s 1989 smash, “I Won’t Back Down”. The video mash-up below shows just how similar these tunes are:

Long story short, Smith claimed this was a complete coincidence, but agreed that Petty and his songwriting partner Jeff Lynne (E.L.O.) should receive co-writing credits for “Stay With Me”. Petty stated that, “these things can happen” and believes it was a “musical accident, no more no less.” Case closed.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a songwriter has been accused of borrowing heavily from a previous song. In fact, this has happened to Tom Petty at least one other time before. Not all of these disputes end on “a happy note”. If you’re curious, there is an entire web site dedicated to pointing out similarities between songs.

But should we really be surprised? There are only so many chords, isn’t there a limit to how many ways they can be strung together? Moreover, our ears are turned on by certain chord progressions, further limiting the combinations an artist can chose from if he/she wants a lot of listeners to enjoy the tune.

In addition to the limited combination of chords that sound pleasing to our ears, some musical genres also suffer from coming up with original lyrical content. This phenomenon was illustrated by a recent demonstration of how modern country songs sound exactly the same. Not to single out country - other musical genres are also guilty of churning out songs in cookie-cutter fashion...and science has found an explanation for this.

First, let's consider how many possible songs can be written. This has actually been calculated and you math fans can check it out here. For the rest of us, the calculation shows that the number of possible 5 minute songs is 2 to the 211 million power, which is a gargantuan number way more than even the total number of hydrogen atoms in our universe. Applying additional filters, such as limiting the octave and the number of notes to those most commonly used, there are still 79 billion possible combinations. Watch Vsauce break it down:

With so many possible songs that could be written, why do chart toppers usually sound the same? For a song to resonate with a large number of people, it has to balance our competing desires for predictability and unpredictability. This was perhaps best articulated by the composer Arnold Schönberg, who held that music must meet “the demand for repetition of pleasant stimuli, and the opposing desire for variety, for change, for a new stimulus.”

Trying to address why simplicity sells, scientists have found that music becomes “increasingly formulaic in terms of instrumentation under increasing sales numbers due to a tendency to popularize music styles with low variety and musicians with similar skills. Only a small number of styles in popular music manage to sustain a high level of instrumentational complexity over an extended period of time.”

Which style of music has had the longest legs in sustained complexity and popularity in musical history? Drum roll…folk rock.

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter.

Juslin PN (2013). From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: towards a unified theory of musical emotions. Physics of life reviews, 10 (3), 235-66 PMID: 23769678 Percino, G., Klimek, P., & Thurner, S. (2014).

Instrumentational Complexity of Music Genres and Why Simplicity Sells PLoS ONE, 9 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115255

Tryin’ To Make A Tricorder

Sometimes present technology stirs the imagination of a writer to think about what might come from it; progress for humanity, horrible nightmares, or further advances. And then there are the opposite cases, where something from a writer’s mind spurs a revolution in real world technology – the old, “We ought to be able to make one of those."

This is the first flight of the USS Enterprise. Actually, it

never went to space. Notice that the bottom of the shuttle

doesn’t have the thermal shield tiles, so it couldn’t

possibly go to space – well, at least it couldn’t come back.

Enterprise was scrapped for parts for subsequent shuttles.

Star Trek gave us both. The telephone could likely give rise to the communicator, and lasers probably influenced the idea of phasers. On the other hand, NASA honored Star Trek by naming the first of the space shuttles Enterprise, meaning that the fictional version predated the real version by some 10 years. But where did the tricorder idea come from?

The tricorder was a hand held monitoring device that could record and analyze data on a number of subjects. Spock used it to scan for life forms and geologic conditions, etc. Michael Jones, with Google, states that the tricorder’s mapping function was one of the inspirations behind Google Earth.

Scotty used it to analyze materials and warp cores. What was going on in the 1960’s that gave the idea to Gene Roddenberry that they could have a hand held device that would analyze just about anything?

McCoy’s medical tricorder was used for diagnosing the medical problems of the crew – except for the guy in the red shirt from the landing party – all he got was, “He’s dead Jim.” Bones also had a diagnostic bed that could be used in the sick bay. Sometimes on Next Generation they would use the tricorder while the patient was in the diagnostic bed. Apparently the patient wanted a second opinion.

Now we have an impetus to construct a real tricorder, at least the medical version. QualComm has put up the money for the Tricorder X Prize, worth a cool $10 million to the winning team in early 2016. This is just in time for the Star Trek 50^th anniversary – on purpose or happy accident?

Here’s Bones with a tricorder from the original Star

Trek. I have found episodes with everyone using the

device, McCoy, Spock, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Kirk, even

Uhura. The gal in the back is Yeoman Rand, she used

the tricorder a lot in the eight episodes in which she

made an appearance.

A paper from 2006 provides a glimpse into the future. This study described a hand held gamma ray energy device for detecting cancer cells in a surgical setting. Remove the tumor and then probe to see if all the cancerous cells are gone from the site. I wonder if they re-purposed a salt-shaker for the probe.  This is a version of a tricorder function for diagnosis and to monitor treatment.

The current medical term for what a medical tricorder does is rapid medical assessment (RMA). RMA can be done by people as a method of triage in emergency departments, or by device as a diagnostic/treatment mechanism. A 2015 paper discusses the use of Mouthlab from Multisensor Diagnostics Company. This tool uses as disposable mouthpiece and a handheld device to monitor several vital signs (heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygenation) at once. This would then be a tricorder use for monitoring vitals and possibly biomarkers.

But the $10 million won’t come so easily; the hand held PET scanner did just one thing and the Mouthlab only does vital signs. To win the prize, the final tricorder must be able to diagnose at least 13 core health conditions (anemia, atrial fibrillation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, Hepatitis A, leukocytosis, pneumonia, otitis media, sleep apnea, stroke, tuberculosis, urinary tract infection, as well as the absence of those conditions), as well as three elective conditions (allergens, cholesterol screen, food-borne illness, HIV screen, hypertension, hypothyroidism/hyperthyroidism, melanoma, mononucleosis, osteoporosis, Whooping Cough, shingles, or strep throat).

Think about it, those conditions include metabolic disorders, cancers, bacterial infections, viral infections, blood problems, cardiac electrical problems and bone density issues.

The name tricorder comes from the fact that it

recorded data and that it originally had three modes,

geologic, meterologic, and biologic. So it could be used

for many things. Here, Data uses it as a hand puppet

after he receives his emotion chip.

But it gets harder, the device must also be able to measure several vital signs and transmit the data for real time analysis and monitoring. Perhaps the toughest requirement? The entire instrument can’t weigh more than five pounds (2.26 kg)

The Star Trek medical tricorder didn’t touch your body, the salt shaker, er…..probe, was waved across your body and you looked at the old time tape recorder with the shoulder strap to see the results. We haven’t got there yet, at least not for all tests. Today, most tests still require some sample taken from the patient and then assessed in a laboratory for specific characteristics.

Changes from normal chemistry, or the presence or absence of some key molecule are then indications of certain disease states. Usually there is a list of possible diseases (a differential diagnosis) and then additional laboratory tests or diagnostic procedures (surgery, PET, MRI, etc) are used to eliminate some possibilities and strengthen others.

Some tests we currently have don’t require touching the patient or taking a sample, mostly imaging methods (X-ray, MRI, PET scan), but most laboratory tests require something given by a patient (saliva, urine) or taken from a patient (tissue, blood).

This is an old example of lab on a chip, although it is still

one of the prettiest. This chip was used for DNA

sequencing. Each channel had a final endpoint in which

the reaction took place and was then read.

The current methodology for performing many tests in a short time and a small space using a small sample is called “laboratory on a chip.” A small liquid sample is dispersed on a surface, into many wells or areas where specific tests can be performed. The whole thing may use less than a single drop of sample.

Microfluidics is a whole field of research that is used to inform the designers how to get small fluid samples to the areas and how small fluid volumes behave. It isn’t just the biochemical or molecular tests that are challenging, it’s getting the sample to the test areas. Once in the testing areas, then the chemistry can be run to produce products or measure components of the sample.

The tricorder devices will have to have a way to measure the results of the reactions or the properties of the fluid. How it gathers the data is important and takes a lot of technology. UV/Visible spectroscopy looks for the absorbance of light rays (colors or fluorescence); mass spectroscopy identifies molecules by mass to charge ratio.

On the other hand, Raman Spectroscopy measures the unique vibrational and rotational characteristics of specific molecules and ultra thin layer chromatography separates molecules based on solubility and mass. Each of these technologies usually requires desk-sized pieces of equipment; the winning device might use any or all of these measurement techniques.  This makes the weight requirement of five pound max a little tougher to achieve.

This is a schematic which shows UV or visible light

spectroscopy. With UV you can measure DNA, RNA, or

fluorescence With visible light, you can measure the

intensity of colors. Each can give information about

how much of a certain compound is there.

The sample components or reaction measurements will be made and their amounts will be assessed relative to the total sample. Those values, along with vital functions data will be assessed by the machine and a diagnosis will be rendered.

The goal is to have consumers use the product themselves, without need for medical professionals or extensive medical knowledge. Therefore, the workings of the machine must be self-contained and self-diagnosing, and the analysis must come down to specific, but easily understandable results. Not easy for a device that may use some very high tech mechanisms. Of course, there’s nothing saying that the finalists must use lab on a chip technology – it could be something completely new.

Good luck to all the ten finalists. You can learn about their projects here. Next week, we take a look at warp drive. Is it possible to use antimatter or plasma for travel? And what about that speed of light thing?

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Fridman GY, Tang H, Feller-Kopman D, & Hong Y (2015). MouthLab: A Tricorder Concept Optimized for Rapid Medical Assessment. Annals of biomedical engineering PMID: 25605586

Chandler, D. (2014). A Doctor in the Palm of Your Hand: How the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize could help to revolutionize medical diagnosis IEEE Pulse, 5 (2), 50-54 DOI: 10.1109/MPUL.2013.2296803

Gulec SA, Daghighian F, & Essner R (2006). PET-Probe: Evaluation of Technical Performance and Clinical Utility of a Handheld High-Energy Gamma Probe in Oncologic Surgery. Annals of surgical oncology PMID: 16865592

The Friday Five

Highlighting some of the coolest science news we’ve seen lately.

1. Which will be the best Super Bowl commercial? Science may have the answer!

2. Well, excuse me! It happens to all of us. The science behind brain farts.

3. Twitches, hiccups, yawns, oh my!  The science behind different involuntary behaviors.

4. Judge me by my size do you? Here’s why small black holes are more dangerous than big ones.

5. OK, I no longer want to be a pirate. Terrifying medical instruments found on Blackbeard’s sunken ship.

Science quote of the week:

“Two things are infinite:  the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” –Albert Einstein

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter: @wjsullivan

Heaven or Hallucination?

Benjamin Franklin once proclaimed, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." While most of us can begrudgingly deal with taxman, we have a much harder time facing the Grim Reaper. It is this fear of the finite that has put the notion of an afterlife at the center of many world religions. Like a good book, we simply don’t want our life's story to end, so most people believe that there must a sequel.

Long ago, people used to think that Heaven was up in the sky. Led Zeppelin even implied that Heaven was accessible via a stairway available for purchase. A more modern idea is that Heaven is transcendental, perhaps in another dimension that is inaccessible to scientific instruments.

What does science have to say on the subject of Heaven and the afterlife? Ancient notions that Heaven resides on mountaintops or in the clouds have been dispelled, and our exploration of the universe so far has not uncovered any evidence of a physical Heaven. The failure to find evidence does not necessarily negate the possibility, but our knowledge about the universe has prompted a change in how most people conceptualize Heaven. Since Heaven is now considered by most to be an ethereal realm unreachable to the living, scientific analyses do not apply and the afterlife must remain a matter of faith.

 

However, some argue that there is tangible evidence of Heaven based on eyewitness accounts of people who've been there during a “near death experience”, or NDE. When evidence is put forth, science is obligated to scrutinize the claim. People surviving a NDE awake with an unshakable feeling that they’ve traveled beyond the confines of their body. You may have heard about the recent case of Alex Malarkey, a young boy who was in an automobile accident in 2004 that left him paralyzed. With the help of his father, they penned a bestselling book in 2010 called, “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven”. But a couple weeks ago, Alex (now 16 years old) admitted that his story was, um, malarkey. Alex now claims that he made up the whole thing as a child because he “thought it would get him attention”. Consequently, the book has been pulled and the million or so people who purchased it are feeling as deflated as a New England Patriots football.

Rock singer Bryan Adams also once thought he'd died and gone to Heaven.

But turns out he was just love-struck.

We are so eager to feast on these personal accounts of an afterlife that a whole new genre of entertainment has been christened “Heavenly Tourism”. Heavenly Tourism is now a big business, even getting a major motion picture in 2014. Some cases appear to bring real credibility to the phenomenon, such as Eben Alexander, M.D., the neurosurgeon who wrote the bestseller “Proof Of Heaven” after his NDE. While science is not a system designed to test matters of faith, researchers can examine what is going on in the brain during NDEs.

“Flatliners” was a movie from 1990 about a group of medical students who tried to reproduce NDEs in the lab. The real miracle is that most of these actors were able to resuscitate their career after this movie.

Dr. Steven Laureys heads a Coma Science Group in Belgium that studies NDEs very seriously. His research is revealing that patients who have a NDE form memories during this period that are unusually vivid, feeling “even more real than real”. Dr. Laureys asserts that the lucid nature of these NDE memories fools many people, including Dr. Eben Alexander, to believe they were real events. But Dr. Laureys attributes these powerful experiences to a dysfunctional brain.

According to Dr. Laureys, there is no evidence that consciousness exists independent of brain activity. In other words, patients forming memories during a NDE were not dead, and the images they retain were the natural result of residual brain activity, which can persist for some time even after the heart stops beating. Further evidence that heavenly visions are not real is that they can be reproduced when certain parts of the brain are artificially stimulated. Oliver Sacks has also written extensively about how the stimulation of certain brain areas can produce an array of transcendental experiences that feel absolutely real. Psychedelic drugs can have a similar impact on the brain.

Supportive findings have emerged from studies that record brain activity in dying rats. In rats that would be considered “clinically dead” by human medical standards, researchers observed a surge in specific brain activities that are signatures of “hyper-consciousness”, the same type of phenomenon that Dr. Laureys observes in patients reporting a vivid NDE. 

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg studies the effects that certain religious practices have on the brain, pioneering a new discipline he calls "neurotheology" that aims to identify the biological underpinnings of spirituality. His studies have revealed why NDEs often leave the impression that you traveled down a tunnel towards a bright light. According to Newberg, peripheral vision is lost during a NDE, producing the sensation that one is in a tunnel.
 

The more we study NDEs, the more it becomes clear that there is a neurochemical basis that explains the imagery and sensations. Collectively, these studies raise a red flag about the validity of Heavenly Tourism, so buyer beware. Those offering to be your tour guide may be teaching you more about neurology and psychology rather than what may await us when the brain truly shuts down. Heaven is outside the realm of scientific examination, so the afterlife remains a matter of faith.

It has been posited, however, that our growing scientific knowledge gives less credence to the supernatural, making an afterlife seem highly improbable. Stephen Hawking has proclaimed, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." John Lennon once asked us to image no Heaven. While the thought of a finite existence is unfathomable to many, the truth is that the only existence we can be certain of is the one we are living here and now. Embracing the possibility that life is a one-take movie can inspire us to do wondrous things with the time we have alive. Knowing that we will not be reunited with friends and family in the Great Beyond should prompt us to cultivate better relationships with them now. The logical course of action is to treat our life as a fragile and precious commodity, taking good care of the body and mind and enabling others to do the same, which interestingly agrees with the prime directive of most religions. 

 

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter.

For more information:
 

Thonnard, M., Charland-Verville, V., Brédart, S., Dehon, H., Ledoux, D., Laureys, S., & Vanhaudenhuyse, A. (2013). Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories PLoS ONE, 8 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057620

Borjigin, J., Lee, U., Liu, T., Pal, D., Huff, S., Klarr, D., Sloboda, J., Hernandez, J., Wang, M., & Mashour, G. (2013). Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (35), 14432-14437 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308285110

Newberg AB (2014). The neuroscientific study of spiritual practices. Frontiers in psychology, 5 PMID: 24672504

Blanke, O. (2005). The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction The Neuroscientist, 11 (1), 16-24 DOI: 10.1177/1073858404270885

Physicist Sean Carroll recently gave a lecture that debunks the notion of an afterlife.

Star Date: Pretty Darn Soon

The 50^th anniversary of Star Trek is a reason to celebrate.

I guess Kirk is too cool to dance and Spock thinks

dancing is illogical.

2016 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the first season of the first series of Star Trek. In that first episode we meet James T. Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, Uhuru, and some guy in a red shirt who meets a horrible fate almost immediately.

In the fifty-one years since Gene Roddenberry pitched the series as, “Wagon Train in space meets Gulliver’s Travels,” many of its technological gadgets have come closer to being real. The original series was set in the 2260’s, so we’re way ahead of schedule on producing workable versions of some of those props. For instance, the tricorder sensor was a repurposed salt shaker.

I figure the only decent way to prepare for next year’s 365-day celebration is to describe where we stand in making all those toys a reality. The purpose of this Star Trek refresher is to rekindle, or just plain kindle, a fire in you to finish the research. That, and about three billion dollars of funding should do the trick.

Let’s start with the replicator. Introduced in the original series, the replicator started out as a way to make food and recycle just about anything. In later series, spare parts and just about everything else was made by replicator, including air. The only rules; no weapons and nothing living. Well… we may be able to go Star Trek one better.

The replicator produced the food and the dishware.

Then you could recycle the dirty dishes into your

next martini.

The theory behind the replicator was that it rearranged subatomic particles to produce atoms of different elements. Then these atoms were assembled into whatever material and form were requested. To recycle dirty dishes or that dead Romulan, the replicator would reduce the object to its subatomic particles. Your late night cheeseburger might have been part of a old sock just minutes before.

While we can’t yet manipulate subatomic particles, we have developed ways to make things on demand. It’s called additive manufacturing; you know it better as 3-D printing.

In basic terms, 3-D printing produces a solid object from liquid or solid material in a build up process, as opposed to cutting extraneous material away from a block. In more technical terms, there are several ways to do additive manufacturing.

Stereolithography is the oldest technique for 3-D printing.

Liquid build material is cured using a UV or laser light.

In stereolithography, a vat of liquid plastic is the build material. A thin layer is spread across the build tray and a laser is used to cure the precise areas that correspond to the first layer of the object. The tray is lowered and another thin layer is spread and cured. This is repeated until the object is completed. This is the oldest of the 3-D printing technologies, first described in 1986, and is still the fastest way to print an object.

On the other hand, in inkjet based printing or powder bed printing, the movable head dispenses a bit of liquid binder onto a bed of powder build material. With light, the binder locks the build powder at that point to the layer below it. The table is then lowered, a new layer of powder material is laid down, and the computer design guides the head to dispense binder at the correct points.

Inkjet 3-D printing is similar to sterolithography, but the

build material is not liquid and the binding comes from the

print head, not from a laser or UV light.

In fused deposition modeling, liquefied build material is laid down and fused together by UV radiation or laser. What is interesting about this (and some other) methods is that you can use several different materials (metal plastic, different colors) in one build.

With fused deposition, you can easily include support material to build up columns for parts of the object that would otherwise be unsupported in the manufacturing process. Now the cool part – the build material can be metal or plastic or glass, while the support material can be something water soluble.

When your build is finished, you can throw it in some water and the supports will disappear, leaving only your desired product. In sterolithography, the support columns are made of the same material as the product, so they have to be cut away.

Fused deposition printing can use different materials for

supports and products. The material is liquefied in the

head before it is deposited.

Finally, there is selective laser sintering. This technique uses powdered metal or plastic. As in stereolithography, a thin layer is spread over the build surface and a laser is used. However, in this case the laser sinters the pieces together, compressing them with heat and pressure into a solid – but not to the point of melting them.

NASA did its first additive manufacturing in space in November of 2014. The International Space Station just got its first 3-D printer. In a small bit of irony, the part they manufactured was a replacement part of the printer itself. The ISS has a fused deposition modeling printer, so our replicator in space may descend from this technology.

Also ironic, the first printed part couldn’t be separated from the build tray. The binder apparently works better in microgravity, so it fused too well with the platform on which the part was built. There’s always a learning curve.

Sintering is just another way to bind the material

particle together.

The original replicator was for making food, and NASA is working on to this as well. There are 3-D printers on the market today that will print food for you. NASA has funded a small business grant to look into the possibility of printing food for long space trips.

Printing food is in some ways very similar – chocolate bunnies or pasta shapes are easy, but it can get more elaborate. Nature Machines has a product called the Foodini that can print burgers, pizza, etc. The technology is similar to other printers, except that the temperatures and textures are different for each ingredient and they have trouble getting many things to hold a 3-D shape against gravity.

The food binder technology is a bit behind – strong enough to hold but edible, and something that will match the flavor, texture, and consistency that one would expect from a certain food. We are actually doing better with medical uses than we are with food.

The software used to design printed objects can be fused to MRI, CT scan or X-ray information to help design very accurate stents, casts, valves, and other plastic or biocompatible material parts to be used in or on the human body. Heart valves are especially useful. A 2015 paper explains printing of metal/glass scaffolds to repair skull defects. Another use described in a 2015 study is for on demand printing of surgical gear needed in war zones.

One possible method to bioprint a vessel. Lay down cells specifically

within an agarose mold. Let them solidify for a time, then put

them in a bioreactor containing growth factors and mild

electrical stimulation so the muscle cells in the walls of

the vessel can mature.

Here's we can go Star Trek one better, 3-D printers are also being used to print living tissues and pretty soon, organs.  3-D bioprinting uses biochemicals and different cell types to build 3-D tissues of various types. A 2014 review explains in common terms the promise and problems with 3-D printing tissues and organs.

One of the problems that must be overcome before organ bioprinting can be realized is the vasculature. For a tissue or organ to survive, it must have a blood supply. This is harder to print because it means having a tubular structure within a solid organ. See the TED video below about printing kidneys.

A new study might have the answer. Using a two print process, the tubular structure is printed using endothelium, muscle in hydrogel tube supports, and then the tissue is printed around it. This must be accomplished before we can take the next step, in vivo bioprinting. In this technique, bioprinting will occur right in or on the human body. That smells a lot like the digital regenerator in The Next Generation. Yes, NASA is funding studies to produce a “bioreplicator” as well.

Next week, let’s tackle a primarily medical device, the tricorder. Think hard about it this week, a workable version might be worth 10 million dollars to you.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

click here if link on video doesn't work

Yu, A., & Khan, M. (2015). On-demand three-dimensional printing of surgical supplies in conflict zones Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, 78 (1), 201-203 DOI: 10.1097/TA.0000000000000481

Murphy, S., & Atala, A. (2014). 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs Nature Biotechnology, 32 (8), 773-785 DOI: 10.1038/nbt.2958

Kolesky, D., Truby, R., Gladman, A., Busbee, T., Homan, K., & Lewis, J. (2014). Bioprinting: 3D Bioprinting of Vascularized, Heterogeneous Cell-Laden Tissue Constructs (Adv. Mater. 19/2014) Advanced Materials, 26 (19), 2966-2966 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201470124