CHROMATOGRAPHY/SPECTROSCOPY Messenger finds surprises on Mercury
NASA's engineers hoped for a trouble-free mission, confirming earlier theories about Mercury. Messenger has done more...
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LIFE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY Nanotube findings push biomedical potential to a new level
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MATERIALS SCIENCE/NANOTECHNOLOGY E.coli a future energy source?
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Are Biofuels The Right Choice?
Fuels-their increasing use, diminishing supply in some areas, and their byproducts which are being attributed to global warming, have become the determining factors in the future of humans' role on this planet. And petroleum, with its high energy output and its 41% dominant share of the U.S.'s energy portfolio, has become the current center of attention in this country.
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Microscopy/Image Analysis A Biased View of the Nanoworld: Electromechanical Imaging By Scanning Probe Microscopy Piezoresponse force microscopy enables electromechanical imaging at the nanoscale. continue...
Photonics/Optics Riding the Waveguide
A planned approach to photonics design is accelerating network development. continue...
Software Improving Bridge Performance with Finite Element Analysis
Finite element analysis enables better bridge performance from the ground up.
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Turbomolecular vacuum pump eliminates cables and accessory rack
Edwards has released its new iXA series of magnetic bearing turbomolecular vacuum pumps continue...
New microscope combines near-field optical Raman with atomic-force imaging
Molecular-level topographic sample information is now available to users of Parks Systems’ new atomic force microscope continue...
UV spectrophotometer features USB operation and small footprint
The latest ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) multi-mode spectrophotometer from Shimadzu Scientific Instruments is the UV-1800 continue...
The complexity of science
May 16, 2008
How complex is science and technology? How many interactions, side effects, and unintended consequences are there from the most mundane (and the most sophisticated) of our developments? The old adage that “the more we know, the more we find out that we don’t know” appears to be particularly accurate in the 21st century.
In general, we find out the particularly negative consequences of our developments far sooner that we find out the positive ones. Take nanotech for example, a very large amount of research is being expended to both develop this technology for applications from electronic circuitry to textiles, while a lesser but still large amount of research is dedicated to determining the effect of those same products on their exposure to the human body and the environment. Take biotech, an enormous amount of research was dedicated in the 1990s and early part of this decade on the sequencing of the human genome (and other genomes as well). During the period of the Human Genome Project, junk DNA was pretty much ignored, hence the term ‘junk.’ Now researchers are finding that this junk DNA has a relation to how, where, and when the genes that were mapped in the HGP are expressed. And then look at a NASA report issued this week that cites human activity as being mostly responsible for global warming (if there is global warming of course), neglecting of course possible cyclic solar or natural terrestrial effects. And we pretty much had it all decided that an asteroid or similar impact in the Yucatan area of Mexico was responsible for the decline of the Triassic dinosaurs. That, of course, was before other researchers came up with alternative possibilities that included biological diseases and solar events. And then the PC was considered to be the only truly practical and usable computing device and Apple Macs were considered to be too pricey and narrow to survive for long.
For more than 30 years, R&D Magazine ran a column written by Fred Jueneman called the Innovative Notebook. In these columns, Fred looked at alternative possibilities for many commonly accepted scientific ideas. Fred (a former researcher who now lives in Northern California and writes music on his Mac) gave us a legacy that is more true today than ever, that we should never accept the accepted and never ignore any possibility.
