Fusion

I have long wondered what the point of Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is but I'm starting to really come around. Unlike magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), ignition is not sustained with ICF, so each fusion ignition has to be started with massive input of energy only to have blow itself out a short time later. It seems very inefficient since like a star MCF is ignited and just keeps burning as long as confinement remains. However, sustained fusion is likely a long way away, since confinement failure destroys  or damages the tokomak, so ICF which runs like tiny H-bombs in semi-disposable containers could be the way to go. Also, the risk of an "event" from ICF is low since there is no sustained fusion, if the laser stops firing there is no fusion and with a carbon/carbon reactor housing cooled by lithium salts even a massive containment failure wouldn't be uncontainable.

The choice of fuel is what I question. The use of cryogenic fuel could be a problem since even if the lasers get cheaper and smaller having to make, store, and dispense perfectly round spheres of hydrogen isotope ice doesn't seem like the easiest thing especially since the reactor vessel would have a significant neutron flux once it had been used for a while.
The solution could be to use a solid Lithium Hydride/Deuteride blend fuel something like Teller Ulam H-bombs. The ignition temperature of lithium7/hydrogen fusion is lower than hydrogen fusion and the product Li/H fusion is two alpha particles that would ignite additional fusion. The increased mass of the lithium would also increase the compressed density, and act like a tamper.

The Autonomous 500

I cannot wait for the time when the day after the regular Indy 500 they run a second race with Autonomous/Self Driving cars. The true spirit of the Indy 500 was the cars might or might not finish a 500 mile race because cars were new and experimental. Tires couldn’t handle going 50 mph, and in additional to the driver there was a mechanic in the car too, who pumped the fuel and leaned out of the car while it turned to keep it on the ground. Races like the Indy 500 were how car makers showed off their wares and improved their technology. As recently as the 1970’s you could go to a car dealership and buy the car you saw race that weekend. Having autonomous car race each other to best the technologies ability would sell tickets and cars.  Plus with autonomous cars we can go back to lots of fiery crashes, since there are no drivers to be hurt or killed. All in all the Autonomous 500 will be a return to car racing’s roots.

Gravity and gluons

I am still working it out if you look at the interaction of gravity at the level of neutrons and protons vs quarks, it is clear that gluons must be providing most of the interaction surface for gravity. Interaction surface is not a correct term, but that is closest concept in macroscopic world. The nature the interaction between the strong force (and its mass component) and gravity, could be a big piece of unifying the forces.

As I said I am still figuring it out, but the math should come together...

Minor Medical Predictions

I haven’t been on here much but I wanted to post a few things that I imagine we’ll see in the medical news for better or worse in a few years.

One:

There will be a backlash and possibly class action lawsuits against thermal printer and paper manufacturers and the users of thermal printer products.  The "ink" on thermal printer paper often contains unpolymerized BPA, which rubs off when you touch the paper.  The BPA monomer is known to be more bioavailable and bioactive, than the polymerized BPA people worry about leaching out of plastics.

The BPA on the paper is free to be rubbed off and consumed, rubbed into eyes, etc.  More concerning is prepubescent and pubescent age people tend to have jobs that involve touching register tape often with damp hands increasing the transfer of BPA to their fingers. All of this puts them at increased risk of chronic, high level BPA exposure at an age where exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals could do the most damage.

Two:

With the discovery that astrocytes are responsible for cleaning metabolic waste out of the brain while you sleep and that poor sleep habits can lead to Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s. It is not clear if poor sleep habits cause disease or having disease causes poor sleep. Either way I can imagine we will soon see clinics where people will undergo anesthesia or other sleep therapies to allow their brains to remove the toxic buildup of proteins from their brains in order to stave off the possibility of disease. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds; people spend enormous amounts of money and endure terrible pain to look better, imagine what they would endure to prevent a slow and terrible death.

Three:

While it is possible that the increase in the cancer rate over the last several decades is because we are living longer or because the increase in environmental toxins, or it could be because we are living cleaner lives largely free of infectious disease. One of the earliest successful cancer therapies was to inject bacteria into the tumor causing a massive immune response, shrinking the tumor. The advent of modern chemotherapeutics caused less controllable therapies to fall out of favor.  However, it is possible that the immune system having to clear up bacterial infections frequently and without any outside “help” could have a similar and sustained antineoplastic effect. With the advent of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, and the fact that the world is in general a cleaner and healthier place than it once was, the immune system no longer has to work as hard or as long to fight off infections. While not being sick is generally perceived as good, immune inaction or lack of simulation could allow cancerous growths to be missed by the immune system. I am not suggesting that giving up antibiotics will end cancer but it is possible that by letting a non-life threatening illness run its course and forcing the immune system to work at beating back the infection might be a good thing. 

For anyone who reads this remember that modern cancer treatment is extremely immunosuppressive so injecting bacteria even killed bacteria into someone receiving chemo or radiation would be extremely bad.

Happy New Year!

I have not been overly diligent about posting but many of my creative juices are going into actual projects. I wish you all a happy New Year, and stay tuned perhaps the I will find my inspiration.

Renewable work

Everyone always talks about renewable energy, but it is important to remember that energy is just we use to do work. At every step from making the solar panels or fiberglass for a wind turbine, to transmitting the energy to using the energy to do work there is a loss of efficiency. This loss of efficiency translates to heat, and the bigger the city the more energy and therefore heat is released. Instead of investing solely in renewable energy we should invest in renewable sources of work.  One of the biggest uses of energy is air conditioners. More interestingly air conditioners dump huge amounts of heat outdoors, and in some cases the use of air conditioners actually raises the outdoor temperature.

(Seriously Google it.)

My thought for renewable work is designing absorption air conditioning to work on either the low level heat from solar collectors that would heat water for homes or on a larger scale using reflectors or Fresnel lenses. With lots of these systems picking up the load from electrical ACs a real impact could be made. Using solar absorption AC during the heat of the day the system would work the hardest, and any additional capacity could be used to make ice or chilled brine to carry the building through the night. Yes, this system is still moving heat from inside to outside but much of the actual work being done, is done with heat that was already there. Additionally since there is no conversion of solar energy to direct current, alternating current to work the possible efficiency is higher than other renewable sources of work.

Acetaminophen linked to ADHD is autism next?

While I think there are alternate explanations for the link between acetaminophen and ADHD, the information is out there. I imagine that a link between acetaminophen and autism is next, either in utero or during early childhood, since ADHD is an autism spectrum disorder. The parents groups will demand black box warning, and flog the companies and the FDA, but since acetaminophen is in everything and is perceived as safer for children, it is going to be hard find a replacement for pain and fever relief in kids

If you are a lawyer, this could be an opportunity for the kind of class action that buys the lawyers beach houses in Maui, next to Oprah.

A possible opportunity for private equity investment

If you follow biotech and pharma you know that in recent months the FDA has rejected several high profile drugs. These were late or later stage drugs for some very profitable indications, with reasonable amounts of life left on the patents. The reason for the rejections were for side effects that were highly unpleasant or lethal, but very rare, or the drug worked really well but only for certain people. These are necessarily insurmountable problems; given the ever decreasing cost of DNA sequencing it will soon be possible to find variants and or other biomarkers to predict who should get the drug with enough certainty for the FDA to approve the drug and for CMS to pay for the companion diagnostic. You might be thinking this is old news, and you are right, I’ll been chatting with people about doing this for 5-6 years.

The difference is right now we are in the sweet spot for this type of activity, since the necessary sequencing technologies needed aren’t ready yet but should be there soon, so the investors will only have to sit on the IP for a year or two. This means it is not yet prohibitively expense for a fund to pick up the rights to a few late stage failed drugs or biologicals for 10-25 cents on the dollar. Then in the 2015-16 timeframe hire CROs or academic labs to figure out the companion diagnostic for predicting who should or shouldn’t get the drug and bring the drug to market in the 2018 timeframe (this assumes you have the ability to market and distribute the drug without eating up the profits.) Less risky but also potentially less profitable would be to develop the companion diagnostic and selling it and rights to the drug either back or to a third party, and letting them bring the drug and companion diagnostic to market. However, the window is closing since once the sequencing technologies are mature enough to actually be useful the drug companies themselves will do this, or hire special CROs to salvage drugs. If you are reading this a couple years from now, and think this seems similar to something you read in Forbes/WSJ or saw on TV, then it is way too late. (Hopefully by then we’ll start with the diagnostic and make the drug.)

If you like the idea and have tens of millions of dollars you are looking to turn into hundreds of millions dollars, I am available do drop me a line

If you have a few million dollars you want to turn into tens of millions you could partner with an information company like (Lexis Nexis, Elsevier, etc) to do the research to find really good drugs that failed in the late stages and are off patent, and develop the companion diagnostic and bring the drug to market by leveraging the old safety with a small clinical trial. Since there is no patent protection the business model is to license the diagnostic to generic companies to do the actual manufacture and distribution.

Salvage Pharmaceuticals or Second Chance Pharmaceuticals would be good names.