Month: March 2011

Middle East borders

the artificial borders of WW1 unravel.

Other “artificial states” like Libya, which was made up of 3 former Italian colonies, as well as Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, could all disintegrate. In all of them there is serious internal tension among tribes and groups or a minority government imposed on the majority. Yemen was divided in the past and could once again split into north and south. In Saudi Arabia, distances are vast. But how is it possible to partition Jordan, where the Bedouin and the Palestinians are mingled? The redrawing of borders is not a panacea.

End of work questions

Just 64.2% of adults were either in a job or actively looking for one, representing the lowest participation rate in 25 years.

At the same link you will see evidence that the number is likely to decline. Some women are less eager to work, some men are quitting the search for work, and there is a general aging of the population. Fewer students work while they are in school. Here are further links to future projections. That’s hardly the end of work but one thing dramatic recessions can do is to reveal new pieces of information. By overturning the table, we (sometimes) see which pieces of the puzzle did not fit in the first place. 1 result of this recession is that we will revise downwards our estimate of the labor force participation rate, both current and future. A few questions are:

  1. What is the political economy of a world where so few people work?
  2. What kind of low-rent areas will evolve to accommodate some of these people?
  3. Will we in fact move to some form of a guaranteed annual income?

Note that the answer to #2 will affect the feasibility of #3.

the comments are in denial. no suggestions of creating permanent disneylands to keep the unemployable happy.

Exosome drug delivery

the blood-brain barrier blocks delivery of many molecules that do wonderful things if injected directly into the brain, but injecting the brain isn’t quite as convenient as injecting a vein. Exosomes are lipid vesicles manufactured by cells for transporting diverse molecules to other cells, including signaling molecules such as micro RNAs. Now, they’ve been shown to carry their contents across the blood-brain barrier, and other work has shown that exosome-like particles can be made synthetically, with membranes chock-full of functional molecules for targeting cells and inducing responses from them. With diameters of 30 to 100 nm, exosomes have room for a lot of payload.

a boon for brain pharmaceuticals

Travel Without Baggage

I’ve done a few very short trips this way, and once I took a month-long journey in Sri Lanka without baggage. I would not want to travel this way all the time, but once you go with none, it is much easier to go with very little. It’s one of the oldest truism in the world: the less you travel with, the more you take back.

total nada, just pockets, day baggers and minimalist borrowers.

97nm Optical Imaging

Not sure about being first, but metamaterials also go beyond the diffraction limit.

The smallest structures that conventional lenses are able to optically resolve are of the order of 200 nm. We introduce a new type of lens that exploits multiple scattering of light to generate a scanning nano-sized optical focus. With an experimental realization of this lens in gallium phosphide we have succeeded to image gold nanoparticles at 97 nm optical resolution. Our work is the first lens that provides a resolution in the nanometer regime at visible wavelengths.

2013-11-13: making microscopic images with visible light is limited by the diffraction limit, around 250nm. If you want to go smaller you have to use (often destructive) techniques like X-rays. This new technique can get to 30nm plus it makes beautiful pictures as a side effect.


2021-08-28: A 100x improvement in 10 years

Scientists have improved the spatial resolution from 8nm to 0.8nm of photoluminescence imaging. This has realized sub-molecular resolution with single molecule photofluorescence imaging for the first time.