A Nature Chemistry paper by researchers from the University of Glasgow describes a process for "printing" pharmaceutical compounds from various feedstocks, and supposes a future in which we have diagnosis/medication manufacturies at home. The process uses an off-the-shelf 3D printer technology to assemble pre-filled "vessels" in ways that create the desired chemical reaction in order to produce medicines. It's a scaled-down version of the industrial process used to manufacture drugs in bulk, and the paper's principal, Prof Lee Cronin, calls it "reactionware." From the BBC:

"We can fabricate these reactionware vessels using a 3D printer in a relatively short time. Even the most complicated vessels we've built have only take a few hours.

"By making the vessel itself part of the reaction process, the distinction between the reactor and the reaction becomes very hazy. It's a new way for chemists to think, and it gives us very specific control over reactions because we can continually refine the design of our vessels as required.

"For example, our initial reactionware designs allowed us to synthesize three previously unreported compounds and dictate the outcome of a fourth reaction solely by altering the chemical composition of the reactor."

...Prof Cronin added: "3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It's entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises.

"Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to health care in the developing world, allowing diagnosis and treatment to happen in a much more efficient and economical way than is possible now.

"We could even see 3D printers reach into homes and become fabricators of domestic items, including medications. Perhaps with the introduction of carefully-controlled software 'apps', similar to the ones available from Apple, we could see consumers have access to a personal drug designer they could use at home to create the medication they need."

'DIY drugstores' in development by Glasgow University researchers

My latest Guardian column is "Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?" which digs into the backstory on the appointment of former MPAA CTO Paul Brigner as North American director of the copyright-reforming, pro-net-neutrality Network Society group, which manages the .ORG domain name registry.

I asked Brigner whether his statements about DNS blocking and seizure and net neutrality had been sincere. "There are certainly a number of statements attributed to me that demonstrate my past thoughts on DNS and other issues," he answered. "I would not have stated them if I didn't believe them. But the true nature of my work was focused on trying to build bridges with the technology community and the content community and find solutions to our common problems. As I became more ingrained in the debate, I became more educated on the realities of these issues, and the reality is that a mandated technical solution just isn't a viable option for the future of the internet. When presented with the facts over time, it was clear I had to adjust my thinking.

"My views have evolved over the last year as I engaged with leading technologists on DNSSEC. Through those discussions, I came to believe that legislating technological approaches to fight copyright violations threatens the architecture of the internet. However, I do think that voluntary measures could be developed and implemented to help address the issue.

"I will most definitely advocate on Internet Society's behalf in favor of all issues listed, and I share the organization's views on all of those topics. I would not have joined the organisation otherwise, and I look forward to advocating on its behalf."

Update: Joly sez, "After his appointment we (ISOC-NY) did pull Paul up on the carpet to explain himself - you can find the salient MPAA passage here

Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?

(Image: Stop SOPA!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 51295441@N07's photostream)

On the Vintage Ads LJ group, a widescreen, two-page Mary Blair ad for AT&T and Disneyland's Tomorrowland. It's everything I love about Blair's illustration in an x-wide package. There's a 1600px+ wide version that deserves your scrutiny.

Tuesday Two-Pagers: AT&T/Disney/Mary Blair

The talented illustrator Jason Edmiston has a show at Phone Booth Gallery in Long Beach. One fun thing about his gorgeous "Monsters of Rock" portraits is how easily recognizable the musicians are.

From John W Campbell Award-nominee Mur Lafferty, an open letter to her (delightful) daughter, decrying all the ways in which the deck is stacked against girls and women in our world. It's a pretty much perfect summation of every fear, aspiration, and upset I feel on behalf of my own daughter.

You should know that you are hated.

I’m not sure why they hate you. You didn’t do anything to them. You don your princess crown, take up your sword, and pretend at Pokemon. You read your books and you learn how to draw comics and dragons and you play piano and practice kung fu. You delight in pretty dresses and weaponry. You love me when I nurture you as a mom, train with you as a warrior, and play video games and card games with you.

“You throw like a GIRL!” – obnoxious drunk asshole behind us at a Durham Bulls game (Apparently he threw 75mph)

There is nothing worse than being a girl. I’m not saying this as a former girl- I quite liked being a girl. I’m saying this from the POV of the entire rest of the world. There was a lovely feminist TED talk – A Call To Men – where a man discussed his conversation with a twelve year old boy, and the boy said he would rather die than be called a girl. And the man thought, Good Lord, how do these boys view girls, if being compared to them is the worst thing in the world?

Dear daughter…

Torrenfreak covers The Pirate Bay's new "Promo Bay" service, which has been flooded by 5,000+ submissions from artists who want to have their work promoted on The Pirate Bay -- mostly musicians, but also writers like Paolo Coelho.

“Thus far we’ve done 14 regular campaigns in 3 countries each and 8 worldwide promotions,” Pirate Bay’s Winston told TorrentFreak, who added that the initial plan has changed a bit due to the massive success.

“When we started the project the plan was to do a few worldwide promotions a year, but the submissions have been too good. So now we’re gonna do the worldwide promos every weekend and some regulars every now and then.”

For the artists the promotion campaigns are paying off as well. George Barnett added 4,000 new Facebook fans during the campaign and his video was viewed 85,000 times in total. And Tomás Vergara, the maker of short film The Chase, got 250,000 views of his video in just three days.

“When I had a reply saying that they liked it and I’d have a worldwide display on The Pirate Bay homepage, I pulled off my hair. I think its been a while since I’ve opened my eyes that wide,” Vergara said looking back at receiving the good news.

“Now The Chase is having massive exposure. I’m so damn happy. This is the kind of things you were not expecting in life, I guess,” he added.

5000+ Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion

The Promo Bay [The Pirate Bay]

(via The Command Line)

This "designer nori" laser-cut seaweed was created by the Japanese ad agency I&SBBDO for a client whose sushi-wrapper business flagged in the post-tsunami economic trough. Jeannie Huang writes,

Each pattern is meant to symbolize good fortune, happiness, and longevity, etc. and the result is a delicate, unexpected reinvention of the classic Japanese food with a modern twist. The patterns are crisp, and when incorporated into the rolls, they create a sharp contrast between the dark seaweed and the white grains of rice within. They’ve entered (and won) a number of ad/design contests for this phenomenal work.

Designer Nori: Delicate Laser Cut Seaweed Patterns

UMINO SEAWEED SHOP | SHOWCASE | I&S BBDO [warning: autoplays music]

(via Make)

On Tor.com, author and reviewer Jo Walton has an insightful look at why so many science fiction readers and writers are discussing David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a book that is already a darling of the Occupy movement:

One of the problems with writing science fiction and fantasy is creating truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF, where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in genuinely different directions. As a British reader coming to SF there were a lot of things I thought were people’s amazing imagination that turned out to be normal American things and cultural defaults. And no matter how much research you do, it’s always easier in the anglosphere to find books and primary sources in English and about our own history and the history of people who have interacted with us. And both history and anthropology tend to be focused on one period, one place, so it’s possible to research a specific society you know you want to know about, but hard to find things that are about the range of options different societies have chosen.

What Debt does is to focus on a question of morality, first by framing the question, and then by examining how a really large number of human societies over a huge geographical and historical range have dealt with this issue, and how they have interacted with other people who have very different ideas about it. It’s a huge issue of the kind that shapes societies and cultures, so in reading it you encounter a whole lot of contrasting cultures. Graeber has some very interesting ideas about it, and lots of fascinating details, and lots of thought provoking connections.

For a more academic discussion of Debt among political scientists and economists, see this Crooked Timber seminar on the book, and the author's reply. I liked Debt, but was also frustrated by the amount of circling back and meandering the author engages in. That said, it was one of my more thought-provoking reads of 2011.

The Best Science Fiction Ideas in any Non-Fiction Ever: David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years

This bookmobile for the sick was wheeled around Los Angeles hospitals in 1928, a service of the LA public library.

Bookmobile

We've talked about arXiv here before. It's a pre-print server for scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, and computer sciences. Basically, what that means is that scientists can post papers to the site without first putting that research through the process of peer review. And that's not a bad thing. ArXiv is a great way for scientists and mathematicians to critique each other's work and do a little bit of vetting before submitting the paper to peer review. That's why the faster-than-light neutrino reports were published on arXiv—the results looked so crazy that the researchers wanted their colleagues to figure out what had gone wrong before a prestigious journal got involved. It's a way of collaborating.

The other nice thing about arXiv: It's a great home for interesting data that doesn't necessarily have a place in a formal, peer-reviewed journal.

Case in point: "The Proof of Innocence", a paper in which physicist Dmitri Krioukov uses math to explain why the cop who stopped him for running a stop sign was clearly seeing things. Physics Central summarizes the first step in this defense:

When Krioukov drove toward the stop sign the police officer was approximating Krioukov's angular velocity instead of his linear velocity. This happens when we try to estimate the speed of a passing object, and the effect is more pronounced for faster objects.

Trains, for instance, appear to be moving very slowly when they are far away, but they speed past when they finally reach us. Despite these two different observations at different distances, the train maintains a roughly constant velocity throughout its trip.

In Krioukov's case, the police cruiser was situated about 100 feet away from a perpendicular intersection with a stop sign. Consequently, a car approaching the intersection with constant linear velocity will rapidly increase in angular velocity from the police officer's perspective.

Krioukov's basic argument: The officer thought he saw Krioukov speed right through the sign. But he was wrong. Instead, Krioukov stopped at the sign, but stopped very quickly and sped up quickly, both of which happened out of the cop's direct line of sight.

It's worth noting that this argument was good enough to get Krioukov out of a $400 fine.

Read Krioukov's paper.

Read the summary on Physics Central.

Weather predictions are one of those things that we see every day, but don't often think about how they're created. The video explains how the process works in the United States, where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collects and compiles the data that's shared with hundreds to TV channels and weather websites.

Video Link

Via Scientific American

A fantastic preview for this summer's Alien somethingquel, Prometheus, which stars Michael Fassbender. Previously.

Here's a diagram that shows the relative size of a great grey owl's body to its feathers. It's hosted on Wikimedia commons, labelled "Cross sectioned taxidermied Great Grey Owl, Strix nebulosa, showing the extent of the body plumage, Zoological Museum, Copenhagen."

File:Strix nebulosa plumage.jpg (via Beth Pratt)