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Tuesday, December 12, 2017
They are blocking Tesla and Electric cars in general in order to continue selling gas burning cars to poor fools who accept their zero percent financing scams and are generally clueless about global warming.
J.R.
As part of its current legal battle over the right to sell its electric cars directly to customers in the state of Michigan, Tesla is trying to subpoena communications between automakers, auto dealers, and legislators over the law that banned direct sales from automakers.
They have been trying to get the communications from three specific auto dealers and today, a judge denied an appeal from those dealerships, which should force them to turn over their communications to Tesla’s legal team.
We might get to see some secrets…
A change to the law in 2014 prohibits direct sales from automakers, which is blocking Tesla from obtaining a dealership license and selling cars in the state.
Last year, Tesla filed a lawsuit against the state after claiming that the ban on direct sales violates commerce laws and that it was pushed by car dealers and GM in an attempt to block the electric automaker at the last hour.
Already a year in, the legal battle is expected to take a while and right now it revolves mostly around what information Tesla gets to use to prove its point.
One of the lawmakers, Sen. Joe Hune, R-Gregory, is the senator who introduced the last-minute amendment that created the ban in 2014 and his wife, Marcia Hune, is a lobbyist for car dealerships.
The other, Rep. Jason Sheppard, R-Lambertville, is being subpoenaed because Tesla claimed that he confirmed to one of their representatives that the reason behind the ban is that “Michigan auto dealers and manufacturers don’t want Tesla in Michigan”.
The two lawmakers fought against the disclosure of their communications – claiming that there would be a backlash, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Ellen Carmody denied their bids in August. The communications haven’t been released to the public and are for lawyers’ eyes only for now.
Now Tesla also wanted the communications from Ann Arbor Automotive, Serra Automotive and Shaheen Chevrolet with the state’s dealers association (MADA) and legislators.
The dealers appealed to the request claiming that it would chill them from interacting with lawmakers and regulators in the future.
Yesterday, the court rejected the appeal in an order obtained by Electrek and embedded below. A case of the disclosure of a Ku Klux Klan membership list is cited as an example on several occasions in the court’s order.
More interestingly, the document continued by stating that dealers can’t claim a bystander status in Tesla’s lawsuit against the state – going as far as stating that they were the ones who drafted the law:
“But particularly unique to this case is the evidence that despite their status as nonparties, the Dealers’ are not merely ‘bystanders’ in this case, given evidence that the automotive dealers themselves drafted the anti-Tesla law in response to “the Tesla situation”. Accordingly, the communications sought in discovery are directly and highly relevant to Tesla’s claims.”
The case is far from over, but it’s getting increasingly interesting.
Brain organoids look like something between a malformed human brain and a character from Monsters, Inc.
But don’t be fooled by their grotesque appearance. Ever since their introduction three years ago, brain organoids—charmingly dubbed “mini-brains” and “brain balls”—have been a darling in neuroscience research.
Made from cells directly taken from human donors, these tiny clumps of cells roughly mimic how a human brain develops. Under a combination of growth chemicals and nurturing care, they expand to a few centimeters in diameter as their neurons extend their branches and hook up basic neural circuits.
Brain balls are as close as scientists can get to recreating brain development in a dish, where the process can be studied and tinkered with. To most neuroscientists, they could be the key to finally cracking what goes awry in autism, schizophrenia, and a myriad of other brain developmental disorders.
But when Dr. Howard Fine, an oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, first heard about these bizarre quasi-brains, development was the last thing on his mind.
What if, he thought, I’m looking at the solution to brain cancer?
Glioblastoma Terror
An oncologist studying glioblastoma, an especially aggressive type of brain cancer, Fine has treated over 20,000 patients in his 30 years at work.
“Almost all of them are dead,” he said recently to STAT news.
A diagnosis of glioblastoma—like AIDS in the 1980s—is essentially a delayed death sentence. Survival rate is a measly two percent three years after diagnosis. There are no effective drugs on the market. Every person’s brain cancer is its own amalgam of tumor cells. Like a mortal game of whack-a-mole, destroy one type, and the others can still spread and roam free.
Physicians have long thrown everything they’ve got at the aggressive cancer. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. Glioblastomas have little tentacles that cling onto normal brain tissue, and even surgically removing all the visible bits doesn’t work. In one extreme case, a surgeon excised the entire half brain that harbored the tumor—and the patient still died because the malignant cells had already invaded the other half of the brain.
The problem, according to Fine, is that oncologists have been pigeonholed.
Like most medical fields, scientists heavily rely on mouse models when studying glioblastoma.
How it usually works: a physician takes a sample of a patient’s brain tumor, expands the cells in a dish and transplants those resulting cells into a mouse. There, the hope is that the tumor cells will spring back into action, taking over the rodent’s brain as they had in the patient.
Unfortunately, this standard approach doesn’t really work. One of the reasons glioblastomas are so insidious is that they contain tumor stem cells, which are notoriously hard to target with standard chemo—like a spark, they readily ignite the entire cancerous flame if even one escapes therapy.
As it happens, tumor stem cells are also tough to grow in the lab. So when scientists carefully prepare the cells to transplant into mice, they inadvertently miss one of the most crucial populations. The result is that glioblastomas are mysteriously tame after transplantation: they’re not nearly as aggressive as their original source.
In other words, scientists don’t really have a good way to study glioblastomas. Lacking a suitable model makes testing potential new drugs or other therapies extremely difficult. It’s no wonder that prospective treatments in mice hardly ever translate to successful clinical trials.
It’s oncology’s “dirty little open secret,” says Fine.
“My stance as an old man in this field is, someone has to start doing something different,” he says.
Quasi-Brains With Real Cancer
When Fine came upon the first report of brain organoids in 2013, he immediately perked up.
Could these quasi-human brains replace mice brains? he wondered.
After a few unsuccessful bouts with the brain organoid recipe—the first few batches took a wrong route towards quasi-pancreases and colons—he figured out the ingredients to make it work. In roughly six weeks, his team grew mini-brains roughly the same level of development as a 20-week-old human fetus.
Immediately, the brain organoids proved their worth.
When placed together with glioblastoma stem cells from patients in a dish, the cancer cells readily clamp onto the mini-brains. Within 24 hours, they begin driving their tentacles deeper into the brain-like tissue in a pattern “that looks 100 percent like what happens in the patient’s own brain,” says Fine.
What’s more, the brain-like environment of mini-brains revealed some strange properties of the cancer normally not detected in mice models.
Individual tumor cells seem to extend lengthy tubes that connect each other, much like an elaborate subway system. This network could be why these tumors are so good at resisting chemotherapy and radiation, saysFine.
It’s a strong lead: drugs that dismantle these networks already exist and could be tested in future studies against glioblastomas.
Me-Too Mini-Brains
Although Fine began making mini-brains using healthy cells, in the past few months he has turned his attention towards organoids grown from cancer patients.
Glioblastomas are known for their individualized “signatures”: each one harbors a slightly different soup of cells depending on the mutated DNA and signals from the environment.
Recapitulating the right combination of cells in the right percentages is exceedingly difficult—but because mini-brains mimic the patient’s own brain development, they offer a one-stop solution.
The plan is to “make hundreds of brain organoids for any given patient and use them to screen for drugs that can shrink that patient’s tumor,” hesays.
According to STAT, earlier this year, Fine received approval to test out the strategy in one patient with advanced glioblastoma. His team created brain balls from her cells, added her tumor cells to give them cancer, then threw drug after drug onto the brain surrogates.
Unfortunately, the patient died before the team found a hit. But Fine still believes in his approach.
Glioblastoma patients are often too sick to withstand a drug screen. Even if, by some slight chance, a drug did magically work for a specific patient’s tumor, often there isn’t enough time for doctors to find that “unicorn” drug.
With hundreds of brain organoids simultaneously taking the brunt, that search may end a lot faster with a much happier outcome.
Last month, Fine received the prestigious National Institute of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award for his foray into cancerous mini-brains. With support in hand, Fine plans to further enhance the realism of their organoids by adding two bonus components: blood vessels, which support the health and growth of both normal brain cells and tumor cells, and immune cells that are an integral part of the brain’s natural defense system.
It’s high-risk, high-reward research; a “bold departure” from traditional ways; a paradigm shift in a long-stymied field.
“[This work] may lead to consequential scientific advances for our patients: new and more effective treatments and therapies,” says Fine. “I am deeply grateful for this opportunity.”
It looks like the cyber attacks have subsided for a while! Somebody or some organization knocked me off the WWW for two weeks. It usually happens around this time of year when merchants drive customers into their stores using every trick imaginable! These last few years, cyber warfare attacks have increased beyond the limits of civility!
I did cave in temporarily and bought a refurbished computer which used Windows 10 as it's operating system but that was a mistake! The first second I opened the machine it literally began talking and asking questions.Then it produced dark images on my old monitor screen and was so complicated I decided to bring it back to the store for a refund. When I returned home I loaded Ubuntu on my old XP and it has the effect of scaring off big computer pushers. The possibility of having individuals gain unrestricted freedom to roam the web outside the influence of Microsoft or Apple, could be creating panic within those organizations!
I wish you happy holidays gentle friends and may the future be kind to all of you!
Joseph Raglione
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In
1986, a power surge during a safety test of the reactor at Chernobyl
caused a catastrophic explosion. Thirty-one people were directly killed
by the explosion and the initial dose of radiation, and several more may
have died due to the lasting effects of the fallout. Alongside the
Fukushima event in 2011, it is one of only two nuclear power disasters
to be rated as a maximum severity event, ominously referred to as level
7. All over the world, support for nuclear power plummeted.
But in Germany, Gerhard Knies—a particle physicist—was inspired to
ask a simple question. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas:
their energy flowed from the sun. It took a tortuous path through plants
and animals that were buried for thousands of years to get to us. The
radioactive uranium that fueled nuclear power plants was also forged as a
trace byproduct of nuclear fusion in stars. Would it not be easier,
cheaper, and cleaner to get our energy directly from the sun?
Knies did a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation and worked out that, in just six hours,
the world’s deserts receive more solar energy than the entire human
race consumes in a year. The energy needs of the world could be met by
covering just 1.2 percent
of the Sahara desert in solar panels. Knies likely wasn’t even thinking
about carbon emissions—just the fact that fossil fuels would one day
run out—but climate change provides an even starker motivation for
pursuing the project. And of course, it just seems so simple: Knies
himself was frustrated about it, questioning, “Are we, as a species,
really so stupid as to not make a better use of this resource?”
Of course, it is difficult to persuade people to invest in such a
grand and ambitious scheme—and one that requires an awful lot of
overhead investment before realizing any profit—but the Desertec
initiative was a real attempt to demonstrate the concept could work.
The plan was to put solar panels in the Sahara that would power a
great deal of the Middle East and North African (MENA) energy needs,
while also allowing for a valuable (€60 billion) energy export industry
that would power 15 percent of Europe’s electricity requirements.
Meanwhile, the Europeans—by importing the plentiful desert power—would
save €30/MWh on their electricity bills. Everyone would win—in the long
run.
The Desertec project began in earnest in 2009, and quickly had a number of industry partners lined up, including EON, Deutsche Bank, and Siemens.
Their investment would be necessary, as the project was estimated to
cost €400 billion—although it had a prayer of paying for itself after
some years of operation. But the project stalled, and by 2014 the
seventeen initial industry partners who had signed up had dwindled to
just three.
So what went wrong with Desertec? A combination of two different sets
of factors. The first are the issues that have plagued the transition
to renewable energy for decades now. The second are the unique
geopolitical and logistical challenges of solar panels in the Sahara
more specifically. Both are worth looking into.
Going the Distance, Bridging the Gaps
First, the general issues with renewable energy. The Desertec plan
called for a centralized power station that would deliver electricity
across three continents and transporting that electricity across such
long distances can be a problem.
The plan was to use high-voltage DC power lines—rather than the AC
power lines we’re familiar with. Across longer distances, the energy
losses can be as little as 3 percent per 1,000 kilometers,
which is much lower than AC power lines. But nothing had ever been
built on that scale before; the longest link is in Brazil, the Rio Madeira line,
and transports 6.3 GW across around 2,400 kilometers. For Desertec to
be a success, 30 GW of power would need to be transported from the
Sahara to Europe—more than 3,000 kilometers. Yet this may seem more
feasible with the news in July 2016 that the Chinese are funding a high-voltage DC power line that will transport 12 GW across 3,000km.
It’s not just about transporting the power. A major issue with
renewables is the intermittency problem—what do you do when the sun
doesn’t shine?
Storage is part of the solution, but as yet, an unsolved part: global
storage is currently dominated by pumped-storage hydroelectricity. This
simple technique accounts for 99 percent of storage worldwide, but with
worldwide storage at 127 GW, it’s still less than 1 percent of all
power used globally. Energy industry researchers talk about a
hypothesized “European super-grid” that allows for the transmission of
power from regions of excess production to regions of excess need. The
same thing happens internally in countries to ensure a constant supply
of electricity, but they have the advantage of depending on fossil fuel
plants where the energy production can be ramped up or down at will.
There are precedents for this kind of system: France and the UK are
connected by a 2 GW power line. High-voltage DC allows power to be sent
in both directions, depending on demand; usually, the British import
French electricity, but not always. The fjords of Norway
allow them to produce 98 percent of their electricity in hydroelectric
plants; the winds of Denmark allow them to produce 50 percent of their
electricity by renewables; and cables across Scandinavia ensure that everyone can obtain power
whether the wind’s blowing or the sun is shining. Studies have
indicated that the Mediterranean, with better interconnectivity and a
source of power like Desertec, could supply 80 percent of its electricity needs by solar alone without worrying about intermittency.
Expect the Unexpected
But as people were looking into the project to center the world’s
power supply in Libya and Algeria, there were more specific
problems—namely, a civil war in Libya, and although the Arab Spring
initially boosted hopes for the plan, the continuing political
instability in the Sahara has spooked some investors. Combine that with
the fact that the project was never intended to be finished until 2050,
and industrial partners would have to be persuaded away from more
near-term opportunities for profit.
Then there is the more delicate political issue of natural resource rights.
Like many bold, futuristic projects, the little matter of governments
can get in the way of something like Desertec. Countries have been made
rich through exports of oil or coal; could sunlight one day fulfill a
similar role? On the surface, this is another bonus to the Desertec
scheme; poorer countries in Africa have something incredibly valuable to
export to the rest of the world, while amply supplying their own energy
needs. In practice, there has been skepticism on the ground that this
isn’t just another imperialist exploitation move. Daniel Ayuk Mbi Egbe
of the African Network for Solar Energy said,
“Europeans make promises, but at the end of the day, they bring their
engineers, they bring their equipment, and they go. It’s a new form of
resource exploitation, just like in the past.”
There is another, slightly more hopeful reason that Desertec has stalled.
It backed CSP—concentrated solar power—where parabolic mirrors
concentrate sunlight, which boils steam to drive wind turbines. This was
the technology that brought Siemens on board. The only problem is that,
as Desertec was being developed, the price of solar panels (solar
photovoltaics) fell off a cliff. From 2009 to 2014, the levelized cost
of electricity (taking into account construction, maintenance, fuel,
etc.) of solar photovoltaics fell by 78 percent, and it’s still going down. In just five years, photovoltaics became five times cheaper. This was one of the reasons Siemens cited for abandoning the project.
Desertec continues in a smaller form; they’re still building power
plants in Morocco to supply the local energy needs of that country.
Perhaps a ground-up approach, where MENA countries increase their own
solar production in the desert before becoming net exporters, will
provide the solution. This project is not the first wildly ambitious
scheme to provide for the world’s energy needs that has stalled;
historians remember Atlantropa, a scheme to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and use it for hydroelectric power that had some interest in the 1920s.
Yet the prospect remains tantalizing. Surely, when only a tiny
fraction of the Earth’s surface need be devoted to energy production to
provide us with more power than we could ever dream of consuming, we
won’t wreck the planet by getting that energy through dirty and
dangerous means. To starry-eyed idealists, it must seem equivalent to
being on a raft in a lake full of drinking water—and choosing instead to
swig from a bottle of seawater in your backpack. Solar power in the
world’s deserts is one of the few feasible, renewable ways of providing
energy on the scale we currently demand as humans. Someday, we will make
better use of the abundant energy from the sun. We’ll have to.
Image Credit: Harvepino / Shutterstock.com
