Swimming bacteria can turn gears

Wow.

Scientists have demonstrated a way to harness the motion of swimming bacteria to turn tiny gears. This bacteria-driven mechanism could someday power micro-machines that combine living organisms and man-made materials.

To build their rudimentary device, the research team first fashioned silicon gears measuring a mere 0.01 inches (380 micrometers) across and 0.002 inches (50 micrometers) thick. With their slanted teeth, the gears look rather like tiny ninja stars.

The microgears were then placed into a nutrient broth swarming with the microbe Bacillus subtilis, the workhorses in this setup. When supplied with nutrients and oxygen the bacteria scoot about randomly.

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Obama prefers Senate's less harsh language on abortion

Well that's good news. Still, both bills go too far, and I don't think the choice groups are happy with either. Read More......

Nobel economists Krugman and Stiglitz see reasonably high chance economy will contract in 2010

Jake Tapper at ABC reports that Krugman says there's a "reasonably high chance," though less than 50-50 odds, that the economy will contract again in 2010. Stiglitz, as I recall, was a bit more concerned.

Krugman says a good portion of our current recovery is due to the stimulus package, which will fade out in the second half of 2010. Krugman says he's "really worried" about the second half of 2010. Stiglitz says we need another stimulus package. Just as a reminder, the experts were saying that the first stimulus needed to be on the order of $1.5 to $2 trillion. Instead it was a bit over $700bn, and 40% of that went to tax cuts that don't carry as much stimulus bang for the buck. The problem now is that Democrats haven't done a very good job defending the first stimulus since its passage, so I think it's politically very difficult to pass a second one. Or at the very least it's going to take the kind of concerted campaign that the Obama people don't like, or don't know how, to do. So the Dems, and all of us really, are a tad screwed if Krugman and Stiglitz are right. Read More......

New incident today on same plane from Amsterdam to Detroit

ABC's Jake Tapper tweets:

new incident today. TSA says: "Northwest Airlines alerted TSA to a disruptive passenger on board flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit..."

(2)"The flight landed safely at Detroit International Airport at approximately 12:35pm est without incident..."

(3) "The aircraft has been moved to a remote location for additional screening. ...passenger is now in custody."

According to a tweet by Breaking News:

The man in custody locked himself in the restroom prior to the flight's landing and became belligerent when asked to come out - NBC

Gotta go gotta go gotta go right now... Sorry.

In other news, I'd read yesterday, and read again today, that the father of yesterday's terrorist warned the US that the son was trouble. But somehow he was still permitted on the plane:

But the education he sought was of a different sort: Nigerian officials say his interest in extremist Islam prompted his father to warn U.S. authorities. As Abdulmutallab was being escorted in handcuffs off the Detroit-bound airliner he attempted to blow up on Christmas Day, he told U.S. officials that he had sought extremist education at an Islamist hotbed in Yemen.

The Post also reports:

Some, but not all, information from TIDE is transferred to the FBI-maintained Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB), from which consular, border and airline watch lists are drawn. The Transportation Security Administration has a "no-fly" list of about 4,000 people who are prohibited from boarding any domestic or U.S.-bound aircraft. A separate list of about 14,000 "selectees" require additional scrutiny but are not banned from flying.

Abdulmutallab's name never made it past the TIDE database. "A TIDE record on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was created in November 2009," one administration official said, but "there was insufficient information available on the subject at that time to include him in the TSDB or its 'no fly' or 'selectee' lists."

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Adam Nagourney of NYT falls for WH spin on HCR

Adam Nagourney, one of the top political reporters at the NYT, is regurgitating White House talking points in an effort to explain what makes our president tick, and more generally, why the left is upset with him.

It is not just that the left wing of the party thinks that its centrists hold too much sway and are too quick to cave when faced with pressure from the right. It is also that this White House, stocked as it is with insiders, people whose view of politics is shaped by the compromises inherent in legislating, is confronting a liberal base made up largely of outsiders to the lawmaking process who are asking why they should accept politics as usual.

As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him.

As I've written repeatedly, that is not why people are upset with the president. It's not that he likes to work within the system, and it's certainly not about "staging a symbolic fight."

The problem many on the left have with President Obama is that he refuses to fight, from the beginning, for things he has promised. The White House would like you to believe that President Obama never promised to fight for a public option, never promised to be a "fierce advocate" for gays and lesbians, never promised to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But he did. So when he caves on those promises, it upsets people who voted for him in exchange for those promises.

The White House argues next that it's just not possible to win on those promises, so the left is naive about politics and unrealistic to expect the President to keep his promises. Which is a rather odd argument: "You're an idiot because you believed me."

I'm not going to speak for the rest of the party, but Joe Sudbay and I have been in politics for two decades. We've both run successful issue campaigns, and we know how it works. If anything, we are the definition of Washington insiders. And both of us find President Obama's approach to governance to be rather weak.

Then we get the "being president is hard work" excuse from the White House (which rather uncomfortably rings of George Bush):

Mr. Obama may find it frustrating that it is impossible under Senate rules to get something through without 60 votes, but those are the rules and he is going to play by them. He was not about to go to Connecticut and to whip up the public against Mr. Lieberman, or to press for him to be relieved of his leadership positions in the Senate, as Mr. Green suggested he do.

“The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

A few points:

1. Don't make promises that you can't keep. If health care, gay rights, climate change, getting us out of wars, and respecting civil liberties has bedeviled the country for generations, then don't promise to fix them in exchange for our votes. It's as simple as that.

2. Don't tell us about how hard your job is. You weren't handed the presidency by your sick aunt who couldn't run the family business in her advanced age. You wanted this job. Please don't tell us that it's too difficult for you to handle effectively.

3.It's not just health care. President Obama has done this repeatedly on promise after promise. He doesn't reach some pragmatic resolution at the end of the negotiation in recognition of the fact that something is better than nothing. He far too often begins a negotiation by caving to his opponent on some key point, seemingly in the hope that this act of kindness will convince his opponents to reciprocate. And that is simply not how negotiations, politics, or life works.

The White House is in an all out effort to brand health care reform as a 100% victory for the president. For some reason, they're spooked by the revolt on the left against the way they have handled this battle, and the result they've reached. So rather than reach out to the left and try to figure out how to move ahead from here, the White House is simply denying that there's a problem, reneging on its promises, and accusing the base of its own party as being naive and out of touch.

What's naive is thinking that the best way to win a negotiation is to make a major concession as your opening move. (And to think that you can win by refusing to advocate for your cause. And yes, the President made a few speeches GENERALLY about health care reform, but the White House did not run a campaign in favor of health care reform. Such a campaign is mandatory if you want to get your own party on your side, and to convince at least a few Republicans to cross over.) Then again, it's only naive to cave at the beginning if you care about the outcome of the negotiation. If you only care about being able to say that the negotiation is over and an agreement was reached, regardless of what the agreement actually is, then yes, caving as an opening move is quite effective. But it's an atrocious way to run, and protect, a country. (It's also a rather idiotic way to buy a house.) Read More......

Airlines to use V formation?

It's an interesting idea and of course, nature is again showing the way. The Guardian:

Such experiments suggest that 25 large birds – such as pelicans or geese – flying in a V-shaped formation can travel 70% further than solo birds. Many of the great migratory journeys, some covering thousands of miles, made by birds would be impossible without the energy-saving effects of group flight, scientists say.

But aviation engineers have now taken these discoveries to their logical conclusion and have proposed that aircraft fly in V-shaped groups so they can benefit from similar energy-saving effects. This idea is the brainchild of researchers led by Professor Ilan Kroo, of Stanford University, California, who say airlines could make substantial cuts in the amount of aviation fuel they use.

In one calculation, the team envisaged three passenger jets leaving Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco airports en route to the east coast of the US. In the hypothetical exercise, the planes rendezvoused over Utah, then continued their journeys travelling in a V, with planes taking turns to lead the formation. The group found that the aircraft used 15% less fuel and produced less carbon dioxide when flying in formation compared with solo performances.

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Sunday morning open thread

In the spirit of giving Joe the weekend off, I'm taking over the Sunday morning thread as well. I'm still in Chicago, and spent the day yesterday downtown with my sister and her family, as is their annual day-after-Christmas tradition. They start the day off insanely early - we got moving a little before 8am - and we head first to a great diner called Lou Mitchell's.



After that we head to Michigan Avenue to do some shopping, or at least window shopping (seemed to me that the "sales" weren't exactly that enticing this year). And the crowds weren't there either, not until mid-afternoon at least. But it was a snowy day in Chicago, with big fat snowflakes and not too much wind, upper 20s - was just gorgeous. And it being Chicago, an expected 4-6 inches of snow didn't slow anybody down.

Next up was the Lincoln Park Zoo. Every Christmas they cover all the trees in the lights and open the zoo up at night. It's amazing (see photo below). The entire zoo is lights and music. And you can go check out the animals too. I ended up getting a lot of cool pictures of the fish, and some of the gorillas entertained us for a while as well. Overall it was a great day. I really love and miss Chicago.





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Kula Shaker Govinda

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