mental_floss Blog » Erik Vance

The Last of the (New) New Einsteins

Erik Vance — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:30:19 +0000

For the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins” – visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. All week, Mr. Vance has been anointing additional New Einsteins here on mentalfloss.com. The final (new) New Einstein? A dog genius.

Who He/She Is: An unnamed doberman-border collie mix from Southern England

What He/She Did: No one knows the name of the first dog to sniff out a cancerous tumor. Since it was about 90 dog years ago, the clever pup has probably gone to the great fire hydrant in the sky by now. But the story was documented by Hywel Williams and Andres Pembroke in the British journal, Lancet, in 1989. Apparently the unnamed canine became obsessed with a mole on the leg of its owner – sniffing at it constantly, even when it was covered by clothes. Eventually, the dog got tired of having its prognosis ignored and simply decided to remove the mole with an ad hoc surgery involving its teeth.

When the owner finally went to Williams and Pembroke, she found out that the mole was cancerous and that the dog had probably saved her life.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Him/Her Immediately: First of all, after succeeding where billions of dollars in federal funding have come up short, this creature likely went home and licked its own privates. That’s got to be impressive in anyone’s book.

Second of all, the discovery led to a whole new way to think about cancer detection. Scientists knew that tumors release all manner of exotic trace chemicals like alkanes and that they could theoretically be detected, say, on your breath if you looked carefully. But it never occurred to anyone that they might stink.

The notion that cancer has an odor has led scientists to start examining the some 3,000 chemicals that leave the body every day. Recently, scientists have confirmed that certain skin cancers can be detected in the air just above the tumor using devices called gas chromatography mass spectrometers. The analysis takes a day or two.

But when it comes analytic chemistry, the best in modern technology can just barely compete with the human nose, which can detect some of the more noxious chemicals in the parts per quadrillion (think a pinhead drop of liquid in a container the size of the Astrodome). Now consider that dogs can smell chemicals with at least 1,000 times that sensitivity.

Which brings us back to the Doberman mix. Today, dogs have detected nascent lung cancer and breast cancer with 88-99 percent sensitivity – theoretically more accurate than pap tests and mammograms. This has led to a number of clinics training cancer dogs to look for lung and bladder cancer. When you think about it, it’s not all that different from the way we used to test for pregnancy by injecting frogs with women’s urine.

So next time you go for a check up, don’t be surprised if your clinician greets you by humping your leg.

Previous (New) New Einsteins: Marin Soljačić , Roland Fryer, Nathalie Cabrol, David Shaw

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The (New) New Einsteins: David Shaw

Erik Vance — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:00:21 +0000

For the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins” – visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. This week on mentalfloss.com, Mr. Vance will be anointing five additional New Einsteins, one per day. Today, it’s David Shaw’s turn.

Who He Is: David Shaw Chief Scientist at D. E. Shaw Research, LLC. Founder of D. E. Shaw & Co. Professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at Columbia University.

What He Did: If you were to write David Shaw’s life in 18 words, it would be “Computer nerd becomes professor, professor becomes hedge fund trader, hedge fund trader becomes billionaire, billionaire becomes computer nerd.” In the 1990s, Shaw was one of the most successful “quants” (quantitative analyst) in the country. Quants use statistical tools and high-level calculus to compile huge numbers of small investment opportunities. Think of it like scraping the bowl for that spoonful of cookie batter.

Unlike other investors, quants usually come from backgrounds in physics or engineering. Shaw was a computer scientist at Columbia when he decided to start D. E. Shaw & Co (and become a billionaire). A few years ago, he returned to research and academia, modeling proteins.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Him Immediately: Ignore for a moment his $2.5 billion, which puts him at number 165 on the Forbes list of the 400 richest people. His whole life, Shaw has been that guy you should have listened to way back when. He was into parallel computing (running numerous algorithms simultaneously to increase power) as a grad student before supercomputers were cool. He joined a hedge fund before everyone was talking about them. And by the time quantitative analysis got crowded and passé, he had already made his fortune.

But apparently gaming the financial system and making oodles of cash wasn’t interesting enough for him. These days, he works on protein folding. Proteins are the building blocks of life (don’t let anyone tell you it’s DNA, that’s just the blueprint). They control almost everything the cell does and so understanding them means understanding what the body is doing. Each one’s job is defined by the chemicals that make up their chain-like structure as well as the shape that structure takes. That means two identically composed proteins with different shapes may do totally different things. Oh, and by the way, some of these protein molecules are tens of thousands of atoms long. So between the contents and the shape, proteins come in an almost infinite variety.

Of course, massive data and infinite numbers of combinations are what Shaw does best. After leaving the business world he created Desmond, arguably the fastest software in the world at the time. Take the protein dehydrofolate reductase – Desmond could model its 23,558 atoms in just a thousandth of a second, a full 10 times faster than NAMD, the former fastest program in the world. Now he is working on a program called Anton, that will model protein behavior and essentially allow scientists to do their experiments on the screen.

Previous (New) New Einsteins: Marin Soljačić , Roland Fryer, Nathalie Cabrol

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The (New) New Einsteins: Nathalie Cabrol

Erik Vance — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:30:06 +0000

In the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins”—visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. This week, Mr. Vance will be anointing five additional New Einsteins here on mentalfloss.com, one per day. Today, it’s Nathalie Cabrol’s turn.

Who She Is: Nathalie Cabrol, astrobiologist and principal investigator with the SETI Institute

What She Did: Cabrol’s work covers a number of different aspects of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (often called SETI). First, she looks for life in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. The idea is that understanding plants and animals in an environment that might go decades without rain (until 1971, some parts might have gone rainless since 1570) tells us something about what might survive on Mars. The Atacama Desert is so harsh that if the same Viking landers that couldn’t find life on Mars in the mid-1970s were to land there, they would say the same thing about Earth.

A few years ago, she climbed the nearby volcano, Licancabur. At the 20,000-foot summit, she descended into the cauldron and dove into the crater lake. It was the unofficial record for the highest female dive. Yet even there, where temperatures get down to -30 degrees, she found tiny living organisms.

Recently she has been focused on helping the Mars rovers. She has helped run several experiments with one version (named Zo), where researchers follow it along and see if it can detect life in the desert.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Her Immediately: Cabrol is an alien hunter who climbs desert mountains and SCUBA dives the world’s highest lakes for a living. And she plays with robots. She’s like a Michael Crichton book that met a Jerry Bruckheimer film and decided to guest star on an episode of The X-Files.

More than that, her work is actually a crucial link between theory and practice of SETI. For the brief time that Mars had a working atmosphere, water on its surface, and was moderately hospitable to life, it probably looked a lot like the Atacama Desert – heavy UV radiation, not much oxygen, kind of cold. Scientists who believe Mars has life must assume that something managed to form, evolve, and make the jump from water to land before the water dried up.

Science increasingly tells us this may be possible. On our own planet life exists at the bottom of the ocean, in boiling sulfur pits, and deep in the Earth’s crust. And in the Atacama. It’s not hard to imagine some of the microbes that she found at the top of Licancabur surviving under the surface of Mars – with a few adaptations. But we are going to have to find them, and that may harder than just digging a few scoops of slushy dirt looking for water. We will need to find the right place to land and know just what to look for. By doing ecological maps of Mars-on-Earth, Cabrol gives us a rough blueprint for what to look for when we see the real thing.

Previous (New) New Einsteins: Marin Soljačić , Roland Fryer

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The (New) New Einsteins: Roland Fryer

Erik Vance — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:30:44 +0000

In the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins”—visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. This week, Mr. Vance will be anointing five additional New Einsteins here on mentalfloss.com, one per day. Today, it’s Roland Fryer’s turn.

Who He Is: Roland Fryer, professor of economics at Harvard

What He Did: Fryer is one of a small group of academics playing around with something called conditional cash transfer, which tries to tie welfare funds to specific performance. Take education. Fryer initiated an experiment program that paid third graders’ families $10 per good test score, and $20 for seventh graders. Critics say he is bribing academic performance (not a new concept to many parents). But supporters say he is creating incentives. And those supporters are on both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives like that he is using the free market to promote achievement and liberals like that he is bringing money to the schools.

Today, Fryer is one of the key architects of Opportunity NYC, which pays parents for things like maintaining health insurance, keeping a job, and taking their kid to the dentist – in addition to good test scores and grades. He is also associate director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard (named after his personal hero) and the principle investigator for the American Inequity Lab.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Him Immediately: Where do you start? Fryer’s not some idealistic kid from the suburbs. As a child he didn’t know his mother, his cousins sold crack, and at 13 he regularly carried a handgun. At 15 he had to bail his father (who would eventually get convicted of sexual assault) out of jail. In spite of this, he managed to go to the University of Texas on a sports scholarship and graduate magna cum laude after just two and a half years (while holding down a job to pay his dad’s bail bondsman). Then he got a PhD four years later and by 27 he was a Harvard professor.

In his short academic career, Fryer has tackled some of society’s most baffling questions. He has written on the effect of crack cocaine on urban communities, the stigmas around African American names and colleges in the workplace, and “acting white.” He is also one of the few researchers who has looked at whether genetics might play a role in black underperformance in school. It’s a dicey subject for anyone to broach (Fryer himself is African American), but it’s one that he says needs to be considered along with all the other factors that might contribute to economic disparities. This is characteristic of Fryer’s unapologetic style of data-focused economics. He told the New York Times that his goal is to figure out “where blacks went wrong” in an analytical way, looking for mechanisms for why things like test scores, pay rates, and life expectancy are so low in African American communities, in order to pull people away from the kind of emotional, anecdotal evidence that he feels frames the political debate on things like affirmative action.

Previous (New) New Einsteins: Marin Soljačić

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The (New) New Einsteins: Marin Soljačić

Erik Vance — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:30:26 +0000

In the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins”—visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. This week, Mr. Vance will be anointing five additional New Einsteins here on mentalfloss.com, one per day. Let’s begin.

Who He Is: Marin Soljačić, assistant professor of physics at MIT

What He Did: Soljačić invented “WiTricity,” the first steps toward wireless electricity. That is, moving electricity without cables. It all started when Soljačić awoke in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time to his chirping cell phone, reminding him to plug it in. It occurred to him that in this day and age, cell phones should be able to plug themselves in and save him the hassle.

There are two primary ways to transmit energy without wires. The first, electromagnetic radiation, is given off by charged particles. It’s hugely wasteful when diffuse and potentially dangerous when concentrated (like in a laser). The second is electromagnetic resonance. This is a magnetic version of what happens when an opera singer blasts the right note and shatters a glass partially filled with water (similarly called acoustic resonance). The idea is if you can get a coil to magnetically resonate in the right way, another specially formatted coil across the room will pick that up, with no interference from whatever is in between. Using this technique in 2007, they were able to power a 60-watt light bulb from 7 feet away.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Him Immediately: The short answer is, because Nikola Tesla is dead. Tesla was the guy who came up with AC power and was constantly bickering with Thomas Edison a century ago. He was the first to propose the idea that electricity could be transmitted without the use of wires. In fact, he even conducted several well-publicized experiments where he supposedly transmitted 100 million volts of power 26 miles using the resonance of the Earth. Sadly, he was less proficient as a manager/businessman and his secrets for wireless energy were either discredited or died with him.

So idolize Soljačić instead. If it works, wireless energy transfer would change everything. Imagine walking into your house after a hard day, watching a little wireless TV, turning off your wireless lights, and waking up the next day with you phone, laptop, and iPod fully charged. That’s the first generation of wireless power. Now imagine using your laptop in a conference center or hotel without a battery. Then imagine powering the whole world without a single wire.

Although his work has just produced the first step toward the first step, the idea has quickly been broadly picked up and investigated by industry, using a swath of different platforms. Of course, with any wireless power technology comes health concerns. But most technology watchers agree that at some point, in some form, your Roomba will no longer need batteries.

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