by Adrian Berry
A computer chip which enables astronomers to see clusters of galaxies 400 billion times fainter than the Moon will soon be widely used in hospitals to scan for breast tumours.
This is but one of many examples of how devices invented for astronomical observatories and spacecraft are revolutionizing life on Earth. They are making aircraft safer and electricity cheaper. In medical research alone, they have also created more progress in the past thirty years than in the previous two millennia.
These are not cases where space vehicles are deliberately built and flown to improve technology down on the ground, like the space station Alpha whose main purpose will be experiments in medical protein crystallography (see the previous chapter), but where spin-offs are accidental.
The computer chip is the ‘charged couple device’ or CCD that converts light to digital images and is hundreds of times more sensitive to light than photographic film. When attached to a telescope, it can perform such feats as seeing the Moon through thick cloud because it is highly sensitive to the infra-red end of the spectrum. Red light penetrates much more than white light, but not to the human eye. The CCD can thus see objects invisible to ordinary telescopes.
Machines containing CCDs of a kind originally built to scan the night sky for stars, galaxies and quasars are about to be put in service scanning human breasts. Trials will soon begin at Manchester and Edinburgh universities.
As , an astronomer at the Royal Observatory at , recently put it: ‘The technique of scanning the night sky for faint objects and scanning the human breast for deposits of calcium, the precursors of tumours, are virtually the same. All you are doing is looking for white objects against a black background. In scanning for tumours you are looking for dark objects against a white background.’
One of the most uncomfortable medical tests a woman can undergo is a breast biopsy, in which a scalpel is used to extract flesh for cancer tests. Using a CCD chip made to give the space telescope sharper images of distant galaxies, a needle replaces the scalpel. It extracts a tiny sample from the suspect area which the chip examines from two angles. ‘The patient can go dancing the same night instead of being exhausted from surgery,’ said , of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in .
CCDs will soon turn up in dentists’ surgeries, replacing the X-ray camera and accompanying technician along with increasingly onerous regulations. No longer will the patient have to fear over-exposure to radiation.
Russian cosmonauts landing from the Mir space station on the steppes of Kazakhstan must stagger about in a ‘penguin suit’ with elastic cords to exercise the muscles to alleviate the crippling effects of weight after living in zero gravity. Now, according to Aerospace Daily, under an agreement between the US and Russia, similar penguin suits are being designed for children with walking disorders.
Reverse thrusters slow down the Boeing 777, the world’s most advanced airliner, by means of an ultra super-lightweight device in its engines. This is made from graphite epoxy, the same material that was used for the containers that carried British Aerospace’s solar power panels up to the telescope to give it electricity during the repair mission by the astronauts in 1993.
The same material is being used to make new kinds of antennae in broadcasting satellites that could aim television broadcasts at widely separated cities on Earth, eliminating much of the need for cable.
And sensors made for ’s cameras are being designed to test the insulation on high-voltage power lines. Electrical leakage costs billions of pounds every year.
But why, some people will ask, could not these marvellous devices have been designed directly for use on this planet without first employing them in space? The answer lies in human nature. Without the compulsive demands of space technology, we might never have got round to building them.
A Car the Size of a Rice Grain
Scene is a battle field of the future. The troops await combat. Suddenly the ‘enemy’ appears from over the horizon in the form of a thin, rapidly advancing cloud. It consists of omnivorous locusts which with equal enthusiasm eat crops, gun metal, rubber, clothing and even human flesh.
Yet these locusts are not living creatures. They are self-replicating engines, incredibly tiny but vastly sophisticated. Such devices are seen as one of the many future applications of the growing science of ‘nanotechnology’ -building extremely small machines. Based on the Greek word ‘nano’, meaning dwarf, the word is a measurement that has come to mean a thousandth of a millionth a metre and promises to transform the world in the next century even more profoundly than computers, aircraft and satellites have transformed ours.
In a recent real-life scene, scientists eagerly watched the screen of a super-computer at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in Tokyo. It slowly filled up with images of coloured, spherical objects in three dimensions.
They looked like a row of Easter eggs. In reality they were atoms of the metallic element molybdenum that is used for hardening and strengthening steel. ‘For the first time we can watch atomic events in the real world, and dream of using them to build tiny machines,’ said one of the watchers, .
It has taken 2,400 years, since first proposed the existence of atoms, for us to see them.
The first step in this direction was the electron microscope, which obtained its resolution by shining a beam of electrons, rather than one of light, on an object. The latest such device is far more powerful. Known as the ‘scanning probe microscope’, it physically senses a surface rather than magnifying it. With this, scientists can create three-dimensional images of its atomic structure. They can even pick up its individual atoms and move them.
To demonstrate the power of nanotechnology, Japanese scientists recently built the world’s smallest car. It was the size of a grain of rice and weighed about a thousandth of an ounce. It was less than two thirds of a centimetre long and came complete with wheels, headlights, bumpers and a spare tire.
, a materials scientist at Cambridge University, said: ‘Silicon, of which computer chips are made, is normally opaque. But at the nanometre scale it emits light. With nanometre-sized chips you could therefore build a computer that transmitted its internal signals at the speed of light. Since signals inside a conventional computer travel at only at about a twentieth of this speed, the super-miniaturization that reduced distances inside the machine, together with light-emitting silicon, could produce computers hundreds of millions of times faster than today’s.’
Medicine and dentistry promise the most spectacular advances. , of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre in Germany, said: ‘Imagine a dentist of the future who was removing plaque from your teeth. He would not need to do any scraping with metal tools. Instead, he could squirt in a spray of nano machines that would remove all the plaque within seconds. Other tiny machines could also remove heart-threatening cholesterol from human arteries.’
added: ‘The problem of replacing the body’s organs may soon be solved. We have discovered in the last few months that, on a nanometre scale, one piece of bone can be grafted on to another. We should therefore be able to make artificial bones, and grow them on to existing ones, without fear of rejection.’
When some of these advances will actually happen is of course unclear, but many researchers expect many of them will be in place by 2010. K. Eric Drexler, whose 1986 book, The Engines of Creation, started popular interest in very small machines, believes that nanotechnology will ultimately be able to do anything that is not forbidden by natural laws (such as turning iron into gold, going faster than light, and building perpetual motion machines). Most significantly, it will enable huge numbers of people to have the finest foods and the most luxurious clothing without being accused of depriving anyone else of them.
But the history of military technology suggests that there will inevitably be a dark side. Omnivorous artificial locusts may be the least of what we have to fear from the next century’s dictators.
The Curse of Sleep
For nearly two million years, or abo
ut 100,000 human generations, our ancestors spent their nights in caves to be safe from wild beasts. Human brains became addicted to nocturnal slumber and now, with millions of workers around the world doing night shifts, their sleepiness costs about £250 billion a year in accidents, lost productivity and health care.
of Harvard Medical School, one of the world’s foremost experts on sleep and the author of an article in New Scientist, says: ‘Since the invention of electric light, which made it possible to work at night, we have been a twenty-four-hour society and we are not fitted for it.
‘During those millions of years, our brains developed a tiny cluster of cells called the suprachiasmic nucleus, which induces semi-hibernation for about eight hours in every twenty-four. This legacy can cause workers on night shifts to be drowsy when they ought to be alert. It has resulted in horrendous accidents, all of which occurred in the early hours of the morning.’
In recent years these have included:
• The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which killed hundreds and exposed millions more to abnormal radiation. It was caused at 1.23 a.m., when a foreman tried to shut down the reactor by the wrong method.
• The Challenger space shuttle explosion in the same year, which killed seven astronauts and halted the US space programme for three years. The shuttle was launched in very bad weather by managers who had not slept for 20 hours.
• In 1988, the Clapham Junction rail disaster, which killed 35 people, happened because a traffic signal had been incorrectly wired by a technician who had had only one day off in 13 weeks.
• The blunders at Three Mile Island in 1979, which have crippled America’s nuclear power industry, and cost £700 million to clean up, were made at 4 a.m.
• The Bhopal chemical leak in 1984, the worst industrial catastrophe in history, killing 2,500, occurred in the early hours of the morning.
• The navigational error of the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989, which polluted 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline, costing Exxon £2 billion so far with £50 billion in pending damage claims, was made in the middle of the night and blamed on crew fatigue.
It is estimated that about 50 per cent of motorway deaths in America are caused by drivers falling asleep. ‘Drowsiness at the wheel is just as great a problem as drunken driving, and yet it receives far less attention,’ says Moore-Ede.
‘Many engineers and managers do not understand the problem. They are still striving to build more comfort into the flight decks of planes, train cabs, and control rooms in the mistaken belief that comfort improves workers’ performance. But this can be a mistake. To be fully alert, one has to be a little uncomfortable, especially in the small hours of the night.’
As founder of the consultancy Circadian Technologies, Moore-Ede recommends ‘keep awake’ devices such as playing radios, wafting smells and shining bright lights. ‘In a nocturnal environment, which can consist of hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror, it can be very dangerous to have only silence and dimmed lights.’
Where may sleep-induced tragedy occur next? Moore-Ede sees the Scottish offshore oil industry as a danger point. Amid tense competition, contractors have mounted a campaign to gain exemption from EU legislation to restrict night work. There are round-the-clock shifts, some of them as long as 15 hours, with intense pressure to cut costs, which can mean fewer people working longer.
But the industry seems less than aware of the danger. ‘We do not discuss staff relations with the press,’ an offshore oil company spokesman said.
The Daily Me
It is a Sunday a few years from now. Police Inspector Jones and his wife sit at the breakfast table and read their copies of the Sunday Telegraph - but their two front pages bear no resemblance to each other.
The articles on ’s are all about crime: an arrest that he himself made the day before, a jewel robbery that took place at 5 a.m., and a gun battle that occurred still later. Turning to the Comment pages, he finds an acrimonious debate between two fingerprint experts.
His wife finds not a word about crime in her paper. It is all about gardening. Article after article enthuses about lawns and flowerbeds. Unexpectedly, page three is entirely devoted to Japanese cooking - because the newspaper’s computer has noticed her interest in this subject from her past reading.
Welcome to the Newspaper of the Future, which contains only the kind of news that you want to read; what , head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, calls The Daily Me. It is never delayed by lie-a-bed paper delivery boys or broken-down vans. It can be read 24 hours a day and is updated every few minutes. It is wholly electronic and its contents come to our homes down the telephone lines from editorial offices.
The biggest revolution in media technology since newspapers replaced town-criers in the eighteenth century may be with us within four years. (It has already begun with such round-the-clock news services as Ceefax, CompuServe and the Electronic Telegraph.) It comes with the ever growing power of the silicon chip and the realization by publishers that there is nothing meritorious about spending billions of pounds a year cutting down trees.
The last big newspaper printing plant has probably already been built. ‘Publishers are in the business of selling information, not newspapers,’ says the consultant . ‘People buy the content, not the wrapper. Newspaper owners are at risk if they fail to understand that they are in the information business, just as railways suffered by thinking that they could stick with trains, not realizing that they were in the transport industry.’
, of the UK-based Digithurst electronic consultancy, says: ‘If newspapers didn’t already exist, they wouldn’t stand a chance of getting off the drawing board in a world where communication is mostly electronic and increasingly digital.’
So what domestic machines will consumers need to receive newspapers of the future? Nobody is quite sure, and most Western newspaper groups are spending huge sums trying to find out. ‘One problem is that most schemes now being discussed require consumers to have more money than they actually have,’ says .
Household television sets would do the job admirably but most of them are too bulky to be carried on trains or read in parks. The most likely gadgets are ‘Personal Digital Assistant’, hand-held personal computers. If they doubled up as fax machines, diaries, calendars and notebooks, they could justify themselves to most households at a price of about £300.
Just as newspapers have changed the people who read them, electronic delivery will have vast cultural and psychological effects. ‘Access to any detail of the news exactly when we want it, with the ability to call up any background details, will vastly increase our understanding of other people,’ says Kruger. ‘It may be that, in the future, communities split by bigotry and hatred, like Bosnia and Northern Ireland, will disappear because people will have the means to understand each other better.’
Whatever gadgetry they use, Inspector Jones and his wife will leave the breakfast table formidably expert in their kind of reading - crime and gardening.
When Dense Prose Fogs the Issue
I hate long arguments, verbosely expressed.
Computers and word processors have proved invaluable editing tools for writers. But, until now, they have been unable to perform the highest function of an editor, that of helping us to write better English. A new computer program called PARSE changes all that.*
*lt is only fair to add that, since this was written, PARSE-like programs have been incorporated into the best modern word processors. But few of them are anything like as good as PARSE. And the fact that software designers saw the need for them is extremely interesting.
It will be a useful analytical tool for people who write badly but cannot see anything wrong with their prose. Their subject matter may be interesting and important, their facts accurate, their spelling correct and their sentences grammatical - but still, to their bewilderment and fury, the only effect on readers is to send them to sleep.
Boring prose issues in torrents from academics, civil
servants, public relations firms, lawyers and scientists. Reading such prose can provoke the sensation of being engulfed in ‘fog’. Long sentences have to be read twice because, having reached the end of them, one cannot remember how they began.
The same can apply if there are too many words of three or more syllables. The grammarian , in his 1952 book The Technique of Clear Writing, published an equation to calculate the ‘Fog Index’ - the degree of boring-ness - in a given document. PARSE performs that computation automatically.
The Gunning equation divides the number of words in the document by the number of sentences. It then adds to this the number of words which have three or more syllables, and multiplies by 0.4. This figure is the document’s Fog Index. As a rule of thumb, an Index of between 3 and 11 is good prose, one between 12 and 14 is long-winded, while anything above 15 is tending towards intolerably verbose, verging on legalese.
I tested PARSE on three documents of widely differing literary styles: a passage from ’s , a chapter from Alice in Wonderland and Earnest Hemingway’s classically terse gangster story The Killers.
Within seconds, my computer gave its verdict on : a passage of 450 words contained no less than 96 words that had 3 or more syllables, and the whole passage contained only 23 sentences. With an average of 19.6 words per sentence, this yielded a shatteringly unreadable Fog Index of 16.3.
The first few pages from the Mad Hatter’s tea-party in fared much better. The Fog Index was down to 10.7. ’s short story consisted mostly of passages such as: ‘Shut up,’ said Al. ‘You talk too goddam much.’ It yielded a Fog Index of 5.5, indicating a style that may even be a little too terse and staccato for some readers.
Pixelating Her Majesty
The Queen and the late never danced together. So I had a picture of them created doing just that - showing how new image-processing computer software can not only fake photographs, but make the fraud undetectable.*