The Trouble With Tires

Hey, here's a pretty neat advance on the recycling front. Here in Portland, we're big on recycling. We have weekly pickup of our paper, cans, jugs and bottles, scrap metal, cardboard, and most other things that can possibly know a second life. Everywhere you look there are recycling bins next to the trash can, reminding us that with a little extra effort (very little in Portland) we can send these items to be reformed and reused, instead of sending them off to populate a landfill. This community decision is reflective of both the "green" attitude here in Oregon, and the pioneer spirit which led many of our ancestors here, using and reusing our resources, refurbishing and remaking, rather than tossing things that might still have some use left in them. My next door neighbors just built a really great chicken coop (yes, you can have up to three chickens here in the city) entirely out of reclaimed materials. It's quite charming and functional, with sliding doors to unobtrusively get at the eggs, and an old french door, with the glass removed, for an entry. I think one of the things that satisfied them the most, besides the fact it's a really cute addition to their yard, is that they didn't buy a thing to finish the job. It' a fine accomplishment in recycling ingenuity.

Even here in Oregon, however, where recycling is a priority, there's a persistent blight on the "reuse it" record. Some things simply can't be used again, or made into something else with any facility. Chief example? Tires. Tire recycling is a big problem the world over, and many landfills are piled high with the troublesome trash because of the difficulty in finding ways to revive the treated rubber. According to Tom Simonite at NewScientist.com, tire rubber, which has been vulcanized--treated with a chemical to make it strong and durable--isn't cooperative in the melting department. Since it won't melt, it can't be merged with new rubber to make new tires, and "retreading" has not been a particularly successful venture. It's just been too difficult to get new rubber to bond to the old tires. So, we're left with piles of tire discards. Haven't we all seen the giant tire graveyards where old tires go when they die? Simonite points out these tires have a tendency to release pollutants and catch fire, and with just the US producing 290 million tires worth of landfill-quality rubber in 2003 alone, it would be in our best interest to come up with some other way to address the problem.

This isn't to say that no one is trying any creative solutions to the tire dilemma. There is some creative tire usage going on. David Isaac, at Swansea University in the UK, says that tires are being ground up for flooring, and I saw a report recently about a fashion designer using bicycle tires for high fashion (seriously ugly, and probably smelly high fashion if you ask me), but, even if wearing tire rubber to the opera were to catch on, these alternatives can barely make a dent in the used tire supply. Wouldn't the best option be to make old tires into new tires, if that were possible? That's something Isaac and his scientist pals have been working on, and they have made some significant progress, using lots of scientific know-how and fancy sciency equipment:

Now, David Isaac and colleagues at Swansea University, UK, have shown that spinning ground-up tyres, called rubber "crumb", inside a chamber filled with ionised oxygen gas plasma could provide a solution.

"It makes the surface of the crumb much better at sticking onto new rubber," Isaac explains. "Without treatment, the interface between the old pieces and new rubber is very weak."

The treated rubber particles can then be added to fresh non-vulcanised rubber to make new tyres. Laboratory tests show that tyre rubber recycled in this way has similar tensile strength and other mechanical properties to completely new material.

Isaac says the plasma treatment appears to create reactive oxygen species - small, highly reactive molecules - on the surface of the rubber by opening up carbon bonds. This reactive surface adheres well to fresh rubber. But it will not stay that way for ever, so the researchers have to add it to new rubber straight away. In the long term, they hope to find a way to make the plasma treatment last longer.

Isn't that nifty? With this technology turning old rubber into new tires that are as strong and durable as the original, there's really no good reason I can see (with my limited understanding of science and economics) that this new approach can't make tire recycling a ubiquitous phenomenon. Now that they've got a workable method, the next step is to sell the technology to the tire manufacturers, and Isaac and crew have formed a company to do just that. Hopefully this method will catch on, making tire fires and tire graveyards a thing of the past. (Oh, and tire "planters" can go bye-bye, too! I know that the people who use old tires that way are being frugal and conservationist and all, but those things are just plain ugly, no matter what color they're painted. I know, I know--I'm being an aesthetics snob again.) Maybe it won't be too long before Bridgestone and Les Schwab are rolling out product lines that actually deplete the supply of used tires in the world. That would make a lot of Oregonians happy, Greens and pioneers alike.

Turn Up The Happy Gas

Here's another slightly strange, but cool, medical breakthrough for you. This time around, our breakthrough involves upgrading techniques for abdominal surgery. Most of us are probably aware of how some surgeries have changed in recent years. Procedures that used to involve cutting a patient's abdominal wall clean open, to gain access to those reclusive internal organs, have been improved with the advent of laparoscopic surgery, where abdominal incisions are tiny, scars are miniscule and recovery time is much shorter than with traditional surgical methods. Such surgeries involve a laparoscope, a tiny camera inserted to examine the abdominal cavity so doctors can see what's going on and repair or remove damaged organs, via other tiny little incisions and long, flexible instruments. Such "keyhole" surgery has made necessary operations much easier for many a grateful patient. There's a new kind of surgery coming to operating rooms around the world, however, that eliminates the external incisions completely, leaves no visible scars, has minimal recovery time and doesn't even require general anesthetic.

Duncan Graham-Rowe, at NewScientist.com, says this revolutionary new technique is called transgastric surgery, or natural orifice translumenal endosurgery--NOTES for short. NOTES takes a whole new approach to the problem of getting inside a patient, quite literally. Instead of entering the abdomen through surgical incisions made externally in the skin and muscle walls, the cameras and surgical tools find their way into the abdominal cavity via the patient's mouth. An incision is made in the stomach from the inside; the surgical instruments pass into the abdomen through this opening, and tissue that needs to come out does so via exactly the same route that food goes in--in reverse, of course:

To some it may sound disgusting, to others the prospect of scar-free surgery may sound too good to be true. Either way it's coming. In the past couple of weeks three separate surgical teams say they have carried out NOTES procedures on humans - surgical firsts for both Europe and the US. And doctors in India say they have performed appendectomies through the mouth.

This transgastric procedure offers a lot of advantages to conventional, or even keyhole surgery: less pain (the stomach apparently has fewer nerve endings than the skin), less sedation (which Duncan-Rowe points out is good for the elderly and infirm), less risk of infection (theoretically), due to avoiding the bad bugs that live on the skin, as well as the disinfecting power of stomach acid, and--an important gain for the workaholics of the world--by far less recovery time:

"Even with keyhole surgery, patients stay off work for several days," says Lee Swanstrom, director of the Oregon Clinic in Portland, US, which specialises in gastrointestinal and keyhole surgery. "With NOTES they could go back to work the same day."

Good grief, that's fast. Gives a whole new meaning to "same day service." Now this last "advantage" might be a mixed blessing for some people who, for example, were hoping that their gall bladder surgery would help them avoid the big cubicle shuffle at the office, or going to the boss' daughter's ballet recital. Be that as it may, most of us would see a rapid spring back to full strength as a big plus. A few years ago, a friend and I had the same surgery performed, only mine was laparoscopic and hers was a full stomach incision. Her surgery came first, and I watched her long and painful recovery with a great deal of sympathy, because it was really hard. She suffered a lot. When it came time for my surgery, I was dreading a similarly unpleasant experience, but all that dread was wasted. While I still had a fairly long recovery time, mostly due to the five-and-a-half hours of general anesthesia the surgery entailed, there was very little pain, because of the tiny, tiny, unbelievably small incisions my doctor used to get at my innards. I'd take my surgery over my friend's hands down; if you added the less intense anesthesia, so the recovery could proceed even faster, that would just be all that much better.

Needless to say, the downside is the "ick" factor. Who really wants to have their appendix come out of their mouth? While they're somewhat awake, no less? I might request that the docs turn on the happy gas for that part of the procedure, although, now that I think about it, even that might not be necessary. When I had my surgery they put something in my IV to make me forget everything that happened from the time they wheeled me out of the waiting room till when I woke up in recovery. If you can't remember the icky bits, there's not really a need for the happy gas, is there? It was actually very frustrating to me that they stripped me of memories that I wanted. I find all this medical stuff fascinating, and probably would have watched the whole surgery, if that had been an option. To have a complete blank in my memory, when I had a prime opportunity for first-hand knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes in Surgery World is very frustrating. They didn't even film it for me, so that I could watch it after the fact!! To give the doctor credit, though, she did take some lovely photos of my insides, which I perused with great interest once the drugs wore off. That was of some comfort to me, even if I'd rather have the memories. I have to confess, though, I don't think even I would want to remember having my spleen come out my mouth. Turn up the happy gas, please (but shoot some video in case I change my mind.)

Carbon Nanotubes: Web 2.0

In case you thought there's anything that carbon nanotubes can't do, have a look at this article at NewScientist.com about the ongoing research into developing a fully functional carbon nanotube Spiderman suit. It'll have you climbing the walls.

Weird Science

Here's a bit of fluff to start your week. Justin Mullins, at NewScientist.com, says that Phillips (you know, the TV manufacturer) is developing "Furry TV." Haven't you always longed for a pettable television? No? I can't say I have either. In fact, such a thing would never have entered my head, but apparently the folks at Phillips have actually been working on how to make it happen, and believe it should be possible to make a TV screen out of fabric, with hair-like strands acting as pixels. Ultimately this could lead to wearable television screens, and Mullins explains, "The company hopes to build furry displays into outfits." How weird is that?

I can "picture" it now--your favorite sweatshirt won't be the one that commemorates your trip to the Super Bowl, but the one that let's you watch the Superbowl. Of course, if you're watching television on your own shirt, instead of someone else's, the image better be upside down, and set somewhere down around your belly button, if you want to see and understand any of the action (which could give new meaning to the term "contemplating your navel.") Speaking of new meanings, this weird science could lead to a whole new set of vocabulary oddities. For example would a sweatshirt TV fitted out for the hearing impaired have "clothesed captioning?" Would a baby bib TV come equipped with a "video feed?" Would "volume control" suddenly have a double meaning--not only referring to turning down the sound, but maybe alluding to somebody's need to trim a few pounds so that they can fit into their wearable television?

I'm left wondering why Phillips wants to spend time and money developing this technology? I get the concept of developing flexible, portable TV screens; there are lots of practical applications, but what real purpose would clothing that can double as an idiot box serve? I wrote last week about how scientists are developing "electronic clothing for emergency personnel that can have updatable messages written across them in glowing letters." That I get, but furry fabric televisions sewn into clothing? That's too weird for even my extra-weird imagination to see the point. Anybody else have any "this is a great idea because..." solutions for me?

Robin Who?

Would you sacrifice some of your limited wealth, just to make sure that other people didn't have "too much?" Apparently, some people will actually do that, sacrifice what little they have in order to take something away from the rich--even when no one benefits from the reduction in the rich person's cache--under laboratory conditions, anyway. Roxanne Khamsi, at New Scientist, describes an experiment set up by James Fowler at the University of California in San Diego, in which 120 students were recruited to play a game. Each student played multiple rounds, anonymously, with various combinations of other anonymous participants. In each round, they were assigned tokens, from 12 to 36 of them. They then had some decisions to make:

The students had to indicate what they wanted to do with their tokens. Each token that subjects kept would contribute $0.05 towards the money they kept at the end of the game. So a subject who kept 20 tokens in a round would net $1. They could also use their tokens to reduce or increase the other three players' sums.

The subjects completed five rounds of the game, each time interacting online with three new anonymous players.

About 30% of the time, the richest players generously gave up tokens to help boost the accounts of the poor players. And 12% of the time they used tokens to make the poorer players even more destitute.

By contrast, in 44% of the rounds the poorest players gave up some of their tiny funds to see the rich become less wealthy. But even though these players acted somewhat like the legendary English bandit, Robin Hood, by taking from the rich, the money did not get redistributed to the poor. It simply disappeared.

What kind of small-mindedness does it take to give up something out of the little you have, just so somebody else who has more has to give something up too? As Khamsi indicated, the Robin Hood effect was only a first-stage phenomenon; the tokens were taken from the rich, but nothing went to the poor as a result. No one gained anything by this stealing-from-the-rich.

The scientists conducting the experiment interpreted this to mean that people have a natural tendency to desire "economic equality." I think this makes the situation sound a lot more positive than it is. If "economic equality" means "I don't want others to have more than me, even if that means we all have less than we could" that's just a sad and tragic kind of selfishness that doesn't bode well for society at large. At least Robin Hood had the reputation of stealing for a purpose. What was the point in this game, except for the poorer participants to make themselves feel better about their pitiable condition, by making sure everyone else was in as close to the same boat as possible?

This robbing from the rich was self-defeating in more ways than one. Not only did it cost the poor what they "spent" on bringing the rich down a peg or two, it also cost them because the rich, being less rich, would have had less ability to be generous. (You'll note that the "rich" had enough of a tendency to be generous that the poor might reasonably hope to benefit from their largess.) Did those "equality seekers" find this equality to be a good thing when the situation was reversed in another round? Whatever happened to "do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" This takes the "two Americas" concept made popular by the John Edwards presidential campaign to a whole new extreme, with any kind of economic state being an acceptable goal, as long as nobody else gets more than I do. I sincerely hope that this experiment does not carry forth into the real world with any degree of accuracy, although, to be honest, I fear it does, far more often than it should.

Pork Pancreas, Anyone?

So, how comfortable are you with the concept of animal tissue being transplanted into your body to replace your own failing organs? There are a lot of people on the "needing a transplant" list who really have no hope of a suitable organ becoming available. The list is too long for the number of human donors to keep up. However, according to Andy Coghlan at New Scientist, scientists right here in the U.S. are developing genetically engineered pigs to provide hearts, livers and kidneys to humans waiting for donor organs. People at the bottom of the list could find themselves with viable transplant options. They just can't be too choosy about the species of the donor!! I realize the whole pig thing makes this an out-of-the-question scenario for Muslims, but it is a decision that some of the rest of us may be called on to make at some point, as science progresses and global populations continue to live longer.

How about something a little less overwhelming than an entire organ? What if it were just a few cells to give a bit of help to a system that's falling down on the job? If you had diabetes, for example, would you let doctors implant pancreatic cells from a pig to help your insulin deficient system keep your blood glucose stable? Michael Helyer, a man from Auckland, New Zealand, was faced with that choice, and made the decision to be a guinea pig for medical science. (Sorry, the pun couldn't be avoided.) His doctors implanted the cells 10 years ago, hoping that they would produce the insulin his own pancreas was unable to supply. Their hopes did not go unanswered. The cells did not provide all the insulin that Helyer's body required, but the porcine cells did, indeed, set up their own little insulin-producing factory, helping to keep his blood sugar levels in check. Coghlan explains that the cells aren't putting out what they once did, but even now, 10 years later, at least some of Porky's cells are still bringing home the bacon, or the insulin as the case may be:

Though Helyer still has to inject himself with insulin, the amount he needed fell by up to a third in the year following the transplant. This effect then faded, but Helyer, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand, says his diabetes remains under better control - a claim supported by data showing that his blood glucose is more stable than before treatment.

The part I found most fascinating about this story is the way that the doctors kept the cells alive--and kept Helyer's body from recognizing the pig cells as foreign and moving in for the kill:

In 1996, LCT [Living Cell Technologies] injected 1.3 million capsules of alginate, a resin derived from seaweed, into Helyer's peritoneal cavity. Each capsule contained about 500 insulin-producing islet cells isolated from the pancreases of newly born piglets. "The alginate lets insulin out of the capsule and nutrients in, to keep the cells alive," explains Elliott. Importantly, it also hides the "alien" pig cells from the human immune system.

Coghlan goes on to add:

Recent samples taken from the capsules suggest that many of the cells are still alive, and a few were found to still produce insulin when exposed to glucose in the lab. Chemical analysis also showed that traces of pig insulin appeared in Helyer's blood shortly after he ate a large amount of glucose.

The fact that these cells are still kicking after all this time is giving doctors reason enough to do further trials. LCT is going to be implanting cells in 14 new people soon, and the new subjects could also receive a second dose of pig cells to see if this can counter the falling off of effectiveness experienced by Helyer.

It's pretty amazing that they found a way to hide the pig cells from Helyer's immune system. I found myself wondering whether the same technique might somehow prove useful in other transplants, even the ones where the donor is human. Naturally, it would be a lot harder to disguise a whole organ from all those pesky white blood cells. How do you take a heart, say, and convince the blood pumping through it that it really should pay no attention to the pig behind the curtain? You can't encase the innards of the heart in seaweed resin, after all.

It is encouraging, though, that they found a way to work around the whole immune system thing in this case, without turning the entire system down or off, as they currently have to do with human organ transplants. Perhaps they can learn from this technique, and come up with other solutions. The alternative is a never-ending regimen of anti-rejection medication. I have a friend waiting for a kidney right now, and she knows that when she gets it she'll be on a strict schedule of drugs to prevent her body from saying, "You don't belong here. Prepare to die." She's mentally prepped for the process though, because she gave one of her kidneys to her brother 20 years ago, and she's seen the routine first hand. One good thing about that is that, since she is a kidney donor herself, she automatically moves to the top of the recipient list as soon as she's medically cleared for transplant. So, she won't have to choose whether it's better to take a porcine kidney than wait for a human one that might never become available.

It's an interesting choice to face, don't you think? Apart from religious objections that would make accepting animal organs, or even a few cells, objectionable to some, for most of us there would probably be a certain "that's just not right" factor that would have to be reasoned through. Is it any different though, really, from human organ donation? Both are alien to you, right? So, what's the difference? I don't know, but for me, on an emotional level at least, there would be more to process if I received an animal organ, rather than a human one. I'm not saying I wouldn't take an animal organ--as my husband said when he read this, "If it work, it works." At the same time, I would be a tad more squeamish about it I suspect, however irrationally. Actually, I hope to circumvent the problem altogether, by never needing an organ transplant, but if I do, I'm hoping that science will have progressed to the point where they can simply grow me another organ in a lab, from my own stem cells, from my own bone marrow, or some such thing. I'd like to skip the whole "pig organ, or death" question. I don't really object to a few pig or cow cells in my body, but generally, I want to chew them as they go inside.

How about the rest of you? Any reaction?