Iran and nuclear consequences

WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) – When an Israeli cabinet minister said he thought an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites was unavoidable, the price of a barrel of oil rose 9 percent to a new record in June. Nice, fat bonus for oil-producing countries, including Iran.

If rhetoric has that effect, imagine the consequences of an actual strike. The numbers have not been crunched, at least not in public, but a four-month computer simulation and gaming exercise carried out last year by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, gives an idea.

It was based on an Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for 90 percent of oil exported from Gulf producers, in response to a U.S. attack on nuclear sites, air fields and air defense targets. The simulation showed the price of oil more than doubling, U.S. gross domestic product depressed for 2-1/2 years, private non-farm employment declining by more than one million jobs, and disposable personal income dropping by more than $260 billion.

In terms of oil and gasoline prices, last year were the good old days. At the time of the exercise, a barrel of oil traded at $65 and a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. averaged $2.80. It’s now around $136 and $4.08 respectively and could well reach twice that after an attack. Tighten your belts!

Source: Reuters. Also see “Top US military officer heads to Israel with Iran on the agenda”, AFP.

Want to Enhance Your Brain Power?

A little brain boost is something we could all use now and then. A new option may be on the horizon. Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning.

Source: Technology Review.

Microscopic ‘clutch’ puts flagellum in neutral

Ill. Scientists have learned a tiny molecular clutch disengages the flagellum’s tail from the engine that powers its rotation.

The action of the protein they discovered, EpsE, is very similar to that of a car clutch. In cars, the clutch controls whether a car’s engine is connected to the parts that spin its wheels. With the engine and gears disengaged from each other, the car may continue to move, but only because of its prior momentum; the wheels are no longer powered.

EpsE is thought to “sit down,” as Kearns describes it, on the flagellum’s rotor, a donut-shaped structure at the base of the flagellum. EpsE’s interaction with a rotor protein called FliG causes a shape change in the rotor that disengages it from the flagellum’s proton-powered engine.

Source: EurekAlert.

Chip for Future Eye Implants Runs on Picowatts, Thanks to New Deep-Sleep Tech

To achieve low-power operation, the team actually focused on nonoperation—the idle time that makes up more than 99 percent of the device’s lifetime. In sleep mode, power gates, which are transistors that act as simple switches, block electrical current from running. In standard designs, those gates are wide to provide lower resistance when the device is turned on. But the low resistance means that even with the gate closed, a fair amount of current leaks through, wasting power. To reduce the leakage, the team went back to an older design generation. Today’s chips have 45-nanometer features. The Michigan team went back four generations to the 180-nm node, creating longer, more-resistive gates. At the same time, they made them narrower, which also raises resistance. The downside is that when the device is actually running, it requires an extra 100 millivolts to overcome the gate’s added resistance. But because the chip is active for only a small fraction of the time—a few hundred milliseconds every 10 minutes—overall power use is still reduced.

Source: IEEE Spectrum.

Synthetic Biology: Social and Ethical Challenges

 
The electron tomogram of a complete yeast cell reveals the cellular architecture. It shows plasma membrane, microtubules and light vacuoles [green], nucleus, dark vacuoles and dark vesicles [gold], mitochondria and large dark vesicles [blue] and light vesicles [pink]. (Credit: Johanna Höög)

Synthethics, or Synbioethics: The rise of concerns about Synthetic Biology.

The report, “Synthetic Biology: Social and Ethical Challenges“, highlights concerns about the accidental release of synthetic organisms into the environment.

Andrew Balmer and Professor Paul Martin, the report’s authors, suggest a threat from “garage biology”, with people experimenting at home. They also emphasise that there is no policy on the impact of synthetic biology on international bioweapons conventions.

Read the entire report here (PDF).

The great carbon bazaar

Evidence of serious flaws in the multi-billion dollar global market for carbon credits has been uncovered by a BBC World Service investigation.

Source: BBC. I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen.