We need to stop xenoestrogen pollution

Endocrine disruptors in the environment are becoming more abundant due to a wide variety of human-related activities over the last few decades. They affect mechanisms by which the body’s endocrine system generates and responds to hormones, by attaching to receptors in similar ways to natural hormones. Minuscule quantities of hormones can have very substantial effects on the body so even very diluted pollutants may have significant effects. A sub-class called xenoestrogens specifically attach to estrogen receptors in the body and by doing so, can generate similar effects to estrogen in both women and men, affecting not just women’s breasts and wombs but also bone growth, blood clotting, immune systems and neurological systems in both men and women. Since the body can’t easily detach them from their receptors, they can sometimes exert a longer-lived effect than estrogen, remaining in the body for long periods and in women may lead to estrogen dominance. They are also alleged to contribute to prostate and testicular cancer, obesity, infertility and diabetes. Most notably, mimicking sex hormones, they also affect puberty and sex and gender-specific development.

Xenoestrogens can arise from breakdown or release of many products in the petrochemical and plastics industries. They may be emitted from furniture, carpets, paints or plastic packaging, especially if that packaging is heated, e.g. in preparing ready-meals. Others come from women taking contraceptive pills if drinking water treatment is not effective enough. Phthalates are a major group of synthetic xenoestrogens – endocrine-disrupting estrogen-mimicking chemicals, along with BPA and PCBs. Phthalates are present in cleaning products, shampoos, cosmetics, fragrances and other personal care products as well as soft, squeezable plastics often used in packaging but some studies have also found them in foodstuffs such as dairy products and imported spices. There have been efforts to outlaw some, but others persist because of lack of easy alternatives and lack of regulation, so most people are exposed to them, in doses linked to their lifestyles. Google ‘phthalates’ or ‘xenoestrogen’ and you’ll find lots of references to alleged negative effects on intelligence, fertility, autism, asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurological development and birth defects. It’s the gender and IQ effects I’ll look at in this blog, but obviously the other effects are also important.

‘Gender-bending’ effects have been strongly suspected since 2005, with the first papers on endocrine disrupting chemicals appearing in the early 1990s. Some fish notably change gender when exposed to phthalates while human studies have found significant feminizing effects from prenatal exposure in young boys too (try googling “human phthalates gender” if you want references).  They are also thought likely to be a strong contributor to greatly reducing sperm counts across the male population. This issue is of huge importance because of its effects on people’s lives, but its proper study is often impeded by LGBT activist groups. It is one thing to champion LGBT rights, quite another to defend pollution that may be influencing people’s gender and sexuality. SJWs should not be advocating that human sexuality and in particular the lifelong dependence on medication and surgery required to fill gender-change demands should be arbitrarily imposed on people by chemical industry pollution – such a stance insults the dignity of LGBT people. Any exposure to life-changing chemicals should be deliberate and measured. That also requires that we fully understand the effects of each kind of chemical so they also should not be resisting studies of these effects.

The evidence is there. The numbers of people saying they identify as the opposite gender or are gender fluid has skyrocketed in the years since these chemicals appeared, as has the numbers of men describing themselves as gay or bisexual. That change in self-declared sexuality has been accompanied by visible changes. An AI recently demonstrated better than 90% success at visually identifying gay and bisexual men from photos alone, indicating that it is unlikely to be just a ‘social construct’. Hormone-mimicking chemicals are the most likely candidate for an environmental factor that could account for both increasing male homosexuality and feminizing gender identity.

Gender dysphoria causes real problems for some people – misery, stress, and in those who make a full physical transition, sometimes post-op regrets and sometimes suicide. Many male-to-female transsexuals are unhappy that even after surgery and hormones, they may not look 100% feminine or may require ongoing surgery to maintain a feminine appearance. Change often falls short of their hopes, physically and psychologically. If xenoestrogen pollution is causing severe unhappiness, even if that is only for some of those whose gender has been affected, then we should fix it. Forcing acceptance and equality on others only superficially addresses part of their problems, leaving a great deal of their unhappiness behind.

Not all affected men are sufficiently affected to demand gender change. Some might gladly change if it were possible to change totally and instantly to being a natural woman without the many real-life issues and compromises offered by surgery and hormones, but choose to remain as men and somehow deal with their dysphoria as the lesser of two problems. That impacts on every individual differently. I’ve always kept my own feminine leanings to being cyber-trans (assuming a female identity online or in games) with my only real-world concession being wearing feminine glasses styles. Whether I’m more feminine or less masculine than I might have been doesn’t bother me; I am happy with who I am; but I can identify with transgender forces driving others and sympathize with all the problems that brings them, whatever their choices.

Gender and sexuality are not the only things affected. Xenoestrogens are also implicated in IQ-reducing effects. IQ reduction is worrying for society if it means fewer extremely intelligent people making fewer major breakthroughs, though it is less of a personal issue. Much of the effect is thought to occur while still in the womb, though effects continue through childhood and some even into adulthood. Therefore individuals couldn’t detect an effect of being denied a potentially higher IQ and since there isn’t much of a link between IQ and happiness, you could argue that it doesn’t matter much, but on the other hand, I’d be pretty miffed if I’ve been cheated out of a few IQ points, especially when I struggle so often on the very edge of understanding something. 

Gender and IQ effects on men would have quite different socioeconomic consequences. While feminizing effects might influence spending patterns, or the numbers of men eager to join the military or numbers opposing military activity, IQ effects might mean fewer top male engineers and top male scientists.

It is not only an overall IQ reduction that would be significant. Studies have often claimed that although men and women have the same average IQ, the distribution is different and that more men lie at the extremes, though that is obviously controversial and rapidly becoming a taboo topic. But if men are being psychologically feminized by xenoestrogens, then their IQ distribution might be expected to align more closely with female IQ distributions too, the extremes brought closer to centre.  In that case, male IQ range-compression would further reduce the numbers of top male scientists and engineers on top of any reduction caused by a shift. 

The extremes are very important. As a lifelong engineer, my experience has been that a top engineer might contribute as much as many average ones. If people who might otherwise have been destined to be top scientists and engineers are being prevented from becoming so by the negative effects of pollution, that is not only a personal tragedy (albeit a phantom tragedy, never actually experienced), but also a big loss for society, which develops slower than should have been the case. Even if that society manages to import fine minds from elsewhere, their home country must lose out. This matters less as AI improves, but it still matters.

Looking for further evidence of this effect, one outcome would be that women in affected areas would be expected to account for a higher proportion of top engineers and scientists, and a higher proportion of first class degrees in Math and Physical Sciences, once immigrants are excluded. Tick. (Coming from different places and cultures, first generation immigrants are less likely to have been exposed in the womb to the same pollutants so would not be expected to suffer as much of the same effects. Second generation immigrants would include many born to mothers only recently exposed, so would also be less affected on average. 3rd generation immigrants who have fully integrated would show little difference.)

We’d also expect to see a reducing proportion of tech startups founded by men native to regions affected by xenoestrogens. Tick. In fact, 80% of Silicon Valley startups are by first or second generation immigrants. 

We’d also expect to see relatively fewer patents going to men native to regions affected by xenoestrogens. Erm, no idea.

We’d also expect technology progress to be a little slower and for innovations to arrive later than previously expected based on traditional development rates. Tick. I’m not the only one to think engineers are getting less innovative.

So, there is some evidence for this hypothesis, some hard, some colloquial. Lower inventiveness and scientific breakthrough rate is a problem for both human well-being and the economy. The problems will continue to grow until this pollution is fixed, and will persist until the (two) generations affected have retired. Some further outcomes can easily be predicted:

Unless AI proceeds well enough to make a human IQ drop irrelevant, and it might, then we should expect that having enjoyed centuries of the high inventiveness that made them the rich nations they are today, the West in particular would be set on a path to decline unless it brings in inventive people from elsewhere. To compensate for decreasing inventiveness, even in 3rd generation immigrants (1st and 2nd are largely immune), they would need to attract ongoing immigration to survive in a competitive global environment. So one consequence of this pollution is that it requires increasing immigration to maintain a prosperous economy. As AI increases its effect on making up deficiencies, this effect would drop in importance, but will still have an impact until AI exceeds the applicable intelligence levels of the top male scientists and engineers. By ‘applicable’, I’m recognizing that different aspects of intelligence might be appropriate in inventiveness and insight levels, and a simple IQ measurement might not be sufficient indicator.

Another interesting aspect of AI/gender interaction is that AI is currently being criticised from some directions for having bias, because it uses massive existing datasets for its training. These datasets contain actual data rather than ideological spin, so ‘insights’ are therefore not always politically correct. Nevertheless, they but could be genuinely affected by actual biases in data collection. While there may well be actual biases in such training datasets, it is not easy to determine what they are without having access to a correct dataset to compare with. That introduces a great deal of subjectivity, because ‘correct’ is a very politically sensitive term. There would be no agreement on what the correct rules would be for dataset collection or processing. Pressure groups will always demand favour for their favorite groups and any results that suggest that any group is better or worse than any other will always meet with objections from activists, who will demand changes in the rules until their own notion of ‘equality’ results. If AI is to be trained to be politically correct rather than to reflect the ‘real world’, that will inevitably reduce any correlation between AI’s world models and actual reality, and reduce its effective general intelligence. I’d be very much against sabotaging AI by brainwashing it to conform to current politically correct fashions, but then I don’t control AI companies. PC distortion of AI may result from any pressure group or prejudice – race, gender, sexuality, age, religion, political leaning and so on. Now that the IT industry seems to have already caved in to PC demands, the future for AI will be inevitably sub-optimal.

A combination of feminization, decreasing heterosexuality and fast-reducing sperm counts would result in reducing reproductive rate among xenoestrogen exposed communities, again with 1st and 2nd generation immigrants immune. That correlates well with observations, albeit there are other possible explanations. With increasing immigration, relatively higher reproductive rates among recent immigrants, and reducing reproduction rates among native (3rd generation or more) populations, high ethnic replacement of native populations will occur. Racial mix will become very different very quickly, with groups resident longest being displaced most. Allowing xenoestrogens to remain is therefore a sort of racial suicide, reverse ethnic cleansing. I make no value judgement here on changing racial mix, I’m just predicting it.

With less testosterone and more men resisting military activities, exposed communities will also become more militarily vulnerable and consequently less influential.

Now increasingly acknowledged, this pollution is starting to be tackled. A few of these chemicals have been banned and more are likely to follow. If successful, effects will start to disappear, and new babies will no longer be affected. But even that will  create another problem, with two generations of people with significantly different characteristics from those before and after them. These two generations will have substantially more transgender people, more feminine men, and fewer macho men than those following. Their descendants may have all the usual inter-generational conflicts but with a few others added.

LGBTQ issues are topical and ubiquitous. Certainly we must aim for a society that treats everyone with equality and dignity as far as possible, but we should also aim for one where people’s very nature isn’t dictated by pollution.

 

The future of vacuum cleaners

Dyson seems pretty good in vacuum cleaners and may well have tried this and found it doesn’t work, but then again, sometimes people in an industry can’t see the woods for the trees so who knows, there may be something in this:

Our new pet cat Jess, loves to pick up soft balls with a claw and throw them, and catch them again. Retractable claws are very effective.

Jess the cat

At a smaller scale, velcro uses tiny little hooks to stick together, copying burs from nature.

Suppose you make a tiny little ball that has even tinier little retractable spines or even better, hooks. And suppose you make them by the trillion and make a powder that your vacuum cleaner attachment first sprinkles onto a carpet, then agitates furiously and quickly, and thus gets the hooks to stick to dirt, pull it off the surface and retract (so that the balls don’t stick to the carpet) and then you suck the whole lot into the machine. Since the balls have a certain defined specification, they are easy to separate from the dirt and dust and reuse again straight away. So you get superior cleaning. Some of the balls would be lost each time, and some would get sucked up next time, but overall you’d need to periodically top up the reservoir.

The current approach is to beat the hell out of the carpet fibers with a spinning brush and that works fine, but I think adding the active powder might be better because it gets right in among the dirt and drags it kicking and screaming off the fibers.

So, ball design. Firstly, it doesn’t need to be ball shaped at all, and secondly it doesn’t need spines really, just to be able to rapidly change its shape so it gets some sort of temporary traction on a dirt particle to knock it off. What we need here is any structure that expands and contracts or dramatically changes shape when a force is applied, ideally resonantly. Two or three particles connected by a tether would move back and forwards under an oscillating electrostatic, electrical or magnetic field or even an acoustic wave. There are billions of ways of doing that and some would be cheaper than others to manufacture in large quantity. Chemists are brilliant at designing custom molecules with particular shapes, and biology has done that with zillions of enzymes too. Our balls would be pretty small but more micro-tech than nano-tech or molecular tech.

The vacuum cleaner attachment would thus spray this stuff onto the carpet and start resonating it with an EM field or sound waves. The little particles would wildly thrash around doing their micro-cleaning, yanking dirt free, and then they would be sucked back into the cleaner to be used again. The cleaner head doesn’t even need to have a spinning brush, the only moving parts would be the powder, though having an agitating brush might help get them deeper into the fabric I guess.

 

The future of nylon: ladder-free hosiery

Last week I outlined the design for a 3D printer that can print and project graphene filaments at 100m/s. That was designed to be worn on the wrist like Spiderman’s, but an industrial version could print faster. When I checked a few of the figures, I discovered that the spinnerets for making nylon stockings run at around the same speed. That means that graphene stockings could be made at around the same speed. My print head produced 140 denier graphene yarn but it made that from many finer filaments so basically any yarn thickness from a dozen carbon atoms right up to 140 denier would be feasible.

The huge difference is that a 140 denier graphene thread is strong enough to support a man at 2g acceleration. 10 denier stockings are made from yarn that breaks quite easily, but unless I’ve gone badly wrong on the back of my envelope, 10 denier graphene would have roughly 10kg (22lb)breaking strain. That’s 150 times stronger than nylon yarn of the same thickness.

If so, then that would mean that a graphene stocking would have incredible strength. A pair of 10 denier graphene stockings or tights (pantyhose) might last for years without laddering. That might not be good news for the nylon stocking industry, but I feel confident they would adapt easily to such potential.

Alternatively, much finer yarns could be made that would still have reasonable ladder resistance, so that would also affect the visual appearance and texture. They could be made so fine that the fibers are invisible even up close. People might not always want that, but the key message is that wear-resistant, ladder free hosiery could be made that has any gauge from 0.1 denier to 140 denier.

There is also a bonus that graphene is a superb conductor. That means that graphene fibers could be woven into nylon hosiery to add circuits. Those circuits might be to harvest radio energy, act as an aerial, power LEDS in the hosiery or change its colors or patterns. So even if it isn’t used for the whole garment, it might still have important uses in the garment as an addition to the weave.

There is yet another bonus. Graphene circuits could allow electrical supply to shape changing polymers that act rather like muscles, contracting when a voltage is applied across them, so that a future pair of tights could shape a leg far better, with tensions and pressures electronically adjusted over the leg to create the perfect shape. Graphene can make electronic muscles directly too, but in a more complex mechanism (e.g. using magnetic field generation and interaction, or capacitors and electrical attraction/repulsion).

How to make a Spiderman-style graphene silk thrower for emergency services

I quite like Spiderman movies, and having the ability to fire a web at a distant object or villain has its appeal. Since he fires web from his forearm, it must be lightweight to withstand the recoil, and to fire enough to hold his weight while he swings, it would need to have extremely strong fibers. It is therefore pretty obvious that the material of choice when we build such a thing will be graphene, which is even stronger than spider silk (though I suppose a chemical ejection device making spider silk might work too). A thin graphene thread is sufficient to hold him as he swings so it could fit inside a manageable capsule.

So how to eject it?

One way I suggested for making graphene threads is to 3D print the graphene, using print nozzles made of carbon nanotubes and using a very high-speed modulation to spread the atoms at precise spacing so they emerge in the right physical patterns and attach appropriate positive or negative charge to each atom as they emerge from the nozzles so that they are thrown together to make them bond into graphene. This illustration tries to show the idea looking at the nozzles end on, but shows only a part of the array:It doesn’t show properly that the nozzles are at angles to each other and the atoms are ejected in precise phased patterns, but they need to be, since the atoms are too far apart to form graphene otherwise so they need to eject at the right speed in the right directions with the right charges at the right times and if all that is done correctly then a graphene filament would result. The nozzle arrangements, geometry and carbon atom sizes dictate that only narrow filaments of graphene can be produced by each nozzle, but as the threads from many nozzles are intertwined as they emerge from the spinneret, so a graphene thread would be produced made from many filaments. Nevertheless, it is possible to arrange carbon nanotubes in such a way and at the right angle, so provided we can get the high-speed modulation and spacing right, it ought to be feasible. Not easy, but possible. Then again, Spiderman isn’t real yet either.

The ejection device would therefore be a specially fabricated 3D print head maybe a square centimeter in area, backed by a capsule containing finely powdered graphite that could be vaporized to make the carbon atom stream through the nozzles. Some nice lasers might be good there, and some cool looking electronic add-ons to do the phasing and charging. You could make this into one heck of a cool gun.

How thick a thread do we need?

Assuming a 70kg (154lb) man and 2g acceleration during the swing, we need at least 150kg breaking strain to have a small safety margin, bearing in mind that if it breaks, you can fire a new thread. Steel can achieve that with 1.5mm thick wire, but graphene’s tensile strength is 300 times better than steel so 0.06mm is thick enough. 60 microns, or to put it another way, roughly 140 denier, although that is a very quick guess. That means roughly the same sort of graphene thread thickness is needed to support our Spiderman as the nylon used to make your backpack. It also means you could eject well over 10km of thread from a 200g capsule, plenty. Happy to revise my numbers if you have better ones. Google can be a pain!

How fast could the thread be ejected?

Let’s face it. If it can only manage 5cm/s, it is as much use as a chocolate flamethrower. Each bond in graphene is 1.4 angstroms long, so a graphene hexagon is about 0.2nm wide. We would want our graphene filament to eject at around 100m/s, about the speed of a crossbow bolt. 100m/s = 5 x 10^11 carbon atoms ejected per second from each nozzle, in staggered phasing. So, half a terahertz. Easy! That’s well within everyday electronics domains. Phew! If we can do better, we can shoot even faster.

We could therefore soon have a graphene filament ejection device that behaves much like Spiderman’s silk throwers. It needs some better engineers than me to build it, but there are plenty of them around.

Having such a device would be fun for sports, allowing climbers to climb vertical rock faces and overhangs quickly, or to make daring leaps and hope the device works to save them from certain death. It would also have military and police uses. It might even have uses in road accident prevention, yanking pedestrians away from danger or tethering cars instantly to slow them extra quickly. In fact, all the emergency services would have uses for such devices and it could reduce accidents and deaths. I feel confident that Spiderman would think of many more exciting uses too.

Producing graphene silk at 100m/s might also be pretty useful in just about every other manufacturing industry. With ultra-fine yarns with high strength produced at those speeds, it could revolutionize the fashion industry too.

The future of make-up

I was digging through some old 2002 powerpoint slides for an article on active skin and stumbled across probably the worst illustration I have ever done, though in my defense, I was documenting a great many ideas that day and spent only a few minutes on it:

If a woman ever looks like this, and isn’t impersonating a bald Frenchman, she has more problems to worry about than her make-up. The pic does however manage to convey the basic principle, and that’s all that is needed for a technical description. The idea is that her face can be electronically demarked into various makeup regions and the makeup on those regions can therefore adopt the appropriate colour for that region. In the pic ‘nanosomes’ wasn’t a serious name, but a sarcastic take on the cosmetics industry which loves to take scientific sounding words and invent new ones that make their products sound much more high tech than they actually are. Nanotech could certainly play a role, but since the eye can’t discern features smaller than 0.1mm, it isn’t essential. This is no longer just an idea, companies are now working on development of smart makeup, and we already have prototype electronic tattoos, one of the layers I used for my active skin but again based on an earlier vision.

The original idea didn’t use electronics, but simply used self-organisation tech I’d designed in 1993 on an electronic DNA project. Either way would work, but the makeup would be different for each.

The electronic layer, if required, would most likely be printed onto the skin at a beauty salon, would be totally painless, last weeks and could take only a few minutes to print. It extends IoT to the face.

Both mechanisms could use makeup containing flat plates that create colour by diffraction the same way the scales on a butterfly does. That would make an excellent colour pallet. Beetles produce colour a different way and that would work too. Or we could copy squids or cuttlefish. Nature has given us many excellent start points for biomimetics, and indeed the self-organisation principles were stolen from nature too. Nature used hormone gradients to help your cells differentiate when you were an embryo. If nature can arrange the rich microscopic detail of every part of your face, then similar techniques can certainly work for a simple surface layer of make-up. Having the electronic underlay makes self organisation easier but it isn’t essential. There are many ways to implement self organisation in makeup and only some of them require any electronics at all, and some of those would use electronic particles embedded in the make-up rather than an underlay.

An electronic underlay can be useful to provide the energy for a transition too, and that allows the makeup to change colour on command. That means in principle that a woman could slap the makeup all over her face and touch a button on her digital mirror (which might simply be a tablet or smart phone) and the make-up would instantly change to be like the picture she selected. With suitable power availability, the make-up could be a full refresh rate video display, and we might see teenagers walking future streets wearing kaleidoscopic make-up that shows garish cartoon video expressions and animates their emoticons. More mature women might choose different appearances for different situations and they could be selected manually via an app or gesture or automatically by predetermined location settings.

Obviously, make-up is mostly used on the face, but once it becomes the basis of a smear-on computer display, it could be used on any part of the body as a full touch sensitive display area, e.g. the forearm.

Although some men already wear makeup, many more might use smart make-up as its techie nature makes it more acceptable.

Five new states of matter, maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter lists the currently known states of matter. I had an idea for five new ones, well, 2 anyway with 3 variants. They might not be possible but hey, faint heart ne’er won fair maid, and this is only a blog not a paper from CERN. But coincidentally, it is CERN most likely to be able to make them.

A helium atom normally has 2 electrons, in a single shell. In a particle model, they go round and round. However… the five new states:

A: I suspect this one is may already known but isn’t possible and is therefore just another daft idea. It’s just a planar superatom. Suppose, instead of going round and round the same atom, the nuclei were arranged in groups of three in a nice triangle, and 6 electrons go round and round the triplet. They might not be terribly happy doing that unless at high pressure with some helpful EM fields adjusting the energy levels required, but with a little encouragement, who knows, it might last long enough to be classified as matter.

B: An alternative that might be more stable is a quad of nuclei in a tetrahedron, with 8 electrons. This is obviously a variant of A so probably doesn’t really qualify as a separate one. But let’s call it a 3D superatom for now, unless it already has a proper name.

C: Suppose helium nuclei are neatly arranged in a row at a precise distance apart, and two orthogonal electron beams are fired past them at a certain distance on either side, with the electrons spaced and phased very nicely, so that for a short period at least, each of the nuclei has two electrons and the beam energy and nuclei spacing ensures that they don’t remain captive on one nucleus but are handed on to the next. You can do the difficult sums. To save you a few seconds, since the beams need to be orthogonal, you’ll need multiple beams in the direction orthogonal to the row,

D: Another cheat, a variant of C, C1: or you could make a few rows for a planar version with a grid of beams. Might be tricky to make the beams stay together for any distance so you could only make a small flake of such matter, but I can’t see an obvious reason why it would be impossible. Just tricky.

E: A second variant of C really, C2, with a small 3D speck of such nuclei and a grid of beams. Again, it works in my head.

Well, 5 new states of matter for you to play with. But here’s a free bonus idea:

The states don’t have to actually exist to be useful. Even with just the descriptions above, you could do the maths for these. They might not be physically achievable but that doesn’t stop them existing in a virtual world with a hypothetical future civilization making them. And given that they have that specific mathematics, and ergo a whole range of theoretical chemistry, and therefore hyperelectronics, they could therefore be used as simulated constructs in a Turing machine or actual constructs in quantum computers to achieve particular circuitry with particular virtues. You could certainly emulate it on a Yonck processor (see my blog on that). So you get a whole field of future computing and AI thrown in.

Blogging is all the fun with none of the hard work and admin. Perfect. And just in case someone does build it all, for the record, you saw it here first.