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01/30/2015
Vaping, a Visitor from Mars and a Sad Goodbye
CHAPTER 53 Vaping, Valuable Rocks and Assorted Awards
When I was about 7 or 8 years old and living in Philadelphia, I picked up a lit cigarette discarded on the street and I smoked it. It was one of the best things I ever did. I was sick as a dog and never was tempted to stick one of those horrible things in my mouth again. I cringe when I see one of those graphic TV segments showing someone dying or horribly disfigured thanks to smoking. Today, an alternative to smoking tobacco-laden objects is the electronic, or E-cigarette, the subject of a brief article by Dan Hurley in the January/February 2015 issue of Discover magazine.
I was drawn to the article by a sketch of the device, which operates by vaporizing a liquid containing nicotine, allowing the smoker to get the "benefits" of nicotine without the cancer-producing compounds in the smoke of a normal cigarette. I had not known that E-cigarettes contain two items, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and lithium batteries, on which I spent over two decades of my 36-year career at Bell Labs. In the E-cigarette, a lithium-ion battery powers the heater/atomizer that vaporizes the liquid containing the nicotine. At the other end of the device, an LED lights up, which I presume serves two functions, mimicking the lit end of a regular cigarette and showing when the cigarette is "on".
It was hoped that E-cigarettes would have none of the bad features of the tobacco kind. However, it seems that the atomized output of the E-variety produces more very fine particles than the tobacco variety. In addition, the nicotine is not all exhaled, just as in ordinary cigarettes. The buildup of nicotine is associated with the harmful cardiovascular effects due to smoking. On the other hand, the good news is that more people succeed in giving up smoking using the electronic version than those who try to stop using nicotine gum or patches or just try to stop cold turkey. Also, I find that there are nicotine-free E-cigs and E-cigs with nicotine in various concentrations. So, ideally, one could wean him or herself off nicotine by smoking E-cigs with lower and lower nicotine content.
Switching gears, in last month's column I was delighted to note that NASA's Kepler mission had been rejuvenated and that Kepler was back in business finding planets around stars other than our Sun. I mentioned that about a thousand of the over 4000 candidate planets discovered by Kepler had been confirmed. Actually, the number confirmed at that point was under a thousand but this year, on January 6, NASA announced that Kepler had confirmed eight new planets, raising the number of confirmed planets to 1,004. Of greater significance to me is that 6 of the confirmed planets are small, less than or near just twice the size of Earth, and are in habitable zones of their stars. Their stars aren't as bright as our sun but there is still the possibility of life on these planets.
Last month I also mentioned the journal Science's choice of the spacecraft Rosetta's rendezvous with a comet as its breakthrough of the year. Discover magazine has its 100 Top Stories of the Year and Rosetta was number 3 behind Ebola and "Climate in Crisis", with emphasis on the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I was bemused by the fact that Discover's 100th Top story was about the "Exoplanet Class of 2014", highlighting 6 of the newly discovered planets orbiting other stars. I was most intrigued with two of the choices, Kepler-186f and Kapteyn b. The former because it is an Earth-size planet in a habitable zone and one of the better prospects for finding life. Kapteyn b is over 11 billion years old, much older than Earth, and it may have been and still be in a habitable zone. If so, any life would have had over twice as long to develop on that planet compared to life on Earth and who knows what kinds of critters might have evolved there? Makes me wonder what kind of life will replace us humans here on Earth before it gets incinerated by our Sun as it expands and ends up as burned out star. My bet would be that one, or all of three scenarios will doom our species long before that happens. One, we manage to kill ourselves off with wars (possibly nuclear) or human-caused climate change; two, some bug (such as Ebola) will be sufficiently deadly and widespread to do us in; or three, we get clobbered by a comet, asteroid or some other large chunk of material.
Speaking of chunks of material striking our planet, have you heard of Black Beauty? It's not the fictional horse, but a meteorite that is the subject of an article by Eric Hand titled "Martian Obsession" in the November 28, 2014 issue of Science. As you might guess from the title of the article, Black Beauty (BB from now on) is the nickname given to a rock that, millions of years ago, was blasted off Mars and probably a thousand or so years ago found its way to the Sahara Desert in Africa, breaking up into an unknown number of pieces but more than a dozen have been found to date. The article focuses on one intrepid meteorite collector, Dr. Jay Piatek, who lives in Indiana. Amazingly, Piatek owns at least ten pieces of BB weighing about two thirds of the total couple of kilograms of BB known to exist. Chunks of BB are regarded so highly in the collecting community that pieces have been sold for some $10,000 a gram; gold is only about $40 a gram!
Why is BB so highly valued? There have been other bits of Mars that have landed on our planet but BB is special. I Googled BB and found a January 3, 2013 press release from NASA telling of scientists finding that BB contained ten times more water than other Martian meteorites of unknown origins. The press release emphasized that the researchers had determined the age of their piece of BB to be 2.1 billion years and that this placed it in an important era of evolution on the Mars surface. But, hold the phone. Later work, on another piece of BB, dates the rock's age to 4.4 billion years! Hey, Mars and our Earth are only some 4.5 billion years old! So this BB is older than any rock we have on our planet and is truly a historical treasure.
But age isn't the only significant property of BB. Although it was initially thought that BB was formed in an eruption from magma, the later studies indicate it to be a collection of all sorts of pebbles and grains more likely formed as sediments by water and wind. The mixture is thought to have been formed into the rock BB by the impact of a foreign body striking Mars. As Eric Hand puts it in his Science article, "Each embedded pebble has a history to be unraveled." As a real historian (I was the historian of The Electrochemical Society for a number of years), what could be more interesting than history dating back to a time when one's home base had just come into being. It's mind boggling to me that we have all those rovers digging and probing the surface of Mars, at a tremendous cost, while we have a chunk of Mars, the first piece of which was found by a nomad in an African desert. Dr. Piatek paid a mere $6,000 to a Moroccan dealer for the first 320-gram piece of BB, not knowing how significant BB would become.
One of the downsides of growing old, recently having turned 87, is the loss of friends, relatives and former colleagues. In my column of December 1, 2013 I wrote of the recognition by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) of my former Bell Labs colleague, Samar Basu, for his invention of the carbon anode used in the lithium-ion battery. After being presented with his award, induction into the CEA Hall of Fame, Samar returned to India. In 2014, the National Academy of Engineering presented its Charles Draper Prize for Engineering to four individuals for their contributions to the lithium-ion battery. In my opinion, Samar should have shared in that award. The prize includes a $500,000 cash award split among the recipients. I deliberately did not inform Samar of this award. I recently received word that in India Samar had fallen and hit his head, spending many months in a comatose state before dying in December. Very sad. I'm hoping he had not heard of the award he so richly deserved to share.
On a brighter note (literally), the winners of the 2015 Draper Prize for Engineering were announced recently. This year's prize is split among five recipients for their work on light-emitting diodes. Two of the five, Shuji Nakamura and Isamu Akasaki, shared in the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for their game changing work coming up with blue LEDs that have led to the amazingly bright white light sources that will eventually eliminate most, if not all the old fashioned electric light bulbs. One of the other recipients of this year's Draper Prize is Nick Holonyak, another former Bell Labs colleague, albeit he was only briefly employed there. My last contact with Nick was at a pleasant dinner for him when he received the Solid State Science and Technology Award from The Electrochemical Society in 1983. Nick, and his former student, George Craford, one of the other 2015 Draper awardees, played key roles in the achievement of very bright LEDs used in such applications as auto stoplights and traffic lights prior to the blue LED era.
Finally, apropos of the LED work, when I was a supervisor of an LED materials group at Bell Labs many years ago, there was a Japanese fellow in our department who was a very dedicated worker and a very pleasant fellow. Takashi returned to Japan and we have exchanged Christmas greetings for the last 45 years or so. This past Christmas he wrote that he was "glad to see his old friend, Prof. I. Akasaki, receive the Nobel Prize for blue LED.." He also said that when he worked at Bell Labs he asked our department head, my boss, "Why don't you develop blue LED?" His answer was ,"For what?" Wrong answer! He wasn't my favorite boss.
Next column will be posted on or about March 1.
Addendum: I was all set to post this column when I spotted two articles in our morning paper, the January 29 issue of The Star-Ledger. One Associated Press article was headlined "E-cigs pose a threat to health and need regulation, state says". The state is California and the California Department of Public Health has issued a report saying that E-cigs emit as many as ten cancer-causing chemicals and that 17 percent of high school seniors are "vaping", the term used to describe use of E-cigs. Advocates critical of the report say that E-cigs help smokers give up the habit and that vaping is far less hazardous than smoking. Stay tuned.
The second article, by Mark Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was headlined "Kids swallowing button batteries is a growing danger". For a decade or so, starting around 1990, I was course director and an instructor in a yearly three-day course on batteries given here in New Jersey and in Amsterdam. One of our slides (this was before thumb drives, etc.) contained a warning about children swallowing batteries. I was surprised at the statistics cited in the Ledger article. In 2013 there were 3,366 cases of American children swallowing batteries and four of them died. There were 16 reported deaths in the period between 1985 and 2013. Lithium batteries were cited as especially troublesome.
One more thing. I've talked above about awards and evaluations of the past year's achievements. A few weeks ago, our editor, Brian Trumbore, dropped off the December 8 - December 14 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek saying I might find something for my column. I finally got around to it and realized that it was the 85th anniversary issue and the magazine was rating the 85 most "disruptive" ideas of those 85 years, starting with number 85, GDP. To demonstrate my aging mental acuity, it wasn't until I reached number 62 that I realized what was going on and went back to the beginning to read the introduction describing the rationale of the issue. Number 62 was Information Theory, Bell Labs' Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication that laid the groundwork for the Digital Age. It was at that point that I thought, hey, surely the invention of the transistor should be number one. So, turning to the back pages of the magazine, I find number 2 is Microchips, with a half-page picture of Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain, and an article by Walter Isaacson describing their invention of the transistor and the following developments elsewhere leading to the silicon chip. What did Businessweek rate number 1? The jet engine. I won't quarrel with that. It's interesting to look at their sequence going from number 11 to number 1: Al Qaeda, Apple, the Pill, the Manhattan Project, Junk Bonds, Google, TV, Wal-Mart, the Green Revolution, Microchips and the Jet Engine. An intriguing mix, to say the least!
OK, that's it. I think I'll fly away in a jet in my imagination to some of the places that my job at Bell Labs allowed me to go. Hawaii sounds like a good start. Aloha.
Allen F. Bortrum
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