Male Oral Contraceptive Pill is on the Way.

Process of fertilization. Image credit to The Telegraph

There are approximately 7 billion people on the planet currently and close to half of this number live in abject poverty. Coupled with this is the fact that these people living in poverty are most likely to give birth to more children, far more than they can train with the little resources at their disposal.

On the other hand, even some fractions of the enlightened segment of the world population in especially developing parts of the world still have mixed reaction towards the need for family planning. There are so many reasons behind this. Among them is the view held by some religious sects concerning the use of contraceptives; there is also the issue of the unwanted side effects of the various oral, injectable and implantable contraceptives used by married women, one of which is excessive weight gain (women are very concerned when it comes to their weight and I fully support them in that); some married men are not willing to use the Durex as they believe it reduces the pleasure that is derived from sex; and when it comes to the permanent contraceptive option, bilateral tubal ligation (the two Fallopian tubes of the uterus are surgically sectioned in the woman) and vasectomy (the man's vas deferens which transport sperm from the testes to the prostate gland is sectioned surgically), it has been shown that the married woman is more likely to go for it, the bilateral tubal ligation.

This is very unlike the man, especially here in Africa, who believes that one of the major attributes of a man is his ability to impregnate a woman-and hence that special characteristic must not be taken away (this is somehow selfish but I'm indifferent on it anyway).

Since there are very few contraceptive options outside this for men--condoms, withdrawal and the rhythm method-- all of which are most likely to be unpalatable to a greater percentage of married men, people in the medical field have been musing over the possibility of a method that will not take away permanently the man's ability to impregnate a woman; that will still allow him to get the full pleasure of sex; but which will prevent him for that moment from getting his wife pregnant.

Feasibility of a male contraceptive pill. Image credit to The Royal Society of Chemistry.

And it looks like this particular idea may be brought to reality in the foreseeable future. A new study by researchers in Australia and published on the 4th of November, 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America shows that it is possible to reversibly prevent sperm from getting into the ejaculate during sex. Though the research was carried out using animals, mice, the prospect of reproducing such in humans is very high. In the study, the scientist used a technique called gene knockout to delete the two genes in mice that encode two proteins responsible for the transport of sperm from the vas deferens to the prostate gland during the emission phase of ejaculation so that the ejaculate produced by these mice contained no spermatozoa, and hence could not fertilize the females. Also, the researchers checked for side effects of this method and found there was mild reduction in blood pressure and heart rate because the two proteins have roles in blood pressure control through the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system.

The researchers are now shifting their attention towards achieving that in humans, not by gene knockout anyway, but through the development of drugs that can reversibly bind on the active sites of the human version of these two sperm-transporting proteins; however, this is going take some time according to the researchers. Nevertheless, what matters most is that a safe, viable target for contraceptive pill development has been found; safe and viable in the sense that, unlike other previous attempts at developing drugs to prevent a man from temporarily producing sperm and in the pills for women, this particular modality does not target spermatogenesis (sperm development) and the hormonal regulations guiding it which could lead to untold mutations that can have future impact if the man decides to have more children. And one more good thing about this research is that when the drugs are finally developed they will likely be in form of tablets that can be taken with a glass of water. It would work as long as it is being taken; once the man stops taking it, he can reverse to being able to get his wife pregnant.

Family planning and birth control, to me and how it should be viewed, is giving birth to the number of children a couple can comfortably raise with the resources available to them; spacing the birth of these children to allow for the full recuperation of the mother after each child--and this is extremely important for the health of both the nursing mother and the child being nursed.

A Software Program to Bill our Calls based on the Quality of Connected Call.

Poor network reception and poor call quality. Image credit to Today's Telegraph

There is no doubt that mobile telecommunication has in numerous ways expanded the growth and development of our society and made our world a global village. In fact, the great impact is very well felt in the developing parts of the world like Africa and Nigeria where I live.

But in the developing world, here in Nigeria, while mobile telecom has expanded our economy, some elements are emerging that are insidiously denigrating the good impact of mobile telecom emergence: an occasional decline in the quality of call and mobile internet service offered by the mobile telecom companies operational in the country. Peripheral to the core of this occasional poor service delivery is the interruption in call by the "one minute remaining" voice that for some seconds (and which is money you've already paid and can't be refunded) actually prevent you from hearing the person you're conversing with-you have to ask him or her to repeat what was said during the lost seconds (money).

The people of Nigeria have been complaining, but on a very weak scale, concerning the 'peripheral problem' I talked about. But the bigger problem we have with these mobile telecom companies is the frequent abysmal quality of voice calls which I can estimate virtually every Nigerian on prepaid plan has and will keep on experiencing if nothing is done about it (this issue does not look like a litigable one in Nigeria for now). It is so annoying to call a number, get connected but for almost a minute of this call you and your caller can't hear each other-- instead you hear this sea roaring noise, all because of bad network reception. Technically speaking, it may not be the fault of these mobile telecom companies all the time and hence they may not be blamed at all times. However, the rule is that one must get the high quality value for money one paid for any service, and hence the customers subscribed to these telecom companies should not be the one suffering from this occasional decline in quality of calls by spending money and not getting the quality service. That is an economic waste both to the customer and the country as a whole: there about 120 million mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria as at June last year according to the Nigerian Communications Commission; estimating that 1% of this number experiences this problem for one second everyday, thats 1.2 million subscribers multiplied by the call rate for one second (which 0.15 naira for intra-network calls) and we have N180,000;  and for 30 days it is N5.4 million; this is the lowest threshold I set but I know it could be higher than this. This estimated threshold statistics shows that annually, Nigerian mobile phone subscribers practically throw about N64.8 million into the fire.

Normally, calls are billed at a per unit time rate in most places. This billing method is okay by me if the quality of the call is at its best and which should be because customers paid for it. But because of the occasional problems in quality that callers may experience, and which is never their fault at all times, and the fact that they must get quality for the money they paid, I'm proposing that a new factor be brought into the phone call billing equation. A new software can be developed that will use a special algorithm to calibrate levels of quality in voice call which will be integrated into the per unit time billing algorithm. Technically, the two factors-time and quality of the call (based on network reception at both users' ends)-will be mathematically represented by two waves on a graph. When network reception is good, the call-quality wave fizzles out and the caller is normally billed per unit time; if the network reception and consequently call quality is bad, two things can happen---either there is a freeze in the timing of the call (in the case where the two connected callers are not hearing each other) and no money will be charged the caller during this period until the reception returns to normal when the timing will be unfrozen; or in the case where the call quality is mildly to moderately poor, the time wave aligns with the call-quality wave and the caller is billed based on the call quality alone. The Nigerian Communications Commission can supervise the development of this program and constitutionally mandate telecom operators to adopt it into their call billing operations.

This new, innovative proposal, if taken up and developed, will further guarantee that customers get the full and high quality value for the services they pay for. Last year, the Nigerian Communications Commission fined the three major mobile telecom companies in Nigeria for abysmal service delivery, one of which is what I have just talked about. But the money fined these companies will not come back to the subscribers who did not get the value for it in the first place, and hence did not record a corresponding socioeconomic growth and development. Technology is here to enable us devise innovative ways of solving any problems that arise in our everyday lives. In Nigeria, mobile phone subscribers often do not get the full value for the services they paid for; this is a socioeconomic problem--and my proposal is one of the novel ways in which it can be solved.

Flexible Screens and Bendable Smartphones: the Science behind this Emerging Technology

Bendable Smartphone of the future. Image credit to Smarttechnology

Bendable Iphone of the future. Image credit to Prowl Newspaper

I had my first mobile phone in 2007-one Nokia 2310. Then it was like one precious jewel-honestly if you give me that phone now, I'll throw it into the closet and flush it away-and I could remember that I played all the ring tunes on it over and over again, and also listened to news and jamz on radio stations with it. It was just so sweet. I used to admire the screen and always changed the theme colour-from blue to other colour mixtures I can't remember. But looking back and making comparison with the type of screens we have on phones now, I made a joke that the display of those old mobile phones and that of the current day call-only dumbphones are just films of groundnut oil on water; but that's a joke anyway.

There has been rapid transformation in phones display and hardware from what was obtained back then to things like LCD (liquid crystal display), AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode); and now the current buzz: flexible display, bendable screens and bendable phones. These new trending buzzwords in the smartphone tech world are not really new ( I mean in terms of the basic, fundamental scientific principles behind them).

Back in secondary school (high school) and in the first year of university when we did the basic sciences, we were taught that metals and semiconductors like silicon are electrical conductors while non metals like plastic and rubber are electrical insulators, meaning that plastics and the likes do not allow current to flow

Flexible Display. Image credit to Treehugger

through them. However, I would say that information was limited in scope maybe to accommodate the curriculum meant for such level. But as far back as the 1970s, three scientists, devised ways through which non metals like rubber and plastics when subjected to certain conditions conducted electricity like metals; this work led to the concept of polymeric conductivity (polymers-composed of thousands of monomers, if you remember your secondary school Chemistry-conducting electricity). The research was so phenomenal and filled with endless prospects for the field of material science and engineering that the three scientists, Professors Alan J Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa behind it were awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for it. 

The area of polymeric conductivity in material science has so much expanded since 1970s, giving rise to possible applications in the future such as flexible electronics (electronic devises whose electricity conducting parts are made of polymeric conductors and hence allowing you to bend them, unlike metals used in current devices).

In fact, one of the expectations I had for the Samsung Galaxy S5 before its launch was it was going to come with a flexible screen display, and I was mildly disappointed initially because it fell short of that expectation despite all the rumours. But that expectation was not met because of one of the biggest challenges facing the industrial application of polymeric conductivity; and that was what took away that mild disappointment (though some other expectations I had for the smartphone, and which are extremely feasible, were not met with, but their analysis is not the focus of this blog).

According to a new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists from Stanford Univetsity and the University of California Berkeley and led by Professor Andrew Spakowitz, these conductive polymers at the molecular level exhibit what they termed structural inhomogeneity. In other words, plastic conductors conduct electricity at different rates in their various parts at the molecular level such that bending or flexing them significantly alters the rate of current flow, reducing the electrical conductivity (and I now understood why the Galaxy S5 probably fell short of my flexible screen expectation--some work still needs to be done). Professor Andrew Spakowitz and his team I guess are working to find solutions to this current flow-impeding structural inhomogeneity; and their success, which is on the high side of prospects, will definitely make our dreams of having bending smartphones and tablets and other electronic devices in our hands come true because, for one thing among so many things,
I will no longer panic if my bendable smartphone falls from my hand.