Discourse.net

Drinking Formaldehyde

This has nothing to do with the conference, honest, but I can't help but wonder if there might not a link between Boing Boing, Corpses are rotting more slowly than they used to and the presence of formaldehyde in diet drinks.

H1N1 Flu: It's Getting Closer

Bulletin from UM:

The first two cases of H1N1 flu (swine flu) in Florida were recently confirmed: one in Broward County, the other in Lee County. To date, there have been no confirmed cases in Miami-Dade County or at the University of Miami. The University continues to carefully monitor the situation.

The University has created an H1N1 flu crisis decision team led by Joseph Natoli, senior vice president for business and finance and chief financial officer; Patricia Whitely, vice president for student affairs; and Howard Anapol, director of UM?s Student Health Service. The team is meeting daily to evaluate the latest developments and proactively determine appropriate steps for the University community in close collaboration with the Miller School of Medicine?s Division of Infectious Diseases.

University leaders are maintaining regular contact with local and regional Departments of Public Health and have a fully functional pandemic management plan in place.

More at University Communications H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu) Information and Resources page.

Meanwhile, these have popped up on campus:

I snapped that picture yesterday in the main food court. (Click on it for a bigger image.) The company’s web site says it is 70% Isopropyl alcohol, which I suppose is why it works on viruses.

By the way, the previous text on the UM page (now vanished?) read in part as follows:

There have been no documented cases of swine flu on campus or in South Florida. The University of Miami is carefully monitoring the situation with the guidance of the Miller School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, and will maintain regular contact with local and regional Departments of Public Health. The University is also taking a number of proactive steps to address the evolving situation.

I imagine commencement is one of those events that epidemiologists worry about.

Heavy Boots

I’ll be honest: At first I thought that this posting on Heavy Boots was total nonsense, one of those urban legends.

But for a lark I tried the quiz on a very smart person I happen to know, one who didn’t have much of a science background. And — spookily — it was right on script, down to the heavy boots.

So there is something to it.

The mind boggles. (How long before all the boggle is used up, I start to wonder.)

Not Real. Please. Not Real.

Please tell me that this Wonderful Life thing is a made-for-Internet-event like LonelyGirl15, not something real. It’s got to be. Got to be.

Wonderful Life is a daily regimen involving a powerful and organic oral supplement and a spiritually based ritual practice.

… The Wonderful Life daily practice is based on a combination of vinyasa yoga, ancient Siberian folk song and dance, and contemporary extreme walking.

Is Wonderful Life safe?

Wonderful Life is 100% safe because it is 100% organic and herbal.

…

Are there any side effects?

In the first two weeks of use, those following the Wonderful Life regimen experienced fatigue, delirium, vivid dreaming and sleep walking. In the third week, people experienced short bouts of mania. People following the Wonderful Life regimen should not operate vehicles or heavy machinery in the first 21 days of use. During the forth through sixth weeks, most people experienced a waning of side effects as the benefits of the regimen began to take root.

Some people taking the Wonderful Life supplement continued to experience mania, combined with delusions of grandeur, hyperhidrosis and hallucinations. In these cases, once the use of the supplement had been discontinued, these people returned to a normal resting state within 72 hours. The presence of these side effects occurred in only 15% of Wonderful Life testers.

Less than 2% of people following the Wonderful Life regimen experienced seizures and migraine-like headaches after six months of use. It is recommended that people following the Wonderful Life regimen discontinue use of this product after 120 days to avoid serious injury.

(Spotted via a link from RockCookieBottom)

Make Yourself Miserable

Update (4/28/09): Unfortunately, the map is not accurate.

H1N1 Swine Flu Map.

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Key:

Pink markers are suspect
Purple markers are confirmed
Deaths lack a dot in marker

RSS Feed of new H1N1 Swine Flu Cases

Amazingly, there are none near here yet. Diseases don’t usually work like that.

Anyone Who Reads Science Fiction Knows Why This Happened

Huge Supernova Baffles Scientists, but anyone who reads science fiction knows why “this star, which lay about 200 million light years away from earth and was million times brighter than the Sun, has exploded as a supernova at a much earlier date than the one predicted by astronomers.”

The Monks got stiffed by bad customers.

Playing With the Blog While We Still Can

I’ve added a new RSS Feed to the right sidebar. I already run these:

• BBC World News
• US Legal News from JURIST
• Reuters: Politics
• World Law News from JURIST - Paper Chase
• Blenderlaw (I love the author)

For a trial period, I’m adding the feed from:

• Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?

Just for fun. I think.

Archimedes Sort of Discovered Calculus

Archimedes kindasorta discovered calculus:

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes’ book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

What they’re finding as they try to recover the underlying text is hard to summarize, but it sounds calculus-like,

Archimedes developed rigorous methods of dealing with infinity—still used today—in which he followed Aristotle’s injunction. For example, Archimedes proved that the area of a section of a parabola is four-thirds the area of the triangle inside it (shown in red in the diagram below). To do so, he built a straight-lined figure that’s an approximation of the curvy one. Then he showed that he could make the approximation as close as anyone could ever demand to both the section of the parabola and to four-thirds the area of the triangle.

Critically, Archimedes never claimed that by adding triangles forever, you could make the straight-line construction exactly equal to the section of the parabola. That would require an actual infinity of triangles. Instead, he just said that you can make the approximation as good as you like, so he was sticking with potential infinity.

Modern historians and mathematicians have always believed whenever Archimedes dealt with infinities, he kept strictly to the potential kind. But Netz, who transcribed the newly found text, says that the recent discoveries show that Archimedes indeed used the notion of actual infinity.

There’s more…

Shadows on Plato's Cave: Giant Hologram Version

I don’t pretend to understand all of this, but apparently, Our world may be a giant hologram.

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

…

Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely “black” but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein’s work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole’s entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and ‘t Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too - the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What’s more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

One key fact out of all this is that the length of the fundamental unit might be hugely larger than the Planck length (10^-35 metres) — maybe as much as a whopping 10^-16 metres. I find that last a bit hard to believe, as that would make it a tenth of the size of a proton, and up to 100 larger than some estimates of the size of an electron.

Then again, this is quite weird:

If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. “Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry,” says Hogan.

I suppose it explains Monday mornings rather well, though.

Cancer-Fighting Beer

Slashdot | Researchers Developing Cancer-Fighting Beer

Oh yes, please.

Dysfunctional Doesn't Cover the Half of It

At first glance, the situation described here seems callous beyond weird: Dembot - Open Letter to James C. Mullen, CEO of Biogen.

There is a method to the madness, described here but any system which produces this outcome is worse than broken.

Quantity Has a Quality All of Its Own

The folks Emergent Chaos think they’ve spotted a scientific revolution:

This paper, “More Really is Different,” may be one of the most important papers of the last half-millenium. It argues that P.W. Anderson’s concept of “emergence” is provable. It may have even proved it.

The idea of emergence, from whence this blog gets its name is the opposite of reductionism. It is the idea that a complex system acquires properties that the underlying parts cannot predict. It’s nothing more and nothing less than a formalization of the adage, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

The authors, Mile Gu, Christian Weedbrook, Alvaro Perales, and Michael A. Nielsen, argue directly that this may mean that a “Theory of Everything” may therefore be impossible.

This is big, big news. Read the paper. Read the commentary in The New Scientist, “Why nature can’t be reduced to mathematical laws.”

If they are right, this goes to the core of the philosophical underpinnings of the way we understand the world. It may help explain everything from weather prediction to the origins of life to whether souls exist. I might even be engaging in understatement rather than hyperbole on that last bit. You may think it’s a long way down to the chemist’s, but this is big.

While you’re at it, expect some highly entertaining debate, and pseudo-scientific whackos of every stripe to start quoting this. Maybe the next Kuhnian revolution has begun.

I am not a (series of) numbers, I am a free man.

[PS. New Scientist seems to be behind a paywall, alas.]

Got Milk?

Caroline Bradley asks some worrying questions about melamine in our food supply in (not) understanding food risks.

Here’s how it starts,

Reading the recent news about melamine contamination of foods produced in China, and remembering how friends with pets dealt with last year’s pet food melamine contamination problem, I wonder how worried to be. A story which began with problems in infant formula spread to other products made with milk as an ingredient. For example, White Rabbit candy, which, according to the Wikipedia entry has been marketed as a healthy product, is one of the products affected. In deciding how worried to be I would like some data on the risks. The FDA website has a reassuring press release. This morning, the Europa website’s press release page showed a release from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) with a link to a detailed statement assessing the risks (unfortunately, since I first saw the press release it has been pushed off the front page by other news). I’d far rather have details than platitudes, even where the details don’t in the end help me very much.

It doesn’t help that this administration probably isn’t capable of telling if there’s a danger or not, much less leveling with us about it.

Well, *That's* Under Control Now

If I did not read Making Light, I would not learn great information like that found in I would just to like to say—, namely,

there is an RSS feed for hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com.

And, indeed, the entry for “Monday, September 08, 2008 11:25 AM” reads, in full, as follows:

NOPE.

The Internet is good.

(But I wonder how often they update?)

CERN Rap!

Is this the best rap song about particle physics ever? Must be.

Sunscreen Is Deadly -- To Coral

Swimmers’ Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

Amazing, and strangely believable.

The death of coral — the lungs of the ocean — is one of the big environmental tragedies of the age. And up to now, maybe, something of a puzzle.

Asperger Syndrome DVD Available for Educators

My old friend Stan Jaskiewicz writes to a college mailing list,

Since so many of members of our class of 1982 are in academia, I thought I would make you aware of a new, free resource to assist you in working with students with Asperger Syndrome, a form of high functioning autism (and the type that my son has) that is particularly common among those skilled in math and science.

The brief video (available at the website or on DVD) explains the social and educational challenges these students face in the college, and how accommodations to the learning environment can help such students to benefit from college classes. The website also has a link to download a free publication, “Understanding Asperger Syndrome: A Professor’s Guide.”

Please feel free to circulate this information to your professional colleagues who may have students with Asperger’s in their classes.

The text of his attachment is below. Or skip straight to the free download. Stan is a hero.

OAR Releases Asperger DVD for College Professors

Arlington, VA, April 18— The Organization for Autism Research (OAR) released Understanding Asperger Syndrome: A Professor’s Guide, a 12-minute video for use by college students with Asperger Syndrome as a tool to educate their professors, teaching assistants, and others about the disorder. OAR produced the DVD in cooperation with the Global Regional Asperger Syndrome Project (GRASP) and Pace University in New York thanks to a grant from the Schwallie Family Foundation. The video is available now for viewing and download at no cost on OAR’s Web page, www.researchautism.org/resources/AspergerDVDSeries.asp.

“The idea behind this series,” said Peter Gerhardt, Ed.D., OAR’s president, “is to have adults with Asperger Syndrome in effect teach what it means to be an adult with the disorder.”

To that end, the video features two people with Asperger Syndrome, Michael John Carley from GRASP and Kiriana Cownesage, a doctoral student at NYU. Dr. Gerhardt also appears providing information on “reasonable accommodations” in the college classroom. In addition to being posted on OAR’s Web site, OAR will post it on YouTube.com and produce DVDs to be available upon request via the Web site by early June.

They're Coming

Robert’s Stochastic thoughts sees the future in the side mirror.

Headline Coincidence

New York Times, The Fungus That Conquered Europe (on the Great Potato Famine of 1845-6)

Slashdot, Newly Discovered Fungus Threatens World Wheat Crop (a variety of the rust fungus originally detected in Uganda in 1999 has already spread as far north as Iran; is the subcontinent next?)

Last Chance to Get Bell Labs Science Kits

I have fond memories of playing with a CARDIAC cardboard computer in grade school. They were handed out as something of an experiment, and I’m not sure that it was judged a success, but I loved it.

Well, it turns out that you can order a CARDIAC — but only for a few more days.

Order now: Bell System Memorial- Bell Labs Science Kits - they’re going out of business at the end of the month.

Other Bell Science kits available for a few more days which you may recall from the 60s and 70s include “From Sun to Sound”, “Speech Synthesis”, “Energy from the Sun” and “Experiments with Crystals and Light”.

Fun With Carbon Dioxide

New materials can selectively capture CO2, scientists say:

Scientists have created metal-organic crystals capable of soaking up carbon dioxide gas like a sponge, which could be used to keep industrial emissions of the gas out of the atmosphere.

Chemists at the University of California Los Angeles said the crystals — which go by the name zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs — can be tailored to absorb and trap specific molecules.

[Prof. Omar] Yaghi and his colleagues describe their findings in the Friday issue of the journal Science.

He said the crystals are non-toxic and would require little extra energy from a power plant, making them an ideal alternative to current methods of CO2 filtering. The porous structures can be heated to high temperatures without decomposing and can be boiled in water or solvents for a week and remain stable, making them suitable for use in hot, energy-producing environments like power plants.

The team of scientists created 25 ZIF crystal structures in a laboratory, three of which showed a particular affinity for capturing carbon dioxide. The highly porous crystals also had what the researchers called “extraordinary capacity for storing CO2”: one litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2.

How much of this stuff do we need to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?

According to Gary W. Harding, How Much of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Accumulation Is Anthropogenic?

Today, the atmosphere contains about 720 Gtons of carbon. The concentration of carbon dioxide is about 360 ppm. Regardless of its source, one billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide would increase its concentration by 0.5 ppm (360 / 720) if all of it stayed there. However, scientists estimate that about half of present human carbon emissions are absorbed by the environment. Of the half absorbed, scientists have accounted for where half of that goes. Where the other half goes is the “mystery of the missing carbon” (about 1.8 Gton per year).

A gigaton, by the way, is a thousand million tons. And that’s 1998 data on stocks not flows.

According to Table 3.2 on page 30 of Global Warming: The Complete Briefing we’re up well past 7.5 GT added annually to the atmosphere due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

So to make humans carbon-neutral at present rates of emissions, we need what exactly? Let’s fire up the calculator.

One liter of carbon dioxide at standard atmosphere and pressure weighs 1.965 grams. So 1 GT approximately equals a petagram (10 to the 15th power).

Divide 7.5 of those petagram by 1.965 grams and we get a measly 3.82 GT of these crystals. Per year. Assuming fossil fuel use stays flat.

How does this compare to this zany idea?

…a concept … for removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline.

The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel.

…

Even with those improvements, providing the energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale — say, 750,000 gallons a day — would require a dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

According to their analysis, their concept, which would cost about $5 billion to build, could produce gasoline at an operating cost of $1.40 a gallon and would turn economically viable when the price at the pump hits $4.60 a gallon, taking into account construction costs and other expenses in getting the gas to the consumer. With some additional technological advances, the break-even price would drop to $3.40 a gallon, they said.

A nuclear reactor is not required technologically. The same chemical processes could also be powered by solar panels, for instance, but the economics become far less favorable.

This is not a small problem.

[erroneous timestamp corrected] [& spelling corrected too - thanks to Earl Killian]

Friday Cat Blogging

One of the things lots of bloggers seem to do is post pictures of cats on Fridays.

I don’t have a cat, but this cat pix seemed fun.

Best Sub-Head of the Day

The day is young, but I declare the sub-head to Radio controlled male contraceptive developed to be the best sub-head of the day.

As the sub-head says, “What could possibly go wrong?”

More on the Theory of Everything

Dr. Garrett Lisi has a wiki where he posts about his theories.

There’s also an extended discussion with critics/questioners on this thread from a physics blog. It’s over my head, though.

Previous post: Can the Underlying Structure of the Universe Be Represented as an E8?

Update: Giant quicktime movie of an E8 being rotated.

Can the Underlying Structure of the Universe Be Represented as an E8?

It’s either all wrong, or it is one of the most important theoretical physics discoveries in history, a major step in the direction of a unified field theory.

In An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, one Garrett Lisi, physics Ph.D and, yes, nearly-homeless surfer dude, suggests that E8 (described by the UK Daily Telegraph as an “eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan”) has this amazing property: E8, says, Dr. Lisi, contains the Standard Model, plus the symmetries belonging to gravity.

And, oh yes, the model makes the testable hypothesis that there are 20 more standard particles waiting to be found by supercolliders. (Twenty seems like rather a lot?)

Here’s the abstract of the paper,

Abstract: All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

This representation, to the very limited extent I follow it, doesn’t tell us anything directly about the shape of the universe; rather it threatens to tell us something fundamental about the relationships between the particles and forces that make up and that shape the universe. While the “exceptionally simple” part of the paper title is — or had better be — a joke, the 248 dimensions of E8 are needed only for representation of relationships; the universe it describes has only the three dimensions we know, plus time, distinguishing this theory from string theory, which requires many more (even if some are very tiny).

Dr. Lisi’s theory also makes pretty pictures.

Pictured above: figure 2 of Dr. Lisi’s paper, “The E8 root system, with each root assigned to an elementary particle field.” There’s also a cute movie of an E8 being rotated.

As noted above, there are already critics. Super-string advocate (and politically weird) Luboš Motl will have none of it.

He blogs,

The author is not constrained by any old “conventions” and simply adds Grassmann fields together with ordinary numbers i.e. bosons with fermions, one-forms with spinors and scalars. He is just so skillful that he can add up not only apples and oranges but also fields of all kinds you could ever think of. Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings.

…

If you care how the forces and particles are supposed to be embedded into his group, it’s like this. You start with a non-compact real form of E8. You embed a G2 into it. Its centralizer is a non-compact version of F4. Now, you embed the strong SU into the G2 while the non-compact F4 acts as the source of a “graviweak” SO group that contains SO, a “gauge group” that is now fashionable in the crackpot circles to “describe” gravity, and SO, their source of cargo cult electroweak symmetry.

Of course, this group plays a different role (in the vielbein formulation of general relativity) than the Yang-Mills groups and the fact that these two kinds of a group cannot be merged is the content of the Coleman-Mandula theorem to be discussed at the end of my text. Moreover, the fermions clearly can’t arise from the connection because they have a different spin and statistics and they don’t transform in the adjoint representation. For people like A. Garrett Lisi, it is not hard to unify everything with everything else because they don’t know any difference between different concepts in physics.

You might think that the E8 starting point is analogous to heterotic GUTs. Except that it is completely crucial for physics that E8 in heterotic string theory is compact. Non-compact gauge groups would lead to ghosts and negative probabilities. Moreover, the whole Standard Model is embedded into the same subgroup of the heterotic E8 once it’s broken, e.g. to SO. Also, everyone knows that the fermions arise as chiral multiplets and not vector multiplets: they are simply not and cannot be a part of the gauge bundle. Most importantly, no sane person has ever claimed that the E8 portion of the heterotic theory already contains gravity. That would be really silly.

So what we have here is either the theoretical physics equivalent of cold fusion, or one Czech physicist who will become unwittingly famous.

More at slashdot.

It'll Never Roll, Wilbur

Talk about articles that seem to confirm all of one’s prejudices: In Doing what Detroit says is impossible, Daily Kos points to an amazing article about a guy who builds powerful fuel-efficient cars — the sort Detroit says can’t exist with current technology.

There are some issues: price, availability of alternate and more efficient fuels, but still…

A Finding With Many Implications

Is a photo worth a thousand votes?:

People asked to rate the competence of an individual based on a quick glance at a photo predicted the outcome of elections more than two-thirds of the time.

Nearly 300 students at Princeton University were asked to look at pairs of photographs for as little as one-tenth of a second and pick the individual they felt was more competent, psychologist Alexander Todorov reports in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The participants were shown photos of leading candidates for governor or senator in other parts of the country, but they were not told they were evaluating candidates. Those who recognized any of the photos were not counted.

When the elections took place two weeks later, the researchers found that the competency snap judgments predicted the winners in 72.4 percent of the senatorial races and 68.6 percent of the gubernatorial races.

It seems to me that this finding, if valid, has many implications.

• National political parties should focus group photos before deciding who to recruit or support in primaries
• I’ll bet it’s a very sexist test — this may explain part of how elections disadvantage female candidates.
• I wonder if this works for law schools? Would student satisfaction be higher when taught by professors whose looks signaled competence? Can we focus group potential hires via their photos? Can we do it without disadvantaging anyone who’s not a white male of a certain age?
• Might it be that dress sends signals of competence? If so, is it important to dress up (or down?) for the first day of class?
• “Lookist” takes on a new meaning
• Do I sense the makings of a new suspect class? Are people who don’t look competent to others a “discrete and insular minority”? Certainly their disability affect electability, thus undermining their political power, which is one of the tests….

And, how do I look?

New Way to Prevent Alzheimers?

Protein that removes plaque holds promise for Alzheimer’s patients

Using a protein as a sponge to absorb the toxic plaque that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients can halt symptoms and improve brain function, U.S. researchers suggest. Scientists from the University of Rochester Medical Centre in Rochester, N.Y., performed studies on mice with a buildup of amyloid-beta, a toxic plaque that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers and damages them.

I’m not so clear if this is a cure that reverses Alzheimer’s, or “only” a preventative — a way to stop Alzheimer’s from getting worse once one is identified as susceptible. Even so, it sounds like a major advance.

7 Million Years and We're Toast

So the sun has an orbit, or an oscillation, relative to the galactic plane, and when it gets to one of the extremes, we get fried with muons. Could this explain why every 62 million years, there’s a huge die-off of species, about ten percent, in our biosphere?

Of Cosmic Rays and Dangerous Days: Now, researchers from the University of Kansas in Lawrence think they have found a possible answer. Physicist and co-author Adrian Melott says that he began suspecting a galactic cause after noticing a 2005 paper that calculated that the drop in species diversity occurs regularly on a time scale of tens of millions of years, which—for a cyclical event—is too long for something happening within the solar system. So he and Kansas colleague Mikhail Medvedev began examining the possibilities. At about the same time as the drops in biodiversity, the researchers determined, the sun reaches the highest point in its orbit relative to the galactic plane, where most Milky Way stars reside. At that point, the scientists report in the 1 August Astrophysical Journal, the solar system is closest to an incoming source of potentially lethal cosmic rays created by interactions between the Milky Way’s magnetic field and radiation generated by a cluster of nearby galaxies.

These galaxies are located in the direction of the constellation Virgo, and the radiation consists of particles called muons, which are so powerful they can penetrate about 2.5 kilometers of sea water or 900 meters of rock—enough to reach just about every living thing on Earth and damage its DNA. Because the zenith of the Sun’s oscillations match almost exactly with the times of the dips in the fossil record, the researchers found, “we’ve noticed an incredible coincidence,” Melott says.

Be sure to mark your calendar to give you plenty of warning, as the next one is due in just seven million years.

Something Nice

I haven’t seen David Saltzman in years, maybe not since shortly after college, although I’d hear about him from mutual friends from time to time. We’ve exchanged the occasional email, which I suppose put me in his address book.

Then, a while back, I started to get cc’s of general emails. They were sober stuff: cancer. Bad cancer.

Not today.

Dear Friends,

This week has been filled by tests at Johns Hopkins confirming that my cancer has, at least temporarily, gone into nearly complete remission! This is the best news I have had since being diagnosed in late 2006 with malignant bile duct cancer (metastatic cholangiocarcinoma), a disease that kills half its victims within three months. After seven months of grueling chemotherapy and a larger number of surgical and endoscopic procedures, the images taken by PET, CT, X-ray and MRI are all in accord that the tumors have shrunk to a “subradiographic” point where they are smaller than grains of rice, though still present. The doctors can’t find the cancer because there aren’t enough tumor cells left in one place or in total.

…

In equally good news, I can finally breathe deeply without pain or coughing. You cannot imagine what a relief this is after six months of ever-shallower, more desperate breathing. …

My symptoms at this point stem entirely from the chemotherapy, not the cancer. I continue to find this oddly liberating, because I choose to undergo chemo and I can reason with an oncologist… but not with a cancer. Since chemotherapy agents are designed on purpose to be as poisonous as possible without quite killing the patient, and I encouraged my oncologist to cut it very close, the symptoms have been brutal.

…

The chemo has left me a smashed shipwreck of a body: battered, scarred, impossibly drained, and barely holding together. Until a few days ago, just climbing a flight of stairs took me to the limit of my endurance. Some months I spend more time at Johns Hopkins than at home. At least the nurses have stopped wearing burkhas around me. The face masks, gowns and gloves were a bit unnerving.

…

The sky now looks bright again. Admittedly, this respite is likely to be just the eye of the hurricane before the cancer comes blasting back, but for some time ahead the weather looks to be spectacularly and undeservedly clear.

There is a good illustration of the concept if you search for “routine procedure” at cartoonbank.com

Please understand that this is just a temporary victory. Chemotherapy cannot cure me of metastatic cholangiocarcinoma, since the survival charts taper to zero by twenty-four months. Facing no prospect of therapies beyond toxic chemicals is crushing. I wish there were some way to connect this rare cancer to the most modern forefronts of medicine, perhaps as a genetics problem or an opportunity for an immunotherapy (cancer vaccine), but there isn’t any evident path on a timeframe available to me.

Nevertheless, this remarkable degree of remission has reset the clock to one helluva good starting point for that inevitable day when one of the cancer’s stem cells evolves resistance to the chemotherapy’s toxic charms and starts proliferating wildly. Then my oncologist will try out a new chemo recipe and the battle will be rejoined. Unless he runs out of chemo bullets first, I will survive to fight a third round. And so on for a fourth round.

Which brings us to the present. Today’s news sets a new high-water mark for the fight against this cancer, though my health is terrible. Seven months of intensive chemo have left me riddled by nausea, with pathetic endurance, poor short-term memory and a miniscule attention span, but I am finally free from pain, and day by day I am starting to get stronger.

In other words, I can now fight this disease from a position of microscopic tumor volume, negligible cancer pain, and increasing stamina (aside from the chemo’s horrific side effects). This is the right place to be starting the next round of battle against a malignancy biding its time as it accumulates mutations, waiting to evade the chemo agents and start proliferating wildly.

I plan to enjoy every day of the improving health, spending cherished time with my family and friends …

Winning this first victorious battle in an ultimately losing war has been the hardest time of my life so far, with only family and strong friendships keeping me above water. I am told that my loopiness from pain killers made dealing with me a tribulation at times, hard though that may be to believe. Beth and I appreciate the support and understanding more than words can convey. As for Joel and Michael, they are thrilled to have their father starting, however slowly, to get back onto his feet.

Consequently, Beth and I have decided take the boys to Israel Sunday, leaving anything work-related behind. We needed to do something dramatic. From the questions I get interrogated with, one would think that airlines and hotels had never encountered somebody making arrangements precipitously, at the last minute. They should see my cooking.

Let’s hope the news will always be this good.

Let’s.

Brad Wants You to Have Your Shots

An economist looks at stupid vaccination policies and throws up his hands in disgust:

A well-designed health care-financing system would dock providers whose patients failed to get all their vaccinations. If we had a well-designed health care-financing system, bureaucrats would be chasing us down the street with syringes full of vaccines, rather than rationing-by-hassle.

My ISP is Green

The ISP hosting this blog is now proudly green.

I don’t know how meaningful that is, but it takes a lot of power to run a huge server farm, so it’s at least interesting that they’re spending the money to purchase the compensating credits.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something.

Renewable Energy Credits

Putting a price on carbon output is just one way to help make the world a better place. It’s a first step towards true energy sustainability. Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “Renewable Energy Credits”.

We’ve purchased enough of these credits - which are retired after purchase and not resellable - to account for our energy usage. The proceeds of these credit purchases are then put toward funding further emission reduction and renewable energy projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, but this is the next best thing! Our Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) have been certified by Green-e.

So how many credits would it take to offset a house? In Florida? With air conditioners?

Study Predicts Fewer Hurricanes to Hit Florida

Unsurprisingly, the University is trumpeting (via its emailed newsletter) this new study — warming oceans may make more and nastier hurricanes, but also contributes to phenomena which weaken them (and tends to send them elsewhere — well south-east of us).

A change in the wind: global warming, wind shear, and future hurricane activity Climate model simulations for the 21st century indicate a robust increase in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic due to global warming, which may inhibit hurricane development and intensification. Historically, increased wind shear has been associated with reduced hurricane activity and intensity. This new finding is reported in a study by scientists at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, N.J., and appears in the April 18 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

While other studies have linked global warming to an increase in hurricane intensity, this study is the first to identify changes in wind shear that could counteract these effects.

“The environmental changes found here do not suggest a strong increase in tropical Atlantic hurricane activity during the 21st century,” says Brian Soden, associate professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at RSMAS and the paper’s co-author. However, the study does identify other regions, such as the western tropical Pacific, where global warming does cause the environment to become more favorable for hurricanes.

“This study does not, in any way, undermine the widespread consensus in the scientific community about the reality of global warming,” says Soden. “In fact, the wind shear changes are driven by global warming.”.

Slashdot on What's Killing the Bees

Slashdot | Are Mobile Phones Wiping Out Bees?

As is often the case, the comments are priceless.

Evolution in Action

Protein Analysis of T. Rex Bone Finds Link to Chickens:

“Unleashing a new, highly sensitive medical analyzer on fossilized bone from Tyrannosaurus rex, scientists have for the first time determined the precise molecular code of a dinosaur protein.

“The feat, long presumed impossible because so little protein is present in dinosaur remains, opens the door to a redrawing of the evolutionary tree — one based on molecular evidence instead of the crude comparisons of bone shapes and sizes that experts rely on today.

“The first results, described in today’s issue of the journal Science, show that the collagen protein in T. rex bone is extraordinarily similar to that of the modern chicken, confirming current thinking that dinosaurs’ nearest cousins are birds.”

(I imagine that although there was probably a lot of good eating on a t.rex that they would have been hard to domesticate.)

Al Gore's Opening Statement

Al Gore’s opening statement to his congressional testimony on global warming:

Bonus video: Boxer Tells Sen. Inhofe “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Cold Fusion Reaction Replicated

Reports that the bubble had burst for a form of cheap, table-top nuclear fusion may have been premature. Rusi Taleyarkhan, the physicist at the centre of a furore surrounding so-called bubble fusion, was last week cleared of scientific misconduct.

In 2002, Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, published a paper in Science claiming that bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sound waves produced tiny bubbles that triggered nuclear fusion reactions. Then in March 2006, Purdue began investigating allegations of misconduct against Taleyarkhan, amid accusations that the evidence of fusion he reported was actually caused by a radioactive isotope of californium.

However, on 7 February, Purdue absolved Taleyarkhan’s group of any misconduct. The verdict follows independent verification of Taleyarkhan’s results by Edward Forringer of LeTourneau University in Texas and his colleagues last November (Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, vol 95, p 736).

I want my “Mr. Fusion”!

Is the Universe 'Finite and Relatively Small'?

Could it be that the Universe is “only” 43 billion-light years in diameter at its smallest? And that it is shaped like a soccer ball — or rather, like a Poincaré dodecahedron? And that when you get to an edge, you just reappear at the other side, rotated 36 degrees?

Apparently, current information about the background radiation of the universe is sufficiently consistent with this hypothesis so that we can’t rule it out. The full explanation is in A cosmic hall of mirrors. It’s a little complex, but here’s a slice of it,

We found that the smallest dimension of the Poincaré dodecahedron space is 43 billion light-years, compared with 53 billion light-years for the “horizon radius” of the observable universe. Moreover, the volume of this universe is about 20% smaller than the volume of the observable universe. (There is a common misconception that the horizon radius of a flat universe is 13.7 billion light-years, since that is the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light. However, the horizon radius is actually much larger because photons from the horizon that are reaching us now have had to cross a much larger distance due to the expansion of the universe.)

A rocket leaving the dodecahedron through a given face immediately re-enters through the opposite face, and light propagates such that any observer whose line-of-sight intercepts one face has the illusion of seeing a slightly rotated copy of their own dodecahedron. This means that some photons from the cosmic microwave background, for example, would appear twice in the sky.

There’s a lot more packed into this relatively short article, and it’s fairly accessible to people like me without any knowledge of advanced cosmology. And I really like that this hypothesis generates testable (if rather hard to test) hypotheses.

Type 1 Diabetes Cure?

This sounds like a fairly major discovery if it pans out, Diabetes breakthrough: Toronto scientists cure disease in mice.

The Market Believes in Climate Change

The Bush administration may claim that climate change is a myth, but the market believes in it. And insurance carriers are adjusting their rates, and even their willingness to write policies accordingly.

Today, it's mostly hurricanes and coastal flooding. Tomorrow it will be higher sea levels (more flooding) and changes in crop patterns.

Not that one expects this administration to pay any more attention to market signals than any others.

Blinding Us With Science

Here's a cool(ing) idea from Nick Szabo.

Scott Adams Can Speak Again

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert has become the first person in recorded history to recover from Spasmodic Dysphonia (an inability to speak). It's an amazing story.

Incidentally, I was horrified to discover recently that my children appear to think Dilbert is the Great Guide to Office Life. They take it as nearly true, just as they used to treat Calvin and Hobbes as the Guide to Excruciatingly Appropriate Household Behavior.

Avian Flu: Human to Human Transmission?

While we were distracted with searches of congressional offices and the Enron verdicts, back in reality, the flu virus may be doing that mutation thing. Or not.

The ever-informative W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. reports on More evidence human-to-human transmission is occurring. The picture is murky. But the news ain't that good. WHO says, "...it is likely that for the first time H5N1 has spread from human to human to human -- three generations of cases, possibly four. This does not mean that a pandemic strain has started but it is another warning signal."

The National Broccoli Crisis

It seems that selecting plants for their ability to grow quickly results in their containing less nutrition.

Fruits, vegetables not as nutritious as 50 years ago. In spite of what Mother taught you about the benefits of eating broccoli, data collected by the U.S. government show that the nutritional content of America's vegetables and fruits has declined during the past 50 years -- in some cases dramatically.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines -- protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

Davis said he doesn't want his study to encourage people to stop eating vegetables on the grounds they lack nutrients.

"That's completely wrong," he said, contending his study shows that people need to eat more vegetables and fruits, not less. "Vegetables are extraordinarily rich in nutrients and beneficial phytochemicals. They are still there, and vegetables and fruits are our best sources for these."

Neutrinos Have Mass?

The BBC reports (March 31, not April 1) on findings that neutrinos have mass! If correct (the data seem to be at the edge of our ability to measure) then that is double plus ungood for the Standard Model, helpfully summarized by the BBC in this little chart:

In other science news, evidence that cell phones do cause cancer.

Father Frank Speaks Out on the Strike

Father Frank Corbishley is about the farthest thing from a radical priest I can imagine. By that I don't mean he's reactionary, but that I have no idea what his politics are. He presents as very middle of the road. He's nice, gentle, soft-spoken, super-decent. I don't usually run in the company of Anglican priests, but we have children about the same ages, and I got to know him a bit via the kids' on-campus daycare/pre-school, which is attached to the campus Anglican church in some fashion (both physically and legally or, if you prefer, corporately and corporately).

No fire-breathing radical here.

Let's listen to what Father Frank has to say about the strike,

Every day striking workers arrive to the Episcopal Student Center on the University of Miami campus, a place now known as "Strike Sanctuary," where I serve as chaplain. The strike is now in its 4th week and the workers remain strong, but a bit worn out from the continual harassment they are receiving from their employer, UNICCO, the contracting service against whom they are striking. One worker told me that last Saturday UNICCO called him 17 times, pressuring him to return to work. Many workers receive phone calls from their UNICCO supervisors, some threatening to fire the workers if they do not return to work.

In spite of the pressure, the workers fill the sanctuary each day as they courageously engage in this David and Goliath struggle. I am moved by how they encourage and support one another. I am also impressed with how the union leadership cares for them by providing the workers with income, food, and meaningful actions to bring this strike to a just resolution.

On behalf of the Task Force, we want to thank the clergy who have written, called, visited, led services, prayed, and joined us in marches as your support means a lot to us and the workers. We especially want to thank Bishops Frade, Ottley, and Estevez, who have given us spiritual strength throughout this journey.

Perhaps you have read that UM President Donna Shalala, although previously stating to the Coral Gables Clergy that she must remain neutral, has announced a raise and "affordable health care" to the striking workers. As a result, some people think that the strike is over or that the main issue has been resolved. I believe this was a tactical move on the part of the university to weaken community support for the workers and is an effort at union busting. The fact that Shalala made this announcement during Spring Break, when students and faculty were away, was another intentional tactical move on her part; there was no on-campus constituency to respond to her for several days. Since returning to campus, the faculty senate has unanimously passed a resolution and STAND, the student group, has run an op-ed piece in the student newspaper. Both groups are in full support of the workers continuing their struggle to unionization and our clergy task force joins them in this support.

So, there has been a victory for the workers but it is only a partial victory. The workers remain steadfast in their goal of achieving a union which will guarantee them their rights on the job, safe working conditions, protection against reprisals, and a lasting voice on the job. As you will read in my letter to the editor, published yesterday in the Miami Herald, this has been the goal of the workers all along.

In order to support the workers, the Coral Gables Task Force is inviting you to participate in a march on Tuesday, March 28 at 12 noon. Religious leaders, workers, faculty, students, and community leaders have come together to help the workers achieve their goal of unionization. The march will begin at my church, 1150 Stanford Drive in Coral Gables.

Since I am at a conference this weekend, please feel free to call Rev. C.J. Hawking of Interfaith Worker Justice at 786-280-6902 with any questions you may have. If you wish to speak to me directly, you may leave a message on my cell phone at 305-606-0923 and I can get back to you on Sunday afternoon.

Thank you for your continued prayerful support.

The Rev. Frank Corbishley, Chaplain,
Chapel of the Venerable Bede
Chair, SFICWJ Coral Gables Task Force

Bush Bird Flu Plan: Tuna Under the Bed

The Bush administration unveiled its bird flu plan for the US this weekend. And you can't make this stuff up,

ABC News: Ready or Not, Bird Flu Is Coming to America: In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a dealy bird flu outbreak approaches the United States.

See, if everything breaks down and the government isn't ready, there aren't enough ventilators, it was your own fault for not listening to their warnings.

Yesterday New Orleans, tomorrow the nation.

Avian Flu Avian Flu Avian Flu

W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. brings us this really cheerful prediction about avian flu from the Boston Globe:

''We're not going to have much warning," [WHO Scientist Dr. Michael] Ryan said. ''One day, two days, maybe three, if we are extremely lucky. Once contagious among humans, the virus will spread like a tsunami. There will be the flash point -- probably in Asia, perhaps somewhere else -- followed by waves of infection that would hurtle around the world."

It could be awful:

In worst-case scenarios based on extrapolations from the 1918 outbreak, some epidemiologists predict that a pandemic spawned by bird flu could kill 140 million people in a matter of months, and sicken so many hundreds of millions that some governments and national economies would collapse.

Or it could just be really really bad:

The World Health Organization is urging countries to brace for a ''mild to moderate" pandemic likely to kill 2 million to 7.4 million people, according to Ryan.

''We need to steer away from worst-case scenarios or we'll end up like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, too terrified to move," he said. ''We need preparation, not panic."

Elephants Want Revenge?

The UK Telegraph summarizes a story in the New Scientist (the original seems to be behind a pay wall) as suggesting that elephants are seeking revenge for the killing of their relatives and friends,

The reputation that elephants have for never forgetting has been given a chilling new twist by experts who believe that a generation of pachiderms may taking revenge on humans for the breakdown of elephant society.

The New Scientist reports today that elephants appear to be attacking human settlements as vengeance for years of abuse by people.

Destined for reform school?

Annals of Mind Control

Via Slashdot comes news that Mind Control Parasites in Half of All Humans:

According to a Yahoo News story, half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, a parasite shown to alter the brain function of rats, inducing them into behavior that benefits the parasite but is suicidal for the rat. So what affect does it have on humans?

The research is by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey -- a name of some controversy for his earlier research in schizophrenia -- so it's not surprising that he suggests there may be a link to it. (According to the Wikipedia article linked above, Dr. Torrey "told The New York Daily News his wife thinks he is going to be assassinated by cat lovers.")

Myself, I'd like to see a whole set of correlations of Toxoplasma infection to various behaviors, such as spending, eating, and -- why not? -- voting...

This Sounds Scary

Bird flu has been identified in Greece, Italy and Bulgaria as well as Nigeria. Which means it's Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Yikes.

Meetings Considererd Harmful

Meetings considered harmful. But we knew that.

It does, however, allow me to include a shot of one of my all-time favorite Demotivators:

Please Let Me Know When It's Time To Panic (Bird Flu)

Uh-oh: Boing Boing: Bird flu, ahoy! (click through to see the graphic)

Er, don't lots of migratory birds winter in Florida? (I gather they don't tend to fly here from Europe, that's just the people, but presumably as soon as we have bird flu almost anywhere in the North, South or Central America, we get it too, right?)

Bait and Switch

A headline of the sort "Testing slimming powers of tequila's agave" stirs promising thoughts. As does the inital text:

Scientists from Mexico's tequila producing region say juice extracted from the blue agave plant, best known when distilled into the fiery spirit, may help dieters shed pounds and cut cholesterol.

Sign me up! Sign me up!

But alas,

Sadly for the world's growing band of tequila lovers, agave's possible health benefits are lost when the plant is distilled into alcohol.

Figures.

Bird Flu

Forget hurricanes. Forget global warming. For a good panic, consider Bird Flu.

Apparently it's broken out of China and is now Epidemic in Indonesia. Or, at least, in the cautious language of bureaucrats "Indonesia could be on the brink of a bird flu epidemic if the virus continues to accelerate." Normally when bureaucrats will go that far, it translates into something worse.

Having just had graphic proof that the US government cannot be trusted to protect us from the consequences of disaster, coupled with the fact that at present the US has no stockpiles of the relevant drugs -- in part due to sloth, in part due to the speed at which this strain can mutate -- some people are going all survivalist on us.

Take a look, for example, at Flu Pandemic Preparation. (And don't forget your emergency gear.)

I'm not entirely sure I get the threat model here. Why do I need a month's worth of food? Is the idea I hide in my house to avoid infection, or that everyone around me is sick and dying and the FEMA trucks don't come?

On a slightly more positive note, there's the FluWiki, "a new experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health" where presumably rather than work on self-directed survivalist, the objective is a community-centered response.

Meanwhile, I'm still scratching my head as to why I want to pack my brown rice in dry ice, which presumably will keep it cold in my very hot garage for only a very limited period. Does the CO2 have preservative qualities too? If I even knew where to get dry ice. Or 50 pound bags of rice, for that matter.

Just in Case You Were Worried We'd Run Out of Hurricane Names

Here we are up to "O" and the hurricane season still has a lot of punch left in it. Plus the official list only uses 21 letters in the alphabet: Q, U, X, Y and Z are left out -- why no Zelda nor Zeke? So we only have six names left for this year (Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma -- watch out for Tammy). But fear not!

In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.

One of my colleagues suggested the other day that instead of boring Greek letters, they should go for double letters: Aaron, Bebe, Cece, Dede, Fifi and so on. I mean, who wants to be flattened by hurricane Beta?

Public Health Consequences of Katrina

Via Dave Farber’s mailing list, an interesting and sobering analysis of Hurricane Katrina’s public health consequences.

Is the Common Banana Doomed?

Can This Fruit Be Saved?: The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction. …

For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless. Our banana, called the Cavendish, is one variety Aguilar doesn’t grow here. “And for you,” says the chief banana breeder for the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Investigation (FHIA), “the Cavendish is the banana.”

The Cavendish—as the slogan of Chiquita, the globe’s largest banana producer, declares—is “quite possibly the world’s perfect food.” Bananas are nutritious and convenient; they’re cheap and consistently available. Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn’t matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands—each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.

… in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming.

Climate Change Follies

EnergyBulletin.net has a jolly little item about a little ice age about to erupt on England: Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows:

CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.

The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.

...

Such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation’s power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C.

Wadhams and his colleagues believe, however, that just such changes could be well under way. They predict that the slowing of the Gulf Stream is likely to be accompanied by other effects, such as the complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020 and almost certainly by 2080. This would spell disaster for Arctic wildlife such as the polar bear, which could face extinction.

Can I Deduct Laphroaig as a Medical Expense?

Whisky ‘helps fight cancer’

Drinking malt whisky may help prevent cancer, a scientific conference has been told.

The medicinal properties of antioxidants in red wine are well known, but delegates at a biochemistry conference were told that whisky offered “even greater health benefits”.

Dr Jim Swan, a consultant to the drinks industry, said: “There has been much in the news about the health benefits of antioxidants in red wine. By contrast, very little has been said about malt whisky distillery science.

“However, research has shown that there are even greater health benefits to people who drink single malt whiskies. Why? Single malt whiskies have more ellagic acid than red wine.”

But is there more ellagic acid in a small whisky or a large glass of red wine?

And does that I mean I can deduct the Laphroaig if I just drink it for, um, medicinal purposes? Especially given what it’s selling for these days.

And, of course, there’s always a killjoy somewhere:

However, Dr Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK, pointed out that the same acid was found in fruit, and said she was “very concerned” that whisky was being promoted as a cancer prevention agent without data to support the claim.

“On the contrary, there is considerable data documenting the link between drinking excess alcohol and the increased risk of a number of cancers, particularly in smokers,” she said.

I don’t smoke, so that should be no obstacle.

If the tax break thing doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just eat more raspberries.

Time Traveling Plans Put On Hold

Chris Ambler, a veteran of the DNS wars, throws cold water on my plans to attend MIT’s upcoming time travel convention at a later date to be announced. It seems that I will also need to perfect my FTL transport in order to get back here in a reasonable time from wherever the Earth has gone, cf. Ambler On The Net, An Aside… The Future Is Now… and Then.

On the other hand, I was always under the impression that the light-speed barrier is tied to our inability to travel in time, as doing so could mean that some information had traveled faster than light. Even so, the navigation issue looks substantial.

Which actually brings me to a serious question I’ve wondered about for years: given the movement of the galaxy, the solar system, our galactic cluster and all the other things rushing and spinning, about how fast is everyone on Earth actually moving relative to frame of the universe’s center, if there is one? I suspect that’s not as meaningful a question as it feels, given what I dimly recall about theories of expansion of the universe, and the serious possibility that there is no there back there, but I’d like to know anyway.

Links We Cannot Resist Dept.

Birds May Be Behind Exploding German Toads.

Please note that this is filed under “Science” not humor, because it’s apparently true.

This Explains a Lot

I’m doomed.

Emails ‘pose threat to IQ’:The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached “startling” levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

Respondents’ minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night’s sleep.

…The average IQ loss was measured at 10 points, more than double the four point mean fall found in studies of cannabis users.

The most damage was done, according to the survey, by the almost complete lack of discipline in handling emails.

I’m so doomed.

Unnatural Selection?

Via Cosmic Iguana - Voice of the Evil Doers comes news that there is now “overwhelming” (well, at least very substantial) evidence that Bisphenol A, aka BPA, a chemical found in plastics, is likely leaching out of plastic bottles and into our bodies. Each bottle may add only a trace amount, but the cumulative of this estrogenic compound effect might, the Iguana suggests, explain radically dropping sperm counts in the US.

Are we living an unintentional evolutionary experiment in which we select strongly for resistance to an estrogenic compound? Perhaps…but only if the effect is real, large numbers of people don’t have diets that avoid the plastics, and — most importantly — only if this is is something to which some part of the population actually has a resistance.

Black Hole Created in Lab (Maybe). Sounds Dangerous To Me...

You’d think they’d know if they have a black hole or not. But apparently it’s only speculation. BBC : Lab fireball ‘may be black hole’. Or you can read the rather mathy paper, The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole.

I’m presuming it’s not going to eat the earth up because in tiny fractions of a second it doesn’t get big enough to be stable and thus flies appart when they turn off the juice.

Anyway, while we wait for the earth to collapse, there’s a highly amusing Slashdot discussion of the alleged phenomenon.

Pineapples as Painkillers?

Apparently, pineapples are painkillers:

It turns out that pineapple has a unique set of enzymes with anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. The main one is bromelin/bromelain, which is an anti-inflammatory, prostaglandin suppressant, anti-coagulant and mild painkiller. I have not confirmed that it’s safe to mix pineapple/bromelain with your usual NSAIDs but the Arthritis Foundation does not note this as a risk, nor does this very comprehensive article noting clinical trials (one currently ongoing) and previous studies. Pineapple being cheap this time of year, and non-organic pineapple having a very low probability of pesticide treatment, further investigation is strongly recommended.

And if that doesn’t work, try a virtual reality game:

The BBC reports that people absorbed in virtual reality simulations or games are oblivious to pain that normally cripples them. They’re so mentally busy that there’s no attention left for physical signals. This is a logical extension of how pro athletes are able to continue playing despite severe injury. The project is being developed by the University of Washington Harborview Burn Center, which also developed Spiderworld to use virtual reality to remove fear of spiders

Both items from an odd, and apparently no longer updated, blog I stumbled on called The Clean Shopper .

Carrots Fight Cancer

Chemical in carrots keeps cancer at bay.

A chemical found in carrots [falcarinol] has been found to reduce the risk of cancer in laboratory rats by a third.

But it seems the carrots should be fresh and raw to get the full effect. And, don’t worry about the beta caroten,

Carrots have been somewhat unpopular for some time, since it was found that the substance beta caroten found in carrots increases the risk of cancer. According to the researchers at Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, however, this will never become a problem, since one would have to eat 2 ­ 3 kilos of carrots every day, or eat pure beta caroten in the shape of pills, in order to be at risk.

Amazingly rare that something I like is good for you.

(Google assures me that falcarinol is also found in English Ivy and in Ginseng.)

Coral is Doomed? And Fish With It?

It seems somewhat strange that an effect this basic would only suddenly be noticed. There’s no doubt the coral around here is dying, but that’s thought to be caused by pollution, boats, and divers. This sounds altogether more serious:

Acid seas ‘will kill off coral within 70 years’: Coral reefs could be dead within two generations and cod replaced by jellyfish because of the acidification of the sea, scientists said yesterday.

The potentially disastrous problem, discovered only recently, is being caused by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

…

Carol Turley, the head of science at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, told a conference in Exeter that the acidity of the sea was rising through chemical processes that turned carbon dioxide into carbonic acid.

She said: “It is happening now; nobody is saying it is not happening. It is O-level chemistry but no one noticed until 15 months ago. This is a rapid change that the world - and the organisms in the sea - have not seen for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. …

Ms Turley said that cod and other fish ate plankton and shellfish that relied for their growth on calcium carbonate. If fish were not there, the sea would fill up with organisms such as jellyfish, which could eat other kinds of plankton.

“In cartoon form, you could say that people should be prepared to change their tastes from cod and chips to jellyfish and chips,” she said. “The whole composition of life in the oceans will have changed.”

Add in the already severe issue of the exhaustion of fish stocks from overfishing and profligate use of drift nets and I wonder if ocean collapse won’t be the major environmental crisis of the mid-21st century.

I don’t think I will like jellyfish sandwiches.

Good News for Florida: Sunlight Also Fights Cancer

Sun Exposure May Fight Some Cancers.

• Fatty French cheese fights heart disease when combined with wine
• Sedentary life style increases intelligence and resistance to disease
• Reading small print in the dark improves eyesight
• Regular chocolate consumption causes ‘Teela Brown’ effect

Triangles Are So Yesterday

“It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and a nobleman, or—well, any of those problems—as the triangle. But they are never unqualified triangles. They are always isosceles—never equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert and Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.”

—O. Henry Schools and Schools.

Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School:

more (via Boing Boing).

Limited Form of Cold Fusion Replicated in Lab

Goodbye “cold fusion” and hello “bubble fusion”.

Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement.

This approach, called bubble fusion, and the new experimental results are being published in an extensively peer-reviewed article titled “Additional Evidence of Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation,” which is scheduled to be posted on Physical Review E’s Web site and published in its journal this month.

The research team used a standing ultrasonic wave to help form and then implode the cavitation bubbles of deuterated acetone vapor. The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and inside the bubbles. Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin.

These new data were taken with an upgraded instrumentation system that allowed data acquisition over a much longer time than was possible in the team’s previous bubble fusion experiments. According to the new data, the observed neutron emission was several orders of magnitude greater than background and had extremely high statistical accuracy. Tritium, which also is produced during the fusion reactions, was measured and the amount produced was found to be consistent with the observed neutron production rate.

Earlier test data, which were reported in Science (Vol. 295, March 2002), indicated that nuclear fusion had occurred, but these data were questioned because they were taken with less precise instrumentation.

“These extensive new experiments have replicated and extended our earlier results and hopefully answer all of the previous questions surrounding our discovery,” said Richard T. Lahey Jr., the Edward E. Hood Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer and the director of the analytical part of the joint research project.

I think this is still a long way from powering my laptop, though.

Bad News for Florida

Latest study predicts 10°C global warming.

Increased levels of greenhouse gases will have a much greater impact on climate change than previously thought and will lead to a “dramatically different” future, according to the largest ever climate change experiment.

If the predicted levels of greenhouse gases predictions are reached, the ice caps are likely to have melted and Britain will be an average 10°C warmer.

Then again, maybe we’ve got some time to prepare:

The first results from climate prediction.net show that average temperatures could eventually rise by up to 11°C – albeit after a new global climate pattern has been established over several hundred years, even thousands of years - even if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are limited to twice those found before the industrial revolution.

The results are based on a distributed computer model run as a screen saver:

The experiment, launched in Britain in 2001 on the science page of The Daily Telegraph, has since seen about 100,000 PC users around the world download a special screen saver to run a Met Office computer model to explore a vast range of climate change scenarios.

Two Optical Illusions: One Smart, One Stupid-Scary

The Dragon Illusion (video) is one super-smart illusion. It uses the way eyes and brain are wired to take advantage of mistaken assumptions:

When we see a solid object rotating, there are all sorts of clues that tell us what is going on, which way it is rotating, etc. The dragon gives us the wrong clues, because we mis-interpret what its shape is. The nose of the dragon appears to be pointing out towards the viewer, but in fact the dragon’s head is concave.

The Bush plan to create deficit-cutting bragging rights also tries to take advantage of mistaken assumptions, primarily the one that our goverment wouldn’t lie quite this brazenly:

To make Mr. Bush’s goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year’s actual shortfall of $413 billion.

By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush’s five-year budget window. …

“I’ve been watching this more than 30 years, and I have never seen anything quite this egregious,” said Stanley Collender, a longtime author on budget issues and a senior vice president at Financial Dynamics, a communications firm in Washington. …

Administration officials are omitting a second big group of costs for goals Mr. Bush has identified but not formally proposed.

By far the biggest of these is his plan to privatize Social Security in part and let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts.

In otherwords, a complete tissue of lies.

Trickery makes for cute toys, but not cute budgets.

No Place to Hide?

Today’s news about the horrific Tsunami in South Asia reminds me of the question I was pondering during our recent spate of hurricanes in Florida: Where should paranoid people live? What parts of the globe are least likely to have a natural disaster, be it earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, forest fire, mudslide, or the like?

Good Thing Two Kids Was Enough

They only measured lap heat, not actual sperm production, but the results are suggestive: Laptops may damage male fertility.

I can hear the jokes already.

While You Were Worrying About the Budget

While you and I were worrying about the budget — borrow more money to fund the move away from guaranteed social security???? — The American Street has been Waiting for a Protein to Shift.

Flu pandemic? If this keeps up I’m expecting a Biblical Flood.

Oh, wait. Global warming means Florida is going to be under water.

No Borscht This Winter

U.S. Reports Possible Case of Mad Cow.

Maybe it’s natural cynicism. Maybe it’s living in the UK during their right-wing government’s denial of what turned out to be a serious Mad Cow problem (right down to the then-Agriculture Minister feeding his young daughter a hamburger on national TV). Maybe it’s an economically irrational attempt to control visible if low-probability risk in a world full of invisible higher-probability risks. But Caroline and I don’t believe the US government has a handle on the potential for a Mad Cow epidemic — it isn’t doing enough testing, for one thing — and we haven’t been eating any beef for months now.

So, no borscht this winter (the family recipe involves beef as well as kasha and sour cream).

Phthalates, *cough* *itch* *wheeze*, Who Would Have Guessed

Phthalates are bad for you:

Bornehag, CG, J Sundrell, CJ Weschler, T Sigsgaard, Björn Lundgren, Mikael Hasselgren, Linda Hägerhed-Engman. 2004. The Association between Asthma and Allergic Symptoms in Children and Phthalates in House Dust: A Nested Case-Control Study, Environmental Health Perspectives, in press.

This study links exposure to phthalates found in household dust to rhinitis, eczema, and asthma in children.

…

Phthalates are industrial chemicals used widely in modern commerce. Over the last several decades, exposure to phthalates has become ubiquitous and virtually unavoidable. There are many types of phthalates, each with its own chemical and physical properties and toxicological characteristics.

This sounds like it may be a signficant finding. Eczema and asthma are rising very fast in developed countries (especially the UK), but no one is really clear as to why. This might explain it: phthalates are emissions from plastic bottles, plastic wrap, PVC, many cosmetics, vinyl tile, and many other ubiquitous modern creations.

And this is more than just a correlation — there’s a biological mechanism suspected.

Uh-oh

New Hypoxic ‘Dead Zone’ Found Off Oregon Coast:

For the second time in three years, a hypoxic “dead zone” has formed off the central Oregon Coast. It’s killing fish, crabs and other marine life and leading researchers to believe that a fundamental change may be taking place in ocean conditions in the northern Pacific Ocean.

The event appears similar to one in 2002, when an area of ocean water with low oxygen content formed in the nearshore Oregon coast between Newport and Florence, causing a massive die-off of fish and invertebrate marine species. The fact that it’s happening again is triggering concern among marine scientists.

…

Dissolved oxygen levels are a great deal lower than those seen in the past 40 years. This is a disturbing trend with an unknown cause that scientists now say may reflect a major change in ocean circulation patterns, with serious impacts on marine biology.

“When you see the same thing happening with this regularity, it suggests that something is fundamentally different,” said Jane Lubchenco, the Valley Professor of Marine Biology at Oregon State University. “This is a significant departure from normal conditions and you have to wonder what’s going on. This ocean system has changed, and we’re paying attention.”

If This is True, then Palaeontologists Are Crueler than I Thought

According to an impeachable news source, the UK’s Guardian, in an otherwise unremarkable story about how scientists now think that T.Rex achieved its enormous size by an sudden four-ton teenage growth spurt, followed by the sort of short life we expect for binge eaters, one finds this remark:

The T rex in the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park famously snatched and devoured a lawyer cowering in a lavatory. Palaeontologists have since heartlessly adopted the lawyer as a standard unit of dinosaur diet.

Please say it ain’t so.

The Theory of Everything

Via Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm, a chart showing the theory of everything.

Spot the Fake(s)

At least one of the following is fake.

• The Forgotten Technology A “a retired carpenter with 35 years experience in construction” rediscovers a technology that would have allowed a remarkably small number of low-tech workers to build Stonehenge or the Pyramids. Quote: “I found that I, working alone, could easily move a 2400 lb. block 300 ft. per hour with little effort, and a 10,000 lb. block at 70 ft. per hour. I also stood two 8 ft. 2400 lb. blocks on end and placed another 2400 lb. block on top. This took about two hours per block. I found that one man, working by himself, without the use of wheels, rollers, pulleys, or any type of hoisting equipment could perform the task.”

• Speed of Light May Have Changed Recently Quote: “A varying speed of light contradicts Einstein’s theory of relativity, and would undermine much of traditional physics. But some physicists believe it would elegantly explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions. The threat to the idea of an invariable speed of light comes from measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force.”

• DVD Rewinder Quote: “Too many DVDs, and CDs and not enough time to rewind? Are your DVDs running a bit too slow? The DVD rewinder is the perfect solution! This rewinder has the exclusive Centriptal Velocity Spindle providing the world’s fastest DVD rewind!”

Chernoybl MotoPhotoBlog Had No Moto?

According to Boing Boing, channeling Neil Gaman (!), the MotoPhotoBlog I linked to a while back is semi-fraudulent. The pictures may be real, but the story isn’t:

I am sorry to report that much of Elena’s story is not true. She did not travel around the zone by herself on a motorcycle. Motorcycles are banned in the zone, as is wandering around alone, without an escort from the zone administration. She made one trip there with her husband and a friend. They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv.

Snookered me.

Chernobyl Images

This is one of the strangest and most disturbing things I’ve seen on the Internet: KIDDofSPEED - GHOST TOWN - Chernobyl Images. The daughter of a scientist who does testing in the devastated Chernobyl area has wangled a permit that allows her to ride her motorcycle through dangerous radioactive areas. Despite the attention she pays to her geiger counter, I can’t help but think this is a really stupid thing to be doing.

The pictures she publishes of what the land and buildings and remains look like in the contaminated area are simply horrific.

Sedna Doesn't Have a Moon

Sedna Mystery Deepens With Hubble Images Of Farthest Planetoid: Sedna’s existence was announced on March 15. Its discoverer, Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., was so convinced it had a satellite, that an artist’s concept of Sedna released to the media included a hypothetical moon.

Brown’s prediction was based on the fact, Sedna appears to have a very slow rotation that could best be explained by the gravitational tug of a companion object. Almost all other solitary bodies in the solar system complete a spin in a matter of hours.

“I’m completely baffled at the absence of a moon,” Brown said.

As you can see from this Hubble telescope photo, there is no sign of Sedna’s moon at all. Nope. Can’t see a thing.

Fascinating Account of Baboon Mores (or Memes!)

The NYT has a fascinating article on Baboon mores, No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture. When a freak illness killed off the most dominant and aggressive males, the tone of the whole troop became, well, kindler and gentler. Amazingly as new males joined the troop they got socialized into the dominant culture. Two generations after the die-off, the troop was still operating on a lower stress, higher happiness level.

The implications for faculty politics are left as an exercise for the reader.

Subvocalization is Real!

I never, ever, was able to suspend disbelief about subvocalization when reading science fiction. I could swallow warp drives, nanotech, even telephathy on a good day, but this silent speaking stuff seemed far too good to be true.

Well, NASA says it’s true.

Hail Sedna, 10th 'Planet'?

The Australian: It’s another world … but is it our 10th planet?. Think of all those maps and models of the solar system that will be obsolete…

Expresso is Good For You!

The BBC reports an Italian (naturally) scientist’s conclusion that Coffee is a ‘health drink’. I would have said ‘necessity’… (Spotted via Slashdot.)

Mars Suffering From Extended Drought

He’s probably thirsty:

The Cyborgs Are Coming

I think this means cyborgs, but it could be androids….

Cells can grow on silicon: Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.

“We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced,” said Naweed Syed, a neurobiologist at the University of Calgary’s faculty of medicine.

The nerve cells also exhibited memory traces that were successfully read by the chip, said Syed, co-author of the landmark study published in February’s edition of Physical Review Letters, an international journal.

More Evidence of Dropping Sperm Counts

The UK’s Daily Telegraph reports that sperm counts are falling in Scotland:

The largest British study into sperm counts has found that they have fallen by almost 30 per cent in 14 years, researchers announce today.

The survey, based on almost 16,000 semen samples taken between 1989 and 2002, lends weight to concerns that sperm counts are falling.

But it is a controversial area because an accurate number for “normal” sperm counts is not precisely known and some studies have failed to find evidence of a reduction.

…

Dr Bhattacharya said the results were significant. The level of 62 million did not affect a man’s fertility, “but we need to know if the counts are going to continue to fall.

…

Dr Bhattacharya said there were two broad reasons for the reduction: environment and genetic factors.

Other research has pointed to increased oestrogen in water supplies, the result of women’s use of the Pill and hormone replacement therapy.

Industrial processes have also been blamed, including the use of solvents and high concentrations of lead.

A recent paper suggested that plastic-lined nappies might play a part because they raised the temperature of baby boys’ scrotums.

The evidence is a little hard to parse. There’s evidence suggesting this is a world-wide problem, at least in industrialized countries, but there are are also national and regional variations, probably due to environmental factors.

From having lived both places, I get the impression that industrial pollution and exposure to chemicals and to radiation (think Sellafield) are greater on average in the UK than the US, so the environmental explanation seems plausible to me.

Not that things are rosy in the US….

Although in the US there’s evidence of dropping counts nationwide, there’s also some evidence to suggest that the in the US the problem may be more serious in rural areas than in cities (or at least, in the one Missippi rural are studied). This dovetails with the suggestion that pesticides may be to blame. (Another surprising suggestion, which doesn’t explain the city/rural result, is that the worldwide decline is due to putting iodine in table salt !)

A more comprehensive study reviewing US research on this subject is awaiting publication, but the web site describing it gives no hint of its conclusions.

Who Is More Reliable, NASA or NIMA?

I wouldn’t have thought this was a tough choice. Given recent history, NASA’s stock is rather low…which would make one think that the SIGINT folks, always the cream of the spy world in my book, ought to have the edge. But consider this tale of compartive evaluations of reconnaisance photos, Whatever Happened to Mars Polar Lander? U.S. Spy Agencies Might Know:

The loss of the Mars Polar Lander became a detective story that pitted photo analysts at a super-secret spy agency and NASA experts about the overall condition of the lost-to-Mars probe.

It’s a saga of light and dark pixels, egos, and professional courtesy, and a report that never saw the light of day, until now.
…
In an early attempt to find the spacecraft, overhead search imagery of the MPL landing site was acquired by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) system, carried by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor that had been orbiting the planet since 1997.

Both JPL as manager of the MPL mission, as well as Malin Space Science Systems, the primary contractor/operator of the MOC system, conducted additional imagery scans to look for the lander.

But locating MPL, or pieces of a wrecked spacecraft, proved inconclusive. Even if MPL sat on the surface intact it would have been tough to detect. The MOC system was right at the very limits of its abilities to clearly spot MPL hardware.

At NASA’s request, a team from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) — recently renamed as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — carried out a detailed search of the primary MPL landing area utilizing MOC images and an array of high-tech analytical equipment.

Why NIMA? The agency is both a combat support as well as national intelligence agency whose mission is to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, in support of our national security. The agency is an acclaimed leader in describing, assessing, and visually depicting physical features on Earth. In short, it makes use of such hush-hush tools as spy satellites.
…
NASA, in turn, reviewed the NIMA story — a nicely bound report, one that was complete with lots of Mars Global Surveyor imagery, other color pictures, drawings, circles and arrows throughout.

According to a source familiar with the report, and taking into account expert advice about the inner workings of Mars Global Surveyor’s MOC system, NIMA got it “embarrassingly wrong.”

The suspect pixels probed by NIMA were identified as electronic noise in the MOC hardware. The NIMA experts didn’t detect Mars Polar Lander, the source said, “they detected noise.”

The NIMA folks, of course, didn’t agree with this assessment.

I have no idea who is right, but I’m curious now, and look forward to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) which might decide the dispute. If NIMA was really taken in by ‘noise’ it will definitely shake my faith in the part of the intelligence apparatus I always ranked miles above the CIA. [#INCLUDE joke about finding WMD’s on Mars here.]

Mad Cows in Cosmetics and Pig Food?

The New York Times has a letter today in which reader Martha Hubbart quotes a “bit of verse [that] was written in response to ‘The Jungle,’ the 1906 novel by Upton Sinclair that exposed the appalling practices in the meat-packing industry”. It goes,

Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it’s labeled chicken.

This would have seemed a lot funnier had I not just read this other New York Times article which states,

the decision announced on Tuesday to ban downer cows from the food supply means that most such animals will be sent to rendering plants, which boil the carcasses to produce protein for poultry and swine feed, tallow, fat, oil and other products, including some used in cosmetics. As a result, much of the screening for mad cow disease will move away from slaughterhouses to rendering plants and farms.

(italics added).

If prions can cross species from cows to people, why can’t they do it via pigs, whose bodies are so like us that they are studied as sources of possible heart transplants? And, is putting the prions into lipstick or face powder really such a great idea?

Update: But it does give a whole new cast to the phrase “driven mad by her perfume”!

Mad Cow: US Learned Nothing from UK Experience

One of the most famous images of the UK’s incompetence over its Mad Cow infestation was the early pronouncement by then Agriculture Minister John Selwyn Gummer that all British beef was safe. It wasn’t. Now this: US Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman,

assured Americans: “The risk of spreading is low based on the safeguards and controls we have put in place.” She said the risk of the disease entering the human food chain was minimal. “I plan to serve beef for my Christmas dinner and we remain confident in our food supply,” Ms Veneman said, in an echo of the then British agriculture minister John Selwyn Gummer’s ill-fated ploy to have his young daughter eat a hamburger on behalf of British beef in 1990.

And, it seems that the US assurance is worth as little as the earlier British one: As Probe of Infected Cow Spreads, So Does Worry (talk about headlines that leave out the main point—the administration simply lied (again)!):

Cattle in other states may have eaten the same contaminated feed that infected a Washington state Holstein with mad cow disease, but investigators who want to track the infection to its source are being confounded by the lack of an organized system that would lead them to the herd where the cow was born, officials said yesterday.

The lack of a reliable tracking system, and a complex trail of clues, rumors and false leads, mean it could be days or months — or never — before all the links are fully explored, officials said.

Which is what one would suspect from the speed with which the phony ‘assurance’ was issued….

So, the US failed to put into place all the safeguards it should, it failed to have a decent tracking system, and it failed to level with the American people. In the UK many people on the left call the Tory party “the stupid party”; while perhaps unfair on economic matters, it was certainly fair on the Mad Cow issue.

How sad to see history repeating itself. Let’s hope it’s just farce and not tragedy.

Mad Cow Disease and Blood Donations

As the whole world knows by now, they’ve found a case of mad cow disease in the USA. Reported, but under-stated, is the fact that the meat processers tested the animal that arrived half-parylized, but had no hesitation in sending it right into the slaugherhouse and into our food supply. And indeed the law requires nothing else.

I spent several years living in a country — England — which woke up gradually to the fact that it had a serioius Mad Cow disease problem. [Best newspaper cartoon. One cow says to the other, “So, what do you think about this Mad Cow disease?” Second cow replies, “Doesn’t bother us ducks.”] When I got back to the US I found tha the Red Cross wouldn’t take my blood in blood drives, because I’d lived (oddly the rule didn’t apply to mere tourists) in a country where there were reported cases of Mad Cow disease. I presume that this rule will now be relaxed for domestic blood donations at least?

If we continue the path of recapitulating the not-very-admirable British experience (denial that there’s a big problem, no change in regulations, followed by a growth in the problem), expect a bunch of jokes about which of our politicians are infected. Probably Karl Rove is working them up already….