Category Archives: Science/Medicine

He's probably thirsty:

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.

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….

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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.]

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”!

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.