April 04, 2008

Pre-Chemo Fasting May Protect Healthy Cells

Health  Science/Technology

One of the reasons it's hard to kill cancer is that it's hard to create treatments that distinguish between cancer cells and normal cells, so it's hard to kill cancer without also killing the patient. Most chemotherapy agents broadly target all cells that are dividing, on the theory that cancer cells divide more often than most normal cells so you'll kill more cancer cells on average. But lots of normal cells become collateral damage in the process, leading to the well-known toxic side-effects of chemo. Hair follicle cells and cells lining the intestinal tract divide especially rapidly, which is why hair loss and nausea are common.

Ideally, the body's own immune system would kick in and selectively kill cancer cells, but there's a problem. The immune system is very good at detecting foreign invaders, but cancer cells are the body's own cells — good cells gone bad — so their external markers are largely indistinguishable from those of normal cells. A lot of research has gone into finding ways to differentiate between normal cells and cancer cells in the hopes of creating "targeted" therapies — chemotherapy agents that attack only cancer cells — but success, so far, has been very limited.

Some researchers have taken an entirely different tack: instead of trying to detect which cells are which and attack only cancer cells, find instead a way to protect healthy cells against chemotherapy. And it turns out there may be a very simple, drug-free way to pull this off. USN&WR:

Fasting for two days before chemotherapy might protect cancer patients against the toxic side effects of these powerful drugs by shielding healthy cells while dooming malignant cells to destruction, new research suggests. [...]

Although not yet replicated among patients, the preliminary animal research is encouraging: As little as 48 hours of starvation afforded mice injected with brain cancer cells the ability to endure and benefit from extremely high doses of chemotherapy that non-starved mice could not survive.

The finding was published in the March 31 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Longo noted that the idea first came from a different field of research: anti-aging science.

"We had found that healthy cells have a 'shield mode' -- a kind of protective strategy that allows the organism to be resistant to not just one but dozens of threats and stresses, including starvation," he said. "So we thought this characteristic might be a way to distinguish between normal cells and cancer cells when applying chemotherapy. And it turns out that it works for yeast, for human cells in test tubes, and here, in mice."

Following genetic manipulation of yeast to show that mimicking starvation could confer a life-prolonging protection against stress, the researchers induced glucose deprivation among a series of rat and human cell lines, some cancerous, some healthy.

This protected the healthy cells against exposure to toxic compounds, while leaving cancer cells unprotected.

In turn, the researchers then tested mice injected with brain cancer cells to see how they faired upon exposure to a high dose of the chemo drug etoposide. Noting that just one-third of this amount is considered to be the maximum for what is allowable for human treatment, Longo and his team compared results among mice starved for 48 hours and 60 hours pre-treatment with mice that were not starved.

While 43 percent of the non-starved mice died within 10 days of treatment, only one of the 48-hour starved mice died in that time. As well, while starved mice had lost 20 percent of their weight before treatment, most regained it back within four days of chemo exposure while the non-starved mice actually lost 20 percent of their weight post-treatment.

Non-starved mice also suffered toxic side effects, such as impaired movement, ruffled hair and poor posture. The 48-hour starved mice displayed no such problems.

Mice starved for 60 hours were exposed to even higher chemo doses. At that level, all non-starved mice died by the fifth day, at which point all the starved mice continued to survive. Again, almost all starvation weight loss was regained post treatment, and no signs of toxicity were evident.

Longo and his colleagues concluded that short-term starvation does appear to guard healthy cells and allow cancer treatment to attack only diseased cells. They said they are now organizing a human trial.

"We hope this works with patients, and we have reason to think it will," he said. "I think I'm more enthusiastic about this than anything else I've done. And you can see the potential for this being turned into something very, very useful. But we won't know until we do it."

Dwayne Stupack, an assistant professor of pathology with the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, described the current effort as a "reasonable" approach toward mitigating the undesirable effects of chemotherapy.

"We all know that people can go for a few days without eating, and it's not going to kill them, because the cells in our body are able to adjust and make do," he noted. "It's an intrinsic evolutionary stress response that is designed to keep those cells alive. And it turns out that this response also works to keep those healthy cells alive during chemotherapy."

"So, I think what they've done is very interesting and exciting, in the sense that the tumor they looked at is very aggressive, very lethal, and they were able to use what I would call relatively high chemotherapy without causing toxicity -- because the cells have already been conditioned to sort of shut down," Stupack said.

Stupack cautioned, however, that the starvation technique might not work for everyone. "There are certain tumors that may already be altering metabolism to normal tissue, and certain populations of cancer patients among whom an intrinsic stress response to the cancer is already under way," he noted. "In these cases, this approach might not achieve anything further. Those are the kinds of limitations that should be considered."

Very interesting, obviously. And it's free, non-toxic, and largely harmless. It will be interesting to hear what my oncologist has to say about it. One possible issue: getting chemo is an unpleasant process as it is. How much worse will it feel when one is ravenously hungry? Still, if it works...

[Thanks, Maurice]

Posted by Jonathan at 04:46 PM | Comments (4) | Link to this  

March 14, 2008

A Stroke Of Insight

Future  Science/Technology

It's Friday afternoon, you've got a little time. Do yourself a favor and watch this fascinating, deeply moving, and finally ecstatic talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor at this year's TED Conference. In 1996, she suffered a massive stroke that pretty much shut down the left hemisphere of her brain, bit by bit, over a four hour period. She tells what she learned, and it's much bigger and more beautiful than you think.

[Source]

Watch it.

Posted by Jonathan at 03:45 PM | Comments (3) | Link to this  

December 21, 2007

Plug-In Hybrids

Energy  Peak Oil  Science/Technology

Go here and click for a great little video on plug-in hybrids. The technology works. So Cal Edison has been running an all-electric fleet of big repair trucks and over 200 cars for 10 years or more. Batteries are rapidly getting smaller and more powerful. What's needed now are economies of scale.

What are we waiting for?

[Thanks, Miles]

Posted by Jonathan at 02:20 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

November 19, 2007

Amazon's Kindle

Science/Technology

Kinda interesting. Someday soon somebody will get this right, but Amazon looks to be well wide of the mark. Too expensive, too clunky, too limited. An over-priced novelty.

Bezos dreams of making the next iPod, but the iPod lets me do something I couldn't do before: shuffle among thousands of songs wherever I go. Kindle lets me carry hundreds of books, but people don't read books like they listen to songs. People listen while they're doing other things; hard to read a book that way. Besides, iPod without shuffle would be a lot less interesting; what's the shuffle equivalent for books? And what's with that keyboard? I want a touch screen and a stylus so I can write and highlight and create links freehand. I want easy interoperability with my computers and with the Internet. Basically, I want a tablet PC that really works, with a great screen, a low price tag, and access to all the world's books (including full text search). For starters.

Or what I've already got: books.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:52 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

October 30, 2007

The World Awakes

Science/Technology

Interesting article about a visit to Google headquarters, which is pretty much a paradise for its employees. I found this passage striking — and beautful:

In the lobby area of Building 43, a flat-screen monitor features a fancy, gorgeous representation of the planet Earth, revolving on its axis. As the world turns, fountains of variously colored sparkly light shoot up from the earth's surface. The efflorescence is a real-time representation of Google search activity. The different colors represent different languages. As the United States rotates by, an explosion of red streams into the stratosphere. Mexico is a slightly less busy yellow. China is mostly asleep, Europe a riotous rainbow. Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly completely dark.

I stood with two Google employees and watched the world go round, mesmerized, once again, at the sheer spectacle of human curiosity. All over the world, people wake up, log on, and start searching. This is what we do. If one of the quintessential traits of humanity is an endless quest for more knowledge (or porn), then here is how it can look — a technicolored extravaganza, an endless tsunami of fireworks. The world as giant brain, with each search a synapse firing. [...]

Staring at that globe, I found it easy to dream of a profusion of color so thick and intense as to drench every inhabited spot on the planet. That there would be no darkness, that surely, with all the world so busily engaged in trying to find things out, that we would end up, somehow, figuring things out. I know we want to.

Bearing that image in mind, how crazily archaic it seems, the way we invest so much political and economic power in so few hands. It's like we think we're still a small band of primates living in the forest somewhere. But it's a big world out there, and it's waking up.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:02 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

October 22, 2007

Tests Show High Chemical Levels In Kids' Bodies

Environment  Science/Technology

As increasingly sensitive tests become available for monitoring the levels of industrial chemicals in people's systems, the results are cause for alarm. CNN:

Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.

"In the beginning, I wasn't worried at all; I was fascinated," Hammond, 37, recalled.

But that fascination soon changed to fear, as tests revealed that their children -- Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 -- had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.

"[Rowan's] been on this planet for 18 months, and he's loaded with a chemical I've never heard of," Holland, 37, said. "He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that's been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats."

The technology to test for these flame retardants -- known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) -- and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it "body burden" testing, an allusion to the chemical "burden," or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as "biomonitoring."

Most Americans haven't heard of body burden testing, but it's a hot topic among environmentalists and public health experts who warn that the industrial chemicals we come into contact with every day are accumulating in our bodies and endangering our health in ways we have yet to understand.

"We are the humans in a dangerous and unnatural experiment in the United States, and I think it's unconscionable," said Dr. Leo Trasande, assistant director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

Dr. Trasande says that industrial toxins could be leading to more childhood disease and disorders.

"We are in an epidemic of environmentally mediated disease among American children today," he said. "Rates of asthma, childhood cancers, birth defects and developmental disorders have exponentially increased, and it can't be explained by changes in the human genome. So what has changed? All the chemicals we're being exposed to." [...]

Dr. Trasande said children up to six years old are most at risk because their vital organs and immune system are still developing and because they depend more heavily on their environments than adults do.

"Pound for pound, they eat more food, they drink more water, they breathe in more air," he said. "And so [children] carry a higher body burden than we do."

Studies on the health effects of PBDEs are only just beginning, but many countries have heeded the warning signs they see in animal studies. Sweden banned PBDEs in 1998. The European Union banned most PBDEs in 2004. In the United States, the sole manufacturer of two kinds of PBDEs voluntarily stopped making them in 2004. A third kind, Deca, is still used in the U.S. in electrical equipment, construction material, mattresses and textiles.

Another class of chemicals that showed up in high levels in the Holland children is known as phthalates. These are plasticizers, the softening agents found in many plastic bottles, kitchenware, toys, medical devices, personal care products and cosmetics. In lab animals, phthalates have been associated with reproductive defects, obesity and early puberty. But like PBDEs, little is known about what they do to humans and specifically children.

Russ Hauser, an associate professor of environmental and occupational epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, has done some of the few human studies on low-level phthalate exposure. His preliminary research shows that phthalates may contribute to infertility in men. A study led by Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester in New York shows that prenatal exposure to phthalates in males may be associated with impaired testicular function and with a defect that shortens the space between the genitals and anus. [...]

"I'm angry at my government for failing to regulate chemicals that are in mass production and in consumer products." Hammond says. "I don't think it should have to be up to me to worry about what's in my couch." [Emphasis added]

These kids weren't living on a toxic waste dump. The chemicals in their systems came from the normal stuff around them: their mattresses, pajamas, plastic bottles and toys. Sticking our heads in the sand won't fix it.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:14 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

October 08, 2007

The Secret History Of The War On Cancer

Corporations, Globalization  Ethics  Science/Technology

Over the weekend, I picked up a new book called The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist who heads the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh. It looked like something I'd want to write about on the blog, but who knows how soon I'll get to it. So many books, so little time. But today, Salon comes to the rescue with a review and interview. This is a long excerpt, but it's important:

Davis, who is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and formerly served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, argues that the United States' $40 billion "war on cancer" has focused far too much on treatment, and not nearly enough on prevention....For instance, in the late '60s, three years after the surgeon general declared that smoking causes cancer, the United States spent $30 million of taxpayer money to create a safer cigarette, essentially doing the tobacco companies' research and development for them. Needless to say, this effort failed, but it succeeded in giving the tobacco companies cover, assuring smokers that a safer cigarette was just around the corner.

Davis argues that again and again, from tobacco to benzene to asbestos, the profit motive has trumped concerns about public health, delaying, sometimes for decades, the containment of avoidable hazards. And, as in the current scientific "debate" about global warming, the legitimate need for ongoing scientific research about many possible carcinogens has been exploited by industry to promote the idea that there's really no need to worry.

In "The Secret History of the War on Cancer," we meet one of the foremost epidemiologists of the 20th century, who is revealed after his death to have been on the take from Monsanto to the tune of $1,500 a day, and we visit the site of former towns that have literally disappeared, like Times Beach, Mo., which since being declared a toxic waste site, has been incinerated, reduced to some grass, geraniums and tulips -- the only signs that anyone ever once lived there. [...]

Salon: In the U.S., one out of every two men and one out of every three women will develop cancer in their lifetimes....Testicular cancer in men under age 40 has risen 50 percent in a decade. What are the theories about why there might be such a radical increase?

Davis: In the United States and Japan, there has been a significant decline in the birth of baby boys. What does this have to do with testicular cancer? Well, there's a theory of testicular dysgenesis, which means that there is something on the Y chromosome that is transmitted to boys that is affecting their overall health, and it may affect whether or not a boy sperm works to fertilize an egg...And these things are likely to be related to early life exposures to hormone-mimicking chemicals....There's recently been a report from the Arctic Assessment of many more girls than boys being born. If something is affecting such an exquisitely sensitive part of human biology, then what else is it doing to us?

Salon: When we read about a study that says XYZ substance causes cancer in rats, how should we interpret it?

Davis: We differ from rodents by about 300 genes. That's it. The differences aren't nearly as big as some people would like you to think.

We use animal research to develop drugs. But when it comes to evidence that something causes cancer in an animal, something that might be used in our schools and homes, we say: "Well, wait. We better get proof of human harm." How can we say that we'll rely on animal studies when we're trying to invent drugs, and then deny their relevance to us when we're trying to predict, and prevent, human harms?

Salon: What's the alternative?

Davis: The alternative is to do experiments on people, or worse, which is what we are doing -- a vast uncontrolled experiment. We will never be able to answer many of these questions, because there is no control group. Who isn't exposed to cellphones? Who isn't exposed to aspartame? Who's not exposed to solar radiation? And that makes it very difficult to do studies of human health consequences. It really does. [...]

Salon: Why do you have concerns about aspartame, the artificial sweetener in many soft drinks and other low-calorie foods? [...]

Davis: In 1977, Richard Merrill, who later became dean of the University of Virginia Law School, was the chief counsel of the Food and Drug Administration, and he formally asked the U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury to decide whether or not to indict the producer of aspartame, G.D. Searle, for misrepresenting "findings, concealing material facts and making false statements" in aspartame safety tests.

This is not some left-wing group. This is the actual chief counsel of the FDA asking the U.S. attorney's office to convene a grand jury. It never happened, because by the time the grand jury was ready to be convened we had a new president. That president was Reagan, and within a month of Reagan taking office, he had a proposal from a guy you might have heard of named Donald Rumsfeld [who was then chief operating officer of Searle].

And Jan. 22, 1981, one day after Reagan's inauguration -- one day -- Searle reapplied for FDA approval. Prior to that, every single request for approval was turned down by all the scientists ever looking at the data. That's a fact. There's no dispute about that fact. And then, it gets approved May 19, 1981.

Remember what happened with the Reagan revolution? It was: "We need to get the government off our backs." One of the backs it got off of was suppressing the aspartame industry. Later, many of the people who worked at the FDA to evaluate aspartame ended up going to work for the company producing it. [...]

The thing that I'm most concerned about is the latest study from Italy. A typical rat study runs two years; that would be getting your rat to about my age: 60. People live now to their 90s. This study started their exposure when they were babies, like what we do now in the United States with aspartame, and let the rats live out their natural lifetimes until they were 3 years old.

And when they did that they found a significant increase in tumors that occurred only in that third year of life. Of course, the European Food Safety Authority, which sounds very independent, says the study is worthless. But I looked up the background on the people involved with the European Food Safety Authority, and many of them work directly for the food industry.

The Ramazzini Foundation, a toxicology institute, which did the study, is not known to be radical. Unlike most other sources of information in toxicology, it's truly independent. It is not funded by Monsanto. And what they found is that there is significant increase in lymphomas and leukemia, and that the increase comes not from consuming 800 cans of soda a day, but from consuming fairly moderate amounts of aspartame in these animals' lifetimes. They had 1,800 animals, and some of them were just consuming the equivalent of two cans of soda a day, two yogurts, 10 pieces of chewing gum. And at that level of consumption, there was a significant increase in cancer, and it only showed up in older rats.

Salon: How have recent court rulings made it harder to try to prevent cancer?

Davis: We have gone backward since the '70s. In the '70s, in the decision on lead in gasoline, the court said we could use experimental evidence that something was a threat to human health in order to prevent harm. The court repeatedly ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could use theories, models and estimates to prevent harm.

Now, we have to prove that harm has already happened before taking action to prevent additional harm. In the area of cancer this is a travesty, since most cancer in adults takes five, 10, 20 or 30 years [to develop]. It means that we have no opportunity to prevent cancer, because we must prove through human evidence that it's already happened....Ninety percent of all claims now for toxic torts are denied. [...]

I'm very, very concerned about the overuse of diagnostic radiation, especially in children. For example, CT scans [CAT scans] of the head and the abdomen. Now, obviously if you have a child with a potentially fatal head injury or a stomach bleed, you can use a CT scan.

Most people don't realize that a CT scan to the head of a baby can give you between 200 and 4,000 chest X-rays at once. And therefore they should be used in a much more limited way. And guess who agrees with me? The American College of Radiology has called for reducing the use of diagnostic radiation in children. [...]

[P]olar bears in the Arctic are showing up as hermaphrodites with toxic waste in their bodies that would qualify them for burial in a hazardous waste site. How do you think that they're getting exposed to these pollutants? They don't work at factories. But they are at the top of the polar food chain, and pollutants go up through the food chain stored in fat from the little fish to the big fish to the walrus to the polar bear. Ultimately, they're making it very clear that pollutants don't need passports, and that you can't ban toxic materials in one nation. It has to be a global policy. [...]

I've developed a theory of Xeno estrogen, named for the Greek word for "foreign." Basically, all of the risk factors that have been identified for breast cancer, except radiation, are related to the total lifetime exposure to hormones. So, the earlier in life you get your period and the later in life you go through menopause, the more hormones you're exposed to in your lifetime, and the greater your risk of breast cancer. The more alcohol you drink in your lifetime -- alcohol is highly estrogenic -- the greater your risk of breast cancer. The less exercise you get -- exercise lowers the amount of circulating estrogen -- the more estrogen in your life. The more fat in your body, the more estrogen, because fat is estrogenic. [...]

Why are more young girls going into puberty at an earlier age? Why are more young girls developing breasts? There are several reasons to think that hormones in personal care products may be playing a role, particularly for breast cancer in young black women.

Some black baby girls were found to have breasts between ages 1 and 3, and when Dr. Chandra Tiwary, who was a pediatric endocrinologist with the Air Force at Brooks Air Force Base, interviewed the mothers he found out the mothers were all putting a cream on the girls' scalps. And we don't know what the hell for sure was in all those creams then, but Dr. Tiwary found when the mother stopped using the cream, the breasts went away.

If something is making the breasts grow in a baby, what is it doing to others in terms of promoting growth at the wrong time, or promoting an improper or excessive amount of breast growth that could lead to cancer?

Salon: Why are you concerned about cellphones?

Davis: I can't tell you that cellphones are safe, and I can't tell you that they are harmful. That's the problem. The reason I can't is that there isn't really independent information, and the cellphone industry has been so quick to spin information.

Studies that you hear about that don't find a risk are often extremely limited, like the Danish Cancer Study. That's a ridiculous study. Anybody who used a cellphone for work was kicked out of the study, which is crazy, because those are the highest users. And they put all of these people together who were not using it for business -- the high users, the low users -- and they didn't find anything.

A study just released from France showed that people who used a cellphone for 10 or more years have double the risk of brain cancer. And people who owned two or more cellphones had more than double the risk of brain cancer. The level of this increase wasn't what we call statistically significant, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't important. [Emphasis added]

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the way we all hear things that ought to fundamentally adjust our way of thinking about the world, but with all the other input that's flooding our attention, most of it utterly trivial, the important thing soon fades from awareness. It's not forgotten exactly, but it's no longer in the foreground, and it's certainly not acted on.

For example. We all know that cigarette companies worked for decades to suppress information linking smoking and cancer. But we don't fully take on board the implications. These actions were taken by ordinary human beings in a corporate setting. The group-think and peer pressure of the workplace, the desire to get ahead or even just to put food on the table, the boundless human capacity for denial and rationalization, these things were enough to cause ordinary people to conspire in activities that killed many thousands of their company's customers. But here's the thing: there was nothing special about tobacco companies. Any number of modern corporations have similar internal dynamics, with similar results. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that any number of other corporations have knowingly downplayed or falsified information about the harmful effects of their products. This is what happens when you have powerful institutions whose sole guiding principle is to maximize profit. The tobacco company story is repeated over and over again. Connect the dots.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:45 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

August 31, 2007

Point, Click, Wiretap

Black Ops  Rights, Law  Science/Technology

Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that the FBI has developed a capability to instantly wiretap almost any communications device in the country. Wired:

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.

The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information — primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone — but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.)

DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders.

A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists. [Emphasis added]

The article says that the telecom companies retain control of their switches and only turn on a wiretap when presented with a court order. But it also says that the system is highly insecure, especially against abuse by FBI insiders.

To my mind, the most significant revelation is the degree to which surveillance capabilities are baked into the system. It's set up to be tappable from end to end. Even if the FBI doesn't abuse it, even if the NSA and the CIA and all the other agencies whose names we don't even know don't abuse it, it all sounds eminently hackable. As one of the computer scientists said in the article:

Any time something is tappable there is a risk. I'm not saying, "Don't do wiretaps," but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?

A hacker's playground.

[Thanks, Mark]

Posted by Jonathan at 02:54 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

August 23, 2007

Google Earth Looks Up

Science/Technology

Google Earth now maps the sky, including Hubble images and lots else. Free download here.

Amazing and beautiful.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

July 03, 2007

Bad News On Climate — Again

Environment  Science/Technology

Scientific papers tend to have a limited audience, but here's one that deserves to be front page news all over the world. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute and one of the world's foremost climate scientists, is lead author of a new study that concludes that the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), alarming as it was, may have been, in George Monbiot's words, "absurdly optimistic."

As we have noted here many times (for example, here), the most ominous global warming scenarios involve positive feedback loops that make GW self-reinforcing. The thawing of Siberian permafrost, for example, releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere — which causes further warming, which causes further thawing, and so on. Hansen et al look at the data on past ice ages and warming periods and conclude that such positive feedbacks make the earth's climate far more sensitive to climate "forcings" (i.e., things like greenhouse gases that upset the balance between the energy the Earth receives from the sun and the energy it radiates back out to space) than previously thought.

When major warming has occurred in the past, it has happened quite suddenly — on a scale of centuries or even decades, rather than millenia — because of the accelerating effects of positive feedback loops. A primary source of this abruptness is the sudden shift that occurs when ice changes phase — i.e., when it melts. When ice becomes wet, it suddenly reflects much less energy than before. The change in its reflectivity, or "albedo," means that more energy is absorbed, which causes more melting, in turn causing more of an "albedo flip," etc., etc. Self-reinforcing. Instead of a linear, gradual change, positive feedback creates a nonlinear system where change happens suddenly. Ice sheets melt, sea levels rise, and quickly.

The IPCC warned that sea levels could rise by as much two feet in the coming century as the West Antarctic ice sheet begins to melt. The melting of the entire ice sheet, though, they projected to take millenia. But according to Hansen et al, the IPCC view is inconsistent both with data on past climate changes ("paleoclimate" data) and with current observations. Ice sheets become unstable and break up suddenly. Hansen et al say it's "implausible" under a business-as-usual scenario (i.e., if humanity stays on its current course with respect to emissions) that the West Antarctic ice sheet would even survive the century. They're talking about the possibility of sea level rises of 75 feet or more.

Here's an excerpt from the paper's abstract:

Palaeoclimate data show that the Earth's climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. One feedback, the 'albedo flip' property of ice/water, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that 'flips' the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Inertia of ice sheet and ocean provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming. Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest human-made climate forcing, but other trace constituents are also important. Only intense simultaneous efforts to slow CO2 emissions and reduce non-CO2 forcings can keep climate within or near the range of the past million years.

"Whipsaw." "Cataclysm." Remarkably dramatic language for an article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. But there's a lot at stake. I recommend you go read the paper. The evidence is persuasive, and the conclusions could hardly be more important.

Posted by Jonathan at 06:50 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

May 09, 2007

Simply Amazing

Science/Technology

Amazing what some people can do. Makes you wonder about the brain's untapped potential.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:42 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

May 07, 2007

Colony Collapse

Environment  Science/Technology

From GNN, a long survey article on Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious malady that's wiping out large numbers of honeybees. Excerpts:

[A] strange new plague is wiping out our honey bees one hive at a time. It has been named Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, by the apiculturalists and apiarists who are scrambling to understand and hopefully stop it. First reported last autumn in the U.S., the list of afflicted countries has now expanded to include several in Europe, as well as Brazil, Taiwan, and possibly Canada.

Apparently unknown before this year, CCD is said to follow a unique pattern with several strange characteristics. Bees seem to desert their hive or forget to return home from their foraging runs. The hive population dwindles and then collapses once there are too few bees to maintain it. Typically, no dead bee carcasses lie in or around the afflicted hive, although the queen and a few attendants may remain.

The defect, whatever it is, afflicts the adult bee. Larvae continue to develop normally, even as a hive is in the midst of collapse. Stricken colonies may appear normal, as seen from the outside, but when beekeepers look inside the hive box, they find a small number of mature bees caring for a large number of younger and developing bees that remain. Normally, only the oldest bees go out foraging for nectar and pollen, while younger workers act as nurse bees caring for the larvae and cleaning the comb. A healthy hive in mid-summer has between 40,000 and 80,000 bees.

Perhaps the most ominous thing about CCD, and one of its most distinguishing characteristics, is that bees and other animals living nearby refrain from raiding the honey and pollen stored away in the dead hive. In previously observed cases of hive collapse (and it is certainly not a rare occurrence) these energy stores are quickly stolen. But with CCD the invasion of hive pests such as the wax moth and small hive beetle is noticeably delayed.

Among the possible culprits behind CCD are: a fungus, a virus, a bacterium, a pesticide (or combination of pesticides), GMO crops bearing pesticide genes, erratic weather. [...]

[A]utopsies of CCD bees showed higher than normal levels of fungi, bacteria and other pathogens, as well as weakened immune systems. It appears as if the bees have got the equivalent of AIDS. [...]

Bees certainly are important, and it will get ugly if we lose them. “It’s not the staples,” said Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. “If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that’s what it would be like” without honeybee pollination. [...]

Honey bees are used commercially to pollinate about one third of crop species in the U.S. This includes almonds, broccoli, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, and strawberries. [...]

Recent military research at Edgewood Chemical Biological Center claims to have narrowed the likely cause of CCD to a virus, a micro-parasite or both. [...]

[A] suspicious fungus was also discovered in them, suggesting the possibility that the fungus is either an immunosuppressive factor or the fatal pathogen that kills the bees. [...]

Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist [in Canada]. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at bushfarms.com. Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage...produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. [...]

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. [...]

It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time. [...]

This conclusion is not surprising, considering how the practice of beekeeping has been made ultra-efficient in a competitive world run by free market forces...Rare is the beekeeper that does not need pesticide treatments and other techniques falling under the rubric of "factory farming." [...]

Bees are finely tuned machines, much more robot-like than your average species. They operate pretty much like the Borg of Star Trek fame. A honey bee cannot exist as an individual, and this is why some biologists speak of them as super-organisms. They are sensitive barometers of environmental pollution, quite useful for monitoring pesticide, radionuclide, and heavy metal contamination. They respond to a vide variety of pollutants by dying or markedly changing their behavior....Some pesticides are exceptionally harmful to honey bees, killing individuals before they can return to the hive.

Not surprisingly, the use of one or more new pesticides was, and likely remains, on the short list of likely causes of CCD. But more than pesticides could potentially be harming bees. Some scientists suspect global warming. Temperature plays an integral part in determining mass behavior of bees. [...]

Erratic weather patterns caused by global warming could play havoc with bees’ sensitive cycles...[A Michigan beekepper] thinks CCD might stem from a mix of factors from climate change to breeding practices that put more emphasis on some qualities, like resistance to mites, at the expense of other qualities, like hardiness.

[A]nother possibility with CCD is that the missing bees left their hives to look for new quarters because the old hives became undesirable, perhaps from contamination of the honey. This phenomenon, known as absconding, normally occurs only in the spring or summer, when there is an adequate food supply. But if they abscond in the autumn or winter, as they did last fall in the U.S.,...the bees are unlikely to survive.

A bee colony is a fine-tuned system, and a lot could conceivably go wrong...[One] theory holds that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bee navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way home. German research has shown that bees behave differently near power lines. Now, a preliminary study has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. [...]

It should be noted that the CCD Working Group at Penn State believes cell phones are very unlikely to be causing the problem. Nor are they interested in the possibility that GMO crops are responsible. Although GMO crops can contain genes to produce pesticides, some of which may harm bees, the distribution of CCD cases does not appear to correlate with GMO crop plantings. [...]

[O]ther pollinators are facing problems too...[S]everal of the U.K.’s 25 species [of bumblebees] are endangered, and three have gone extinct in recent years....[T]he process is caused by “pesticides and agricultural intensification” which could have a “devastating knock-on effect on agriculture.” The disappearance of wildflower species has also been implicated in the British bumblebee decline. [...]

[In other words,] it’s an ecosystem thing. As with honeybees and CCD, the root of the bumblebee problem lies in our modern rationalist drive toward endlessly ordering the world around us. [...]

This truth may be generalized to most facets of our agricultural existence; the bees are just a warning. Wherever you look, pests are getting stronger as the life forms we depend on get weaker. Adding more chemicals isn’t going to help for much longer. [...]

“There used to be a lot more regulation than there is today,” says Arizona beekeeper Victor Kaur. “People import bees and bring new diseases into the country. One might be colony collapse disorder.”

“The bees are dying, and I think people are to blame,” is how Kaur puts it simply. “Bee keeping is much more labor intensive now than it was 15 years ago. It’s a dying profession,” he eulogizes. “The average age of a beekeeper is 62, and there are only a couple of thousand of us left. There are only about 2.5 million hives left...It’s too much work.” [Emphasis added]

Free market enthusiasts take note. Factory farming and other forms of profit-driven monoculture are, in the long term, suicidal. (Not to mention, murderous.) But the market rewards them in the short term. The big commercial monoculture players displace everyone else, and by the time we wake up and begin to realize what we have lost, it's gone. The fatal flaw of monoculture: when something goes wrong, it goes wrong everywhere, all at once.

The fundamental problem is a mindset that treats Nature as a dead thing to be engineered and manipulated, as if it were a machine to be pushed until it breaks, then thrown away. That mindset, together with the tunnel vision created by the ferociously single-minded pursuit of profit.

Greed kills. On a larger and larger scale. Inevitably.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:03 PM | Comments (3) | Link to this  

May 04, 2007

Using Nanotech To Heal Spinal Cord Injuries

Science/Technology

An application of nanotech holds enormous potential for treating spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. ABC:

Samuel Stupp has a bunch of mice that used to drag their hind legs behind them when they crawled around his Illinois lab, but they have miraculously regained at least partial use of their rear legs.

Astonishingly, their severed spinal cords have been repaired, at least partly, without surgery or drugs.

All it took was a simple injection of a liquid containing tiny molecular structures developed by Stupp and his colleagues at Northwestern University. Six weeks later, the mice were able to walk again. They don't have their former agility, but their injuries should have left them paralyzed for life.

Stupp is on the cutting edge of one of the most exciting fields in medical research: regenerative medicine. If he and others in the field are on the right track, one of these days tragic diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's will be a thing of the past. And the crippled will walk again as the human body repairs itself in ways that it cannot do today.

Preliminary results with lab animals have been encouraging, but what works for mice and rats frequently does not work for humans. But if it does, medicine will enter a new era.

Stupp's team concentrates on combining the incredibly small world of nanotechnology with biology, creating molecules that self-assemble into large molecular structures that can literally "hug" around cells in the human body. That allows them to take charge of key cells present in the body and dictate how they will perform, or, in the case of stem cells, what they will become. [...]

The mice in Stupp's lab can move about better these days because the designer molecules attacked the precise reason why a spinal cord is unable to heal itself. When the cord is severed, glial cells in the body create a scar called a "glial scar."

"The scar appears within weeks after the injury and this basically paralyzes the patient forever," Stupp said. "The scar is like a physical blockade that prevents axons from regenerating and growing."

Axons are fibers that extend out from nerve cells and attach to other cells, thus allowing the brain to command the body to carry out its functions, like moving its legs. Stem cells present in the body that have not yet developed into a specialized cell should be able to differentiate into new neurons, thus making regeneration possible, but often the stem cells become glial cells instead, making recovery that much more difficult by reinforcing the "blockade."

A couple of years ago, Stupp said, his team discovered that it could pack its nanostructure with a biological signal that commands the stem cells to turn into neurons, not glial cells. The same signal, he said, orders the axons to grow.

And that's just what Stupp and his colleagues found when they dissected the damaged spinal column in some of the mice.

"We see regenerated axons across the lesion," he said. "That's the exciting part. Regeneration of axons across the lesion is very significant."

What it means is that the spinal column is, indeed, healing itself, and without the aid of drugs.

But what happens to those nanostructures after they've done their work? [...]

"These nanostructures are completely biodegradable," Stupp said. "They disappear within weeks." [...]

Stupp is now expanding his research into Parkinson's disease.

"It's just the very beginning, so this is extremely early," he said. "We are introducing these nanostructures in the brain of mice that have Parkinson's disease. We have seen very interesting functional recovery." [Emphasis added]

Molecular biology and nanotech are two fields where knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate. That means that we can expect "miraculous" new developments to appear, seemingly out of nowhere, at an ever-accelerating rate. Nanotech's still in its infancy, but the next few decades will be revolutionary.

Posted by Jonathan at 12:15 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

May 01, 2007

Narrowcasting Ads Via Focussed Audio

Corporations, Globalization  Media  Science/Technology

Hearing voices? Maybe this is why. Boston Globe (via Cryptogon):

Advertisers have a new way to get into your head.

Marketers around the world are using innovative audio technology that sends sound in a narrow beam, just like light, making it possible to direct messages right into consumers' ears while they shop or sit in waiting rooms.

The audio spotlight device, created by Watertown firm Holosonic Research Labs Inc., has been used to hawk everything from cereals in supermarket aisles to glasses at doctor's offices. The messages are often quick and targeted -- and a little creepy to the uninitiated.

Court TV recently installed the audio spotlight in ceilings of bookstores to promote the network's new murder-mystery show. A voice, whispering, "Hey, you, can you hear me? Do you ever think about murder?" was beamed toward customers as they browsed the mystery section in several independent bookstores in New York.

For advertisers, the audio spotlight is a way of marketing to consumers, sending tailored messages without disturbing an entire store with loudspeaker announcements such as Kmart's iconic "Blue Light Special." The flat disk speakers with precision targeting have made sound possible in unlikely places -- from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the New York Public Library -- and are increasingly attractive to merchants trying to improve the shopping experience with a peaceful environment. [...]

Unlike traditional speakers, which broadcast sound in every direction, sound from an audio spotlight speaker can be focused directly at one spot, so no one else can hear it, or projected against a surface so that sound appears to come from the surface itself.

For example, a box of Fruity Pebbles can advertise its nutritional content, heard by shoppers only as they walk by boxes in the cereal aisle. The audio spotlight uses ultrasound to stimulate the air into making sound, which is emitted in focused, laser-like beams. [Emphasis added]

What an awful idea. First time I encounter one of these things in a store, I'm going to boycott that store for life.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:25 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

April 28, 2007

Airborne Wind Farms

Energy  Future  Science/Technology

An interesting review of concepts for flying wind farms. Whether or not these particular ideas turn out to be practical and scalable, it's encouraging to be reminded that there's a whole world full of inventors out there, and some of them are definitely thinking outside of the box.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:51 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

April 27, 2007

Unevolved

Extremism  Politics  Religion  Science/Technology

This is disheartening, putting it mildly. The graph below shows public acceptance of human evolution in 2005. You'll find the US at second-to-last.

From National Geographic's description:

Adults were asked to respond to the statement: "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." The percentage of respondents who believed this to be true is marked in blue; those who believed it to be false, in red; and those who were not sure, in yellow.

A study of several such surveys taken since 1985 has found that the United States ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory among nations polled. Researchers point out that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory's validity has increased over the past 20 years. [Emphasis added]

Note that the question was just whether humans evolved from earlier animals. It said nothing about evolution being by purely natural means, via natural selection, or without participation by a deity. It's just: "did humans evolve?"

It would be hard to overstate how clueless you have to be to say no.

The study also found — no surprise here — that evolution deniers in the US tend to be Republicans:

The team found that individuals with anti-abortion, pro-life views associated with the conservative wing of the Republican Party were significantly more likely to reject evolution than people with pro-choice views.

The team adds that in Europe having pro-life or right-wing political views had little correlation with a person's attitude toward evolution.

The researchers say this reflects the politicization of the evolution issue in the U.S. "in a manner never seen in Europe or Japan."

"In the second half of the 20th century, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in Southern and Midwestern states," the study authors write.

Miller says that when Ronald Reagan was running for President of the U.S., for example, he gave speeches in these states where he would slip in the sentence, "I have no chimpanzees in my family," poking fun at the idea that apes could be the ancestors of humans. [Emphasis added]

It would be funny, in a sick sort of way, if it weren't so downright scary, considering the belligerence and military power of the US. People who have flipped the mental switch that lets them ignore the evidence of physical reality so they can be accepted by the herd are people who can be led into all sorts of mischief. And they're armed to the teeth. Superstitious primates with guns.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:31 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

April 25, 2007

Tesla Motors

Energy  Science/Technology

Vanity Fair has a long feature article on Tesla Motors, maker of the world's coolest electric car:

There is no engine noise, because it is a 100 percent electric car—only an eerie whine of gears as the car accelerates. We turn onto an entrance ramp for Route 101 South. And then comes the money moment. Luk floors the accelerator, and the Roadster jumps forward so fast—as instantaneously as its inverter can send electricity to the motor that turns its wheels—that I'm pinned against that hard-shell seat. Zero to 60 in four seconds is Tesla's claim—faster than all but a few high-performance, gas-powered racecars—with a top speed of 135 miles per hour and a range of 250 miles. It's pretty cool.

Whoa.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

April 16, 2007

The Edge

Culture  Future  Media  Science/Technology

Just wanted to make a plug for an extraordinary website called The Edge. It brings together world-class thinkers from a variety of fields and has them talk or write about what's on their minds: what's interesting and important to them right now, with an emphasis on leading edge ideas.

People like Lee Smolin, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Lisa Randall, Stuart Kauffman, Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky, Ernst Mayr, Brian Greene, Susan Blackmore, John Barrow, Ray Kurzweil, E. O. Wilson, Esther Dyson, and an old professor of mine, John Allen Paulos. And many more.

Check out the page of videos, lots of goodies there.

Most addicting, though, is the World Question Center. Each year, a hundred or so luminaries are invited to submit a short answer to a question like "What's your dangerous idea?" or "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The variety of viewpoints and ideas is astounding and endlessly fascinating. Mind-expanding in the best sense of the word.

Well worth a bookmark.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:06 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

April 03, 2007

Wasp Neurosurgery

Science/Technology

This isn't new, but it's one of the more amazing bits of biology trivia I've ever seen. Wow.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:18 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

March 13, 2007

Hacking RFID Passports

Science/Technology

Passports with embedded electronic chips (RFIDs) are supposed to be unhackable. But they're not. Not even close. Daily Mail (via Bruce Schneier):

They are the "safest ever", according to the Government. But the Daily Mail has revealed how easily a person's identity can be stolen from new biometric passports.

In just four hours, the Mail hacked into a new biometric passport and stole the details a people trafficker or illegal migrant would need to set up a life in Britain.

A shocking security gap allows the personal details and photograph in any electronic passport to be copied from the outside of the envelope in which it is delivered to homes.

The passport holder is none the wiser when it arrives because the white envelope has not been tampered with or opened.

Using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet, it took the Mail less than four hours to copy the details from one passport.

It had been delivered in the normal way by national courier company Secure Mail Services to a young woman in Islington, North London.

With her permission we took away the envelope containing her passport and never opened it.

By the end of the afternoon, we had stolen enough information from the passport's electronic chip - including the woman’s photograph - to be able to clone an identical document if we had wished. [...]

The Government says the biometric chips are protected by "an advanced digital encryption technique". [...]

Yet it took us no time at all to unravel the crucial code, using a relatively simple computer software programme and a scanning device.

The first flaw is that a hacker can try to access the chip as many times as he likes until he cracks the [access] code. This is different to putting a pin number into a bank machine, where the security system refuses access after three wrong combinations are entered.

The second is that there are easily identifiable recurring patterns in the [access] key codes issued. For example, the passport holder's date of birth always features, as does the passport’s expiry date, which is ten years after the issue date. [...]

Crucially, some banks, including the Post Office, no longer require to see a full passport as proof of identity from a new customer opening an account. They ask for a photocopy of the photo page to be sent in the post instead. [Emphasis added]

RFIDs are the kind of chips used for automatic toll collection. They operate by proximity, and that makes them a security nightmare. Your data can be grabbed without your ever knowing it, no physical contact required.

What's dumbfounding is that the responsible parties evidently didn't even try very hard to make the British passport RFID secure. It was hacked in an afternoon. But, as security guru Bruce Schneier points out, your passport needs to be secure for 10 years.

We might be able to take some cold comfort in Big Brother's cluelessness, were it not for the fact that there are plenty of black hats running around who are decidedly not clueless. Big Brother's just made it a lot easier for them to steal your identity.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:31 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

March 02, 2007

Change Blindness

Science/Technology

How good are humans at noticing small changes? Check this out.

If you can't see what's changing, right-click and select a shorter gap time. Once you see it, you can't not see it. But until you do, it's dumbfounding.

The right mouse button also lets you select other scenes to try. Have fun.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:56 AM | Comments (3) | Link to this  

February 28, 2007

Windows For Warships

Science/Technology

What's wrong with this picture? The Register (via Bruce Schneier):

The Type 45 destroyers now being launched [by the Royal Navy] will run Windows for Warships: and that's not all. The attack submarine Torbay has been retrofitted with Microsoft-based command systems, and as time goes by the rest of the British submarine fleet will get the same treatment, including the Vanguard class (V class). The V boats carry the UK's nuclear weapons and are armed with Trident ICBMs, tipped with multiple H-bomb warheads. [Emphasis added]

Nuclear weapons controlled by Windows boxes. Talk about nuclear terror.

But weapons system software gets thoroughly tested and debugged before deployment — right? The Register again:

Significant new capabilities have been added to the US Air Force's latest superfighter, the F-22 "Raptor". The USAF's Raptors cost more than $300m each, and are generally thought to be the most advanced combat jets in service worldwide. However, until recently they were unable to cross the international date line owing to a software bug in their navigation systems.

A group of F-22s heading across the Pacific for exercises in Japan earlier this month suffered simultaneous total nav-console crashes as their longitude shifted from 180 degrees West to 180 East.

Luckily, the superjets were accompanied by tanker planes, whose navigation kit was somewhat less bleeding-edge and remained functional. The tanker drivers were able to guide the lost top-guns back to Hawaii and the exercises were postponed. [Emphasis added]

It's funny, but it's not funny. Not at all, when you consider that the whole world's wired with weapons of mass destruction under software control. Are we nuts?

Posted by Jonathan at 05:29 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  

February 22, 2007

Model Airplane Magic

Science/Technology

Fun video of a battery-powered model airplane. Amazing what some people can do:

[Via LongTail]

Posted by Jonathan at 03:34 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

February 19, 2007

Starving Climate Science

Environment  Politics  Science/Technology

From an interview with NASA climatologist Drew Shindell in yesterday's NYT:

Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone's interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.

If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.

By NASA? Well, it's a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily.

Are you referring to President Bush and his plan to send Americans to Mars? The moon and Mars, yes. It's fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet.

Why is NASA involved in climate research in the first place? There is no federal agency whose primary mission is the climate, and that's a problem, because climate doesn’t command the clout that it should in Washington. Since NASA is the primary agency for launching new scientific satellites, it has ended up collecting some of the most important data on climate change. [...]

Why do you think the federal government has been so phobic about adopting energy-efficiency regulations? "Phobic" is the right word, because it's irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers' pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us. [Emphasis added]

It always seemed a little odd that the Bush White House took an interest in promoting manned spaceflight to Mars and the moon. It seemed out of character.

Pardon my cynicism, but could it just be their way of diverting funding away from research into the inconvenient truth of global climate change? Seems like just the sort of move that Bush, Cheney, and Rove might think was oh so very clever.

Posted by Jonathan at 03:41 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

February 08, 2007

Reconstructing Evolution

Science/Technology

Until recently, biologists have had to infer the process of evolution from evolutionary outcomes. I.e., they could see from the fossil record and by anatomical inference that one form of an organism had evolved into another, but the step-by-step procession through genetic intermediates was unknowable. This lack of detailed evolutionary intermediates left the door open for Intelligent Design proponents who claim that magic must be involved. It was like the familiar cartoon of two scientists examining a blackboard on which the steps of a mathematical proof have been written out: somewhere in the middle of all the steps is one that says "Magic happens here".

Now, however, geneticists have laboratory tools capable of reconstructing the missing links.

A little background: DNA is a set of instructions for building protein molecules, plus associated instructions affecting when and in what quantities the protein molecules get built. I.e., DNA governs the production of proteins, one gene per kind of protein molecule. Changes in DNA lead to changes in proteins, which in turn lead to developmental and metabolic changes in the organism. At the microbiological level, then, evolution is about changes in DNA that produce changes in the structure of protein molecules: in the end, it's about proteins.

A recent paper in Nature describes how new lab techniques are helping biologists reconstruct the step-by-step pathways through a sequence of evolutionary intermediates leading from one protein to another.

To demonstrate how a sequence of mutations could have caused protein A to evolve into protein B, one needs to demonstrate a series of steps that take you from A to B, where each step can arise in a single DNA mutation and each step confers some evolutionary advantage. The latter requirement is crucial, because evolution proceeds by natural selection, weeding out the less advantageous adaptations, allowing the more advantageous adaptations to flourish.

Mike Dunford at Questionable Authority has an interesting post on all this. Dunford describes a recent paper in Science that illustrates this kind of reconstruction. Dunford:

There are some bacteria that have a version of a particular enzyme [a protein] that makes them 100,000 times more resistant to certain antibiotics (like penicillin). We know that there are five differences that separate this version of the enzyme from the basic version, and we know what those mutations are. In theory, if the mutations happened one at a time, there are 120 possible ways that the enzyme could go from the original form to the resistant form. (For example, mutation 1 could have happened first, mutation 2 second, mutation 3 third, mutation 4 fourth, and mutation 5 fifth, or mutation 2 could have happened first, mutation 1 second, mutation 3 third ... or mutation three could have happened first ... and so on until all the possibilities are exhausted.)

Scientists then were able to construct possible intermediate forms of the enzyme — varieties that contained some, but not all 5, of the mutations, and test their resistance to the antibiotic. What they found was that 12 of the 120 possible paths from the original form to the new form increased resistance with every additional mutation. That's pretty cool — it shows that not only could natural selection drive the changes in this enzyme, but also that there are 12 different ways it could have happened. [Emphasis added]

Ideas like Intelligent Design exist at the gaps in our knowledge. Those gaps are closing. Pretty soon, ID proponents will have no ground left on which to stand. Not that that will stop people from believing what they want to believe.

Meanwhile, it's worth nothing that Americans who deny evolution by natural selection are much more likely to be Republican than Democrat. As are people who think the world was created in seven days just a few thousand years ago, and people who think humans and dinosaurs coexisted in the past. I've often wondered how scientifically literate Republicans must feel when they look around at their party and realize who they're in bed with.

Posted by Jonathan at 03:14 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  

January 24, 2007

Phaeton's Reins

Environment  Science/Technology

MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2006, has published a superb overview of the science of global warming in the Boston Review [link via RealClimate].

Long, but lucid, and well worth the effort of working your way through. Excellent discussions of how the greenhouse effect actually works, how a variety of factors interact as climate changes, how climate scientists separate the effects of human activity from other sources of climate variability, and the most elegant description I've seen of how chaotic systems are sensitive to small changes in initial conditions.

Very highly recommended.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:07 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

January 23, 2007

Doctor Knows Best?

Science/Technology

Do you think the US has the greatest health care system in the world? Do you drink diet sodas? If so (even if not), you'll want to read this. Very interesting.

[Via Cryptogon]

Posted by Jonathan at 12:10 PM | Comments (4) | Link to this  

January 18, 2007

What If Cancer Could Be Cured For Pennies?