EV1 at a charging station Photo by Chris Paine, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, all rights reserved.
Air pollution, global warming, oil addiction—all are now quotidian facts of life in the twenty-first century. It seems like everyone and their great aunt is starting to grasp that something must be done to preserve the health of the planet and the future of its inhabitants.
In California, in 1990, something quite significant was done. The state’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate called for the sale of zero-emission cars, with sales targets increasing gradually from 1998 to 2003. From this mandate emerged the development of viable consumer electric cars, among them General Motors’ EV1.
But the EV1 was scrapped before it could really catch on, supposedly because there was no demand for it.
If that was the case, why did EV1 drivers band together and plead with GM for the right to buy the car? Why were they denied? Why, at the time that the car’s production was halted, did the waiting list for an EV1 extend into the thousands? Why were EV1s not only reclaimed by GM, but destroyed? Why was the original zero-emission mandate revoked? And why, just last month, was the EV1 removed from the Smithsonian, where it had been for more than a year, and replaced with an SUV?
Documentary filmmaker Chris Paine examines the plight of the EV1 in his passionate and informative film, Who Killed the Electric Car? The film tells a powerful story with the car as its doomed hero. “You made me cry over a car!” one viewer told Paine after a screening.
You had an EV1, correct?
I leased one. It was the first car I ever leased. I did it as sort of a lark. I didn’t really know anything about electric cars. And I was just blown away by what a terrific vehicle it was. It was super fast, you could charge it at home, it never needed repairs, etc.—so, I fell in love with my car.
How did you discover the car?
I’d read an article about Paul MacCready—he designed the Gossamer Condor, which was the first human-powered aircraft, and then the Gossamer Albatross, which crossed the English Channel by human power in the seventies. I read that he’d designed an electric car for GM. So I wrote GM and tried to be really early in line.
You really sought it out.
I did. And one of the takeaways from the movie is: Consumers have to ask for what they want. As becomes clear in the film, the company wasn’t necessarily going to offer this car eagerly.
In the end, GM refused to let leasers buy their cars. It seems bizarre that a corporation would refuse ready buyers.
I’ve never heard of another situation where a car company doesn’t let you keep a car at the end of a lease. You buy it—usually, they’re begging you to buy it. Here, they said, “You can’t have it.”
There was also no precedent for General Motors putting its own name on a car. And that’s where the film becomes, in my view, sort of a “great American tragedy”—they took their own branded car off to the crusher.
Was there an official reason given for the destruction?
They said they couldn’t get spare parts for them. And they said they were worried that if the cars were on the road, it wouldn’t be indemnified—that they’d get sued if anything happened. But the drivers who wanted to keep the cars gave GM complete jury-trial indemnification. They offered them the price of the car, the buyout price. And they said, “Don’t worry about spare parts, we’ll figure out how to do it. We can make our spare parts, or get them from other people—just please don’t crush the cars.”
I think another business reason for the destruction was that they didn’t want to give California the chance to make them put the cars back on the roads again. They were afraid the law might change again, to require it.
Even having seen the film, I’m still not completely clear on how the legislation was changed. Why did California capitulate on that?
The original law, in 1990, the “Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate,” called for 2% of all new cars sold in California to be zero-emission vehicles by 1998, 5% by 2001, and 10% by 2003. If you add that up, —based on the number of new cars they sell in California, today there would be one million new zero-emission cars on the road in California alone.
“There are maybe 1,000 electric cars still on the road in California. It should have been a million.”
So the oil industry and the car industry went after this mandate, mostly the car industry, in terms of technical details, but oil was certainly involved as well. And the first thing they said was, “You can’t make us sell something that people don’t want. So please, please change the rules.” And finally, someone caved and said, “Okay, you have to build them in accordance with customer demand.” And as soon as that was in the law, the car companies went out to try to show, whether or not it was the case, that there was no customer demand.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was, well, two things. The car and oil industries successfully negotiated to get California to say, “Hey, we’ll give you a partial zero-emission-vehicle credit if you make a car that has higher mileage.” And as soon as they got California to say that, they turned around and sued California, and said, “You can’t do this—federal law says states can’t determine mpg for cars.” And then they got the Bush administration to join it. And then they told California, “Before we sue you through the wall, we just want you to know that we’ll do some hydrogen cars for you in the future. All you have to do is take away this damn electric-car thing.” Game over.
And then they managed to suppress that the story even existed, in a lot of ways. Which is why what’s happening now with the Smithsonian seems so significant.
Filmmaker Chris Paine Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, all rights reserved.
In your opinion, what can people who care about these issues do next? Where’s the best source of power for the consumer at this point?
Information is at the heart of a democracy. If the populace isn’t informed, then democracy falters. And one of the problems with this whole thing is that everybody looked to the car companies to have the official explanation, and they’re not giving the full story. So I hope that, in terms of this situation, seeing this film is an act of becoming better informed. Because if everybody believes that electric cars take eight hours to charge and only go 20 miles and are not efficient, then there’s no chance for new technology. That’s one reason I made the movie—to get the word out that this is not a dead-end technology.
Secondly, I hope people push their state governments for zero-emission vehicle mandates. We’ve got to swat [car manufacturers] in the butt and say, “You guys have to make these cars. We’re not joking around. This is the future of this country.”
The third thing is, even without those mandates, to give people the sense that we don’t always have to buy whatever Detroit is selling. So, you can convert your car to electric or bio-diesel.
You live in L.A. How do you get around there?
I have a Toyota Rav4 EV. I had just lost my EV1 to GM, and someone told me that Toyota was going to sell a few of those.
So some electric cars are still out there!
There are maybe 1,000 electric cars still on the road in California. It should have been a million, but at least there are a thousand, mostly saved by activists. They got Ford to change their mind on this policy. And Toyota agreed to sell some of their cars, but not because they really wanted to. Recently in Motor Trend, Rick Wagoner [CEO of GM] said his biggest regret was that he axed the EV1 program. But then he implied that he regrets this not so much for the technology as for the public relations.
Too bad it wasn’t because he wants to protect the environment.
I had a talk with a scientist today about the main Saudi oil field that just had a “hiccup” again. This is the one that’s 150 miles long. And now they can suck the oil out of it horizontally, so the flow of oil is so intense. And they just had a big hiccup. And if that’s happening, well, we’re probably facing some real serious troubles.
The talk is that we’re at or just past—
Peak oil. Yeah.
And oil is not going to become renewable all of a sudden, start springing eternal.
What do spring eternal are, every day, fresh electrons from the sun—millions of them— that we waste. And I wish we’d put them to work.
Beyond the alt-fuel car, where should we be looking for solutions?
We have to be a better mass-transit society. One reason ethanol works so well in Brazil isn’t that ethanol is so much better than fossil fuels, it’s that people drive less there. And driving less is a big part of it—biking and telecommuting, along with mass transit.
But the thing is: The car is wrapped up in the American Dream to some extent. Our cars are an extension of ourselves, of our mobility and our power. And the electric car meant so much to me from the beginning because it felt like a projection of the twenty-first century—what America could be.
Evolution
According to the good folks at Guinness, we’ve waited billions of years for the perfect pint of beer. What, Guinness, the single cell organisms of yore weren’t waiting, too? (via CV)
An unexpected question in a pub
Orac answers the question we all wanted to ask. His response is beautiful, but we’d kind of like to get another detailed answer from the folks featured here.
The numbers are frightening. They indicate that the flow of scientists and engineers graduating from American universities is slowing to a trickle. At the same time, schools in China and India have opened the proverbial floodgates.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings dropped figures from the NAS report in a Newsweek op-ed: “Last year,” she wrote, “China’s schools graduated more than 600,000 engineers and India’s schools produced 350,000, compared with 70,000 in America.”
Partisans on either end of the political spectrum seem equally eager to trumpet the data—both Edward Kennedy and Newt Gingrich, for example, cited them when warning about America’s ever-more-precarious economic advantage over upstart developing nations.
What worries all these science alarmists is not that China and India will emerge as major players in the global science market—that’s a given—but that those nations will become America’s superiors, rather than its peers.
Citing everything from “nerd” stigma to insufficient pay, representatives have taken the floor at multiple Congressional hearings to bemoan what they say is a recent downward trend in the number science PhDs awarded in the US. Adding to the alarm is the fact that more foreign students are staying home, either by choice or because of difficulty obtaining a visa in post-9/11 America.
Despite this apprehension, some observers have concluded that the situation may not be as dire as politicans have suggested. In fact, some researchers closely studying the American science pipeline actually see much to be confident about.
The members of the National Academies disavowed their original numbers in February, adopting less foreboding data that provides new figures for Chinese or American engineers. The army of 600,000 Chinese was replaced with “about 350,000 engineers, computer scientists and information technologists with four-year degrees,” while the reported number of American engineers doubled to 140,000.
The new numbers come from a December 2005 report out of Duke University, compiled by Vivek Wadhwa and Gary Gereffi. Wadhwa is a lifelong tech entrepreneur who has been outsourcing projects to the developing world since the early 1990s, and is now an “executive-in-residence” at Duke’s engineering school. Gereffi is director of Duke’s Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness.
Wadhwa and Gereffi found that the oft-quoted numbers didn’t filter for expertise. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Association of Software and Service Companies and the Chinese Ministry of Education, they determined that many of the Chinese and Indian degrees are “sub-baccalaureate,” awarded to the “equivalent of motor mechanics and industrial technicians.” They also found that in 2004, the United States actually awarded 137,437 engineering, computer science and IT bachelor’s degrees, versus China’s 351,537, and India’s 112,000. Per capita, the report adds, that’s 468 per million citizens in the US, versus 271 and 104 per million in China and India, respectively.
A 2005 McKinsey and Company Global Institute labor study found that a higher percentage of engineers in lower profile nations like Poland, Hungary and Malaysia are competitive in the global job market compared to Chinese and Indian engineers. Only about 10 percent of China’s engineers and 25 percent of India’s are qualified worldwide.
Still, as China and India continue to develop their universities at breakneck speed, “it’s inevitable,” Wadhwa said, that they will eventually produce many more qualified scientists and engineers than the US.
But, Wadhwa points out, China has more dentists too.
Concerns that America’s science pipeline is rapidly drying up may be unfounded as well.
Eric Iversen, manager for outreach at the American Society for Engineering Education calls the oft-quoted numbers “the touchstone for the hysteria argument,” though he admits that science research and education have gained valuable attention from all the hoopla.
“There’s political utility in [those numbers],” he said, “Both the Democrats and Republicans want to say, ‘We’re the ones that ensured the future by passing the American Competitiveness Initiative.’”
Iversen notes that the number of bachelors degrees awarded in engineering has increased “disproportionately” compared to all degrees between 1999 and 2004, from 62,000 to 73,000.
John Tsapogas, a senior analyst in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Science Resource Studies, points to the number of science and engineering degrees awarded by American colleges, which rose in both 2003 and 2004, saying this could be the beginning of a rebound. He attributes an NSF-reported 20% decline in science and engineering doctorates awarded to US citizens or permanent residents between 1995 and 2004 a hot tech-labor market; during those years, tech-savvy minds ran from the classroom to the boardroom.
“A lot of the decrease [in doctoral program enrollment] happened in the 1980s and 1990s, during phenomenal job growth,” Tsapogas said. “When unemployment goes up, so do doctorates.”
Another boon to American science are newly-lax visa protocols, which have increased the numbers of foreign students. The number of graduate applications from China declined 53% from 2002 to 2004, while applications from India declined 32%. But in 2005, Chinese applications were up 21%—climbing back to 2003 levels—and Indian applications were up 23, only 15% below the 2002 level. Furthermore, the Senate recently approved immigration provisions to award automatic green cards to foreign students with advanced and/or engineering degrees.
“I think our numbers will continue to rise,” Tsapogas said. “Unless there’s another 9/11.”
Tsapogas believes that even as other countries develop their own education systems, America will continue to maintain its share of foreign students. He also predicts that the numbers from China and India will largely recover, and students from nations in parts of Africa and Latin America will arrive in larger numbers as their nations develop.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, a 500-page treatise on globalization, wrote that there’s “something about [America’s] free society and free market that still attracts people like no other.”
In response to those who worry about China, Friedman added, “our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.”
The burden of bearing a massive penis
PZ would know; he…studies these sorts of things. Savor every sentence of this post, but especially savor, “If I had a pair of penises the size of volleyballs and weighing 10 pounds each attached to my cheeks, I might want to get rid of one, too.”
Giant Bat-Eating Centipede
Oh, God. A centipede just snatched a bat out of mid-air and is now draining it of all its precious bodily fluids. We can’t look, but we can’t look away. (via Boing Boing)
the air up there
Physicists tackle the question of why it’s easier to hit a homer at Coors Field.
Skewing Statistics for Politics
Apparently, ticket sales to Al Gore‘s movie have been plummeting. Well, at least it’s apparent to people who misuse math.
Got something for Seed‘s Daily Zeitgeist? Email the Zeitgeister.
Scientific issues and innovations seem to creep into everyday conversation more than ever before. Recognizing that we could all use some expertise in hot science topics, Seed offers its Cribsheet.
5
Nuclear Power
Now that the US—and the world, for that matter—has recognized its oil addiction, controversial, carbon-free nuclear fission is suddenly enjoying a comeback as a viable power source. Still, the threat of using nuclear technology for weapons looms in the background, as do the memories and visible after-effects of meltdowns such as Chernobyl. But, nuclear power’s time is now —like solar power, wind power and other alternative energy sources. This Cribsheet explains the process by which nuclear fission yields usable energy, from the reactor to the generator.
Information design by Cybu Richli, Switzerland, www.cybu.ch; Writer: Josh Braun; Consultants: Per Peterson and Daniel Kammen, professors, nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley; Map Data: The Nuclear Energy Institute/The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); Graph Data: IAEA
Above, thickness of the Earth’s crust across Antarctica . Thicker crust appears red. The location of the Wilkes Land crater is circled (below right of center). Image courtesy of Ohio State University.
The Permian-Triassic (PT) extinction, also known as “The Great Dying” among paleontologists, wiped out over 90% of terrestrial animals some 250 million years ago, but left no clear evidence of its cause. Now, a piece of evidence bigger than the state of Ohio could shed light on this mystery.
Ralph von Frese, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University, led a research team that uncovered a crater-like circular ridge buried under more than a mile of Antarctic ice that he believes may be linked to the mass extinction. Von Frese and his team had originally been surveying the area for faults or tectonic plates.
“When we heard that people were talking about impacts in that area we looked at the data for evidence of an impact, and we found it,” said von Frese, who presented his findings at an American Geophysical Union meeting in late May.
Von Frese said a added that A 30-mile-wide meteor would have been required to create the 300-mile wide crater that his team discovered. By contrast, the meteorite that struck at Chicxulub (near the modern-day Yucatan peninsula), which is believed by some to have killed the dinosaurs, was only about six miles wide.
Before stumbling onto the crater itself, von Frese discovered a well-known geological structure that typically indicates an area struck by a massive impact——a “mascon” or mass concentration. The mascon von Frese found is a 200-mile-wide section of the Earth’s mantle that had risen up into the Earth’s crust. He used NASA’s GRACE satellite, which is capable of detecting changes in the Earth’s gravitational field, to help locate the geological disturbance.
Impacts of this size are not uncommon in our solar system, said von Frese.
“The moon has at least 20 craters indicative of similarly sized impacts.,” said von Frese.
However, the moon provides the geologists an advantage since it’s a “dead” world which that lacks dynamic processes like erosion and volcanism. This stability allows the moon’s surface to retain a relatively pure record of impacts dating back for eons. The Earth, on the other hand, has a tendency to destroy geological evidence through its myriad physical systems, all of which are constantly reshaping the surface of the world.
Since the PT crater is buried under a mile-thick layer of ice, and the mascon is buried even farther—, under the crust of the Earth—, all of the research team’s observations are relatively indirect. The GRACE satellite and ice-penetrating radar were necessities when dealing with such difficult terrain.
“We’ve put more people on the moon than on this area of the world,” von Frese said.
Douglas Erwin, a Smithsonian paleobiologist and author of the book Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago, is skeptical of von Frese’s findings.
“Most claims of craters this size evaporate under closer inspection,” he said.
Von Frese emphasized that the findings are preliminary and must be followed-up with aircraft surveys of the region to provide more concrete data.
Pro-Jester One
A woman attempting in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is unlikely to conceive. But when performance is dismal, doctors know how to save the show: Send in the clowns! In a recent Israeli study, women undergoing clown therapy were 75% more likely to conceive through IVF than women whose lives lacked big red noses and overcrowded cars. Of the 93 women entertained by a professional clown for 10 to 15 minutes, 33 became pregnant. The study’s results appeared in the greater context of research showing that high levels of stress can prevent women from ovulating. Yes, apparently 15 minutes of personal attention from Bozo is a way of reducing stress. For all the women who might disagree with this assumption, perhaps clown time could be an effective new form of birth control. Warning: For the love of all that is good, don’t actually try using a clown as a contraceptive.
(source: the Scotsman)
Information Junkie
D.A.R.E. bigwigs, here’s an idea for your next commercial: A high school freshman is cornered by an older boy who says, “I’ve got something you’re going to love,” and hands him heroin. The confident freshman stares back and says, “No, thanks. The only thing I absorb to get high is knowledge!” The kid (who probably got beaten to a pulp after the exchange) would be referring to a recent article proposing that when someone grasps a new concept, the brain gets a shot of natural opiates. A USC neuroscientist notes an increased density of opiate receptors in the part of the brain responsible for image recognition and processing. He asserts that we’re addicted to the euphoria of comprehension; our thirst for knowledge is the hunger of a junkie awaiting his fix. Maybe those PSAs should use any slogan but“The More You Know.”
(source: University of Southern California)
A Fece Only A Mother Could Love
Mothers think their own baby’s poop smells nicer than that of other babies. Scientists recently discovered this useful piece of cocktail party information by—what else?—making mothers smell dirty diapers. Thirteen lucky ladies sniffed pairs of unlabeled, used diapers and ranked their odors. The moms consistently said their kid’s underwear was less vile than the control pair. The researchers, who are looking at the evolutionary origins of disgust, say that while the emotion probably evolved to keep us away from dangerous, disease ridden objects like feces, it wouldn’t do us any evolutionary good if mothers are too grossed out to care for their children.
(source: New Scientist)
We’ll Request Manhattan, The Bronx and Staten Island Too
What is the most polite place in the world? New York f-in’ City! According to a recent report by Reader’s Digest, New York is the most courteous city in the world. The digest sent researchers into 35 cities around the world to see whether residents would hold doors, help pick up papers and say thank you after a customer purchased an item from a store. Each test was repeated 20 times in each city. The Big Apple got an 80% courtesy score; second place Zurich got a 77 and third place Toronto earned a 70. Least courteous was Mumbai, with an abysmal score of 32. The magazine notes that eight out of the nine Asian cities surveyed fell in the bottom 11, with fewer than 40% holding doors in any Asian city.
(source: Reader’s Digest Canada Edition)
Deep Freeze
For all you folks out there hoping to achieve immortality by being cryogenically frozen, scientists may have found just the material to preserve you: water. The formation of ice crystals damages human tissue, but if scientists can freeze and thaw water without making it crystalize, we may just have a frozen fountain of youth. Research by a University of Helsinki scientist has shown that when diluted aqueous droplets are slowly supercooled, they form “glassy water,” or low-density amorphous ice. This glassy water melts into highly viscous water, which, the scientist reports, is similar enough to regular water that they may be able to use it to freeze organs. At no point in the supercooling or warming process do ice crystals form.
(source: American Chemical Society)
With Batted Breath
Stop your breath, or vampire bats will stop it for you. A German study shows that vampire bats, the only mammals that live on blood alone, can recognize the sound of an individual person breathing far better than humans can. As bats like to drain the same individual over the course of several nights, the researchers propose that bats use breathing patterns to differentiate their victims from the unbitten masses. The bats were trained to associate recordings of humans breathing with specific cattle blood dispensers. When the researchers played recordings of the same people either at rest or under physical strain, the bats correctly flew to the corresponding dispenser for their gory reward. Delicious.
(source: BioMed Central Limited)
Blame Evolution For Teen Pregnancy
Randy teens who run around impregnating each other may be a nuisance in high schools, but as Dr. Laurence Shaw reminded the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology last week, high school didn’t really matter to Homo sapiens for the first 150,000 years of our existence. We evolved to reproduce in our late teens or early twenties, when women’s fertility is at its peak, so it’s no surprise that teenage gals are looking for love. As Dr. Shaw said:
Therefore, before we condemn our teenagers for having sex behind the bike sheds and becoming pregnant, we should remember that this is a natural response by these girls to their rising fertility levels. Society may ‘tut, tut’ about them, but their actions are part of an evolutionary process that goes back nearly two million years; whilst their behaviour may not fit with Western society’s expectations, it is perhaps useful to consider it in the wider context.
Take that, libidophobes!
(source: MR Communication and Analysis Ltd)
A couple of years ago, a friend asked me to be a pilot subject for one of her fMRI studies. I immediately said yes, in large part because most of the psychologists I knew had their brains scanned at one time or another, and I was feeling left out. It was a tedious experience, involving the memorization of long strings of numbers—and being inside a magnet is like being buried alive, only louder. So when I emerged from the machine an hour later, I was grouchy.
But then she took me to a screen and showed me a record of my brain at work. It made up for the hour of torment. I was entranced.
Newspapers, magazines, TV and blogs very often discuss psychology these days as a series of studies that involve some measure of neural activity, usually fMRI. The most compelling studies are those which probe the brain while the subject is made to think about something controversial, such as politics, sports teams, race, sex, corporate brands or morality. It makes for great press releases. But fMRI imagery has attained an undue influence, and we shouldn’t be seduced.
“For both the novices and the experts, the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with imaging research. The best imaging studies inform psychological theory in a significant way. One elegant study, for instance, done by Stanislas Deheane, Elizabeth Spelke and their colleagues, found that different parts of the brain are active during exact arithmetic versus approximate arithmetic, supporting the theory that these aspects of numerical reasoning are psychologically distinct. More recently, Joshua Greene and his colleagues did a neat series of studies looking at the involvement of various brain areas, particularly those involving emotion and cognitive control, when people are confronted with different sorts of moral predicaments. This is more than just phrenology. But it is not so dazzling that it should usurp other areas of research.
FMRI studies—which indirectly measure the flow of oxygenated blood in the brain—are typically motivated by earlier experiments that used more conventional methods, and are not always a better window to the soul than eye tracking, behavioral genetics, implicit priming or dozens of other well-worn techniques. We know far more about the mind from the study of, say, reaction times than we do from fMRI studies.
Psychologists can be heard grousing that the only way to publish in Science or Nature is with pretty color pictures of the brain. The media, critical funding decisions, precious column inches, tenure posts, science credibility and the popular imagination have all been influenced by fMRI’s seductive but deceptive grasp on our attentions. It’s a pervasive influence, and it’s not because the science is better.
Why does it affect us so? Probably because fMRI seems more like real science than many of the other things that psychologists are up to. It has all the trappings of work with great lab-cred: big, expensive, and potentially dangerous machines, hospitals and medical centers, and a lot of people in white coats. In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.
We’re also natural dualists. We intuitively think of ourselves as non-physical, and so it is a shock, and endlessly interesting, to see our brains at work in the act of thinking. Young children are explicit about the duality; they will tell you that you need your brain for certain activities, such as doing a math problem, but not for others, such as loving your brother or pretending to be a kangaroo. And most of us, children and adults, are comfortable with the idea that though our bodies will die, our minds (consciousness, memory, will) can survive.
So, when a New York Times article rhapsodized about neural correlates of passion (“Watching New Love As It Sears the Brain”), the interest of the article for the average reader did not lie in the details about the role of the caudate nucleus. Rather, it lay in the fact that the brain is involved at all in anything as interesting and personal as falling in love.
But we know, scientifically, that the physical activity of the brain is the source of our mental processes. It’s one of the first things the professor says in any intro psych course: The mind is what the brain does, and so every mental event, from falling in love to worrying about your taxes, is going to show up as a brain event. In fact, if anyone were to find an aspect of thought that did not correspond to a brain event, it would be the discovery of the century, as it would be the first ever proof of hardcore Cartesian dualism.
Despite this most concrete of scientific understandings, however, intuition tells us that our minds and our brains are very different things. The pretty pictures of our brain at work will continue to seduce us in many insidious ways, and provide my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience the enviable advantage of, at the very least, being able to inspire awe.
The key to producing environmentally friendly biofuels from agricultural waste may reside in the gut of Indian elephants, say researchers in the Netherlands.
Ethanol, a popular type of biofuel, is currently produced by fermenting sugars in plants, like corn and sugarcane, with yeast. Previously, the fuel could only be produced from a plant’s most edible material, which is rich in starch and certain types of sugars called hexoses.
However, Dutch researchers genetically engineered a special strain of yeast that can also convert leftover plant material into ethanol, starting with wastes like straw, woodchips, and cornhusks. The development opens a previously untapped source of plant-based energy production that doesn’t compete with consumable crops.
“You can have food production as well as feedstock for your bioethanol,” said Marko Kuyper, the leader of the project and a researcher at the Delft University of Technology. “[And] you can do both in the same area of land.”
Agriculture waste products typically contain a class of sugars called pentoses, which normal yeast cannot convert into ethanol because it lacks an enzyme necessary to complete the fermentation process.
Kuyper’s team made total fermentation possible by inserting a foreign gene into the yeast’s genome. The gene was isolated from a fungus that researchers from the University of Nijmegen, also in the Netherlands, found in the feces of Indian elephants in 1984. This gene helps animals to digest plant material by producing an enzyme that converts a specific pentose sugar, xylose, into another form called xylulose. While yeast cannot ferment xylose, it can process xylulose.
“This is the first yeast that can do that at an industrially interesting rate and efficiency,” Kuyper said.
This new method of ethanol production has taken a few years to perfect. Before employing the fungal gene, which codes for the enzyme xylose isomerase, Kuyper’s group attempted to use a bacterial version of the gene. But they were disappointed by its effectiveness. Even in their yeast-based solution, low growth rates posed a problem. The xylose isomerase gene comes from an anaerobic organism—one that grows in an oxygen-depleted environment—which caused the modified yeast to grow slowly when exposed to oxygen. To improve the growth rate, researchers used evolutionary engineering: They cultivated successive generations of the yeast strains in an oxygenated environment until it adapted to living in an aerobic environment.
“The end product of our efforts was a yeast strain that converted both hexose and pentose sugars at a high rate and with high efficiency,” said Harry Harhangi, another member of the team, in an e-mail correspondence. Harhangi added that since 5 to 25% of a plant’s biomass is composed of pentose sugars, the modified yeast strain could improve the yield of bioethanol considerably.
Still, according to Kuyper, before it can be used to produce ethanol industrially, the genetically modified yeast will need a few more improvements. Currently, the yeast doesn’t tolerate the acids and other compounds that appear when sugars are freed from plant material, so Kuyper’s team hopes to modify the yeast to make it resistant to these substances.
“There’s still a few glitches, but a few years back there was no organism available that could do these hexose and pentose fermentations together,” Kuyper said. “And now we do have one, so we’re a lot closer to application than we were five years ago.”
Ton van Maris, an industrial microbiologist at Delft who was not directly involved with the research, called Kuyper’s new process the “dominant technique” for breaking down the sugars that yeast could not previously ferment.
“I think it definitely will be applied within five years, probably sooner,” van Maris said.
The San Andreas Fault is primed for a major earthquake, reveals new research published in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature. Fault areas typically allow for some gradual “slippage,” or relative movement of the two plates forming the fault. However, the San Andreas Fault has been locked in place without slippage for the past 300 years, and it has accumulated about seven meters of slip “deficit.” If this tension is released in one event, the researchers report, it could cause a quake as severe as the one that devastated San Francisco in 1906.
Work began last week on a “doomsday vault” that will store samples of millions of important plant seeds from around the world. The vault site is about 1,000 miles from the North Pole, deep inside a permafrost-covered Norwegian mountain. While other gene banks around the world could be destroyed by natural or manmade disasters, the new vault will withstand most threats. The vault is scheduled to open in September of 2007.
The United States is not prepared to deal with another major disaster, be it terrorism or a hurricane, concluded a report published last Friday by the Department of Homeland Security. The report cited evacuation planning and command structure as two areas in need of significant improvements. New Orleans is still vulnerable to hurricanes, the report stated, as the levees are unequipped to survive another Category Five storm.
Avian flu has broken out in the poultry farms of the northern Chinese province of Shanxi, China’s Ministry of Agriculture announced last week. The area has been quarantined, allowing veterinarians to begin disinfection and culling. In China’s the southern region of Guandong, Chinese officials recently reported the country’s nineteenth case of human-contracted bird flu.
Advances with Embryos and Stem Cells
Scientists have successfully transferred pancreatic tissue from pig embryos to lab mice with non-functional pancreases. Past research has shown that embryonic pig cells can only be transferred to another animal during a specific window of time in the development of the embryo: Cells transferred before the window opens are non-functional and possibly cancerous, while those taken too late are rejected as foreign. The success indicates that transplanted embryonic pig tissue could allow diabetic humans to produce insulin and regulate their own blood sugar.
A recent advance in embryo screening could make the technology available to a wider audience. The new procedure, called pre-implantation genetic haplotyping, locates chromosomal markers of possible disorders instead of pinpointing individual mutations linked to defects. This strategy allows for greater accuracy, shorter turnaround time and a longer list of detectable disorders.
Research out of Oklahoma City has revealed that adult stem cells in bone marrow, previously thought to be relatively inert, actually play an active role in the functioning of the body’s immune system. These marrow stem cells possess receptors capable of identifying bacteria and viruses. Upon detecting a hostile invader, the stem cells mobilize the immune system to fight off the infection. The discovery could help scientists gain a greater understanding of how immunosuppressive treatments affect the body.
Scientists Rally for Science
Sixty-seven national science academies from around the world have signed a statement saying that evidence for evolution is being “concealed, denied, or confused” in some classrooms. The statement lists scientific facts that are key to understanding the origin and development of life on Earth, such as dating the formation of the planet to 4.5 billion years ago. The academies encourage educators to teach children about the methods and discoveries of science and to omit hypotheses that cannot be tested or fail when tested. The statement follows recent debate on whether intelligent design may be taught in public schools.
The Fish and Wildlife Service should list polar bears as an endangered species, declared a June 15 letter from a University of Chicago climate scientist and 30 of her colleagues. The scientists expressed fear that global warming is leading directly to the destruction of the sea-ice habitat in which polar bears thrive. The Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to initiate a review of the situation.
It is a myth that environmental protection hinders economic growth, said Adam Steiner, the new head of the U.N. Environment Program, on June 16. Traditional economic measures do not account for the monetary value of natural services such as the coastline protection of coral reefs, and that paradigm must shift, he said. The Kyoto Protocol’s carbon dioxide emissions market, where firms can buy or trade for the right to emit, is a step in the right direction, Steiner said.
New Visions of Space
NASA’s space shuttle Discovery has been officially scheduled for launch on July 1, despite continued fears that the shuttle may be damaged during launch. NASA administrator Michael Griffin said that while such damage could hinder the success of the program, it would not harm the crew. A worst-case scenario would involve an unfixable break in the shuttle during lift-off, which would result in the astronauts returning home using an alternative craft.
Thanks to a new NSF grant and a Bureau of Land Management permit, the most powerful cosmic ray detector in the northern hemisphere may be fully operational in a year’s time. The detector, known as the Telescope Array, is designed to reveal the origin of cosmic rays, those ultra-high-energy atomic nuclei that bombard the Earth. Four hundred miles of Utah desert have been devoted to the project, which will begin testing in late spring of 2007.
Wars Waged Over Energy
Top scientists are urging world leaders to take action regarding global warming at next month’s G8 summit in Russia. The scientists said global warming could be pushed off the agenda due to energy supply worries. At last year’s summit in Scotland, the G8 committed to take action on climate change, but environmentalists said that oil prices have dominated pre-summit discussions, and the countries have made follow-up on global warming a low priority.
A major government effort, similar to the Manhattan project or NASA’s moon mission, is needed to avert the looming energy crisis, said scientists at a high-level energy conference in Los Angeles last week. The last shift in the United States’ primary energy source, from wood to coal in the 1800s, took about 50 years, and scientists said a shift today to more sustainable sources would take just as long. Some of the scientists present at the conference said that oil prices might increase so much that the United States will not be able to afford 50 more years of oil consumption.
Oil companies such as Chevron and BP have developed a new class of ship to get at oil deposits more than 1,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. At such depths temperatures water pressure approaches 20,000 pounds per square inch. When drilling, these ships suck up enough power to light 40,000 homes.
In 580 BC the Greek philosopher Pythagoras discovered that harmonies could be expressed mathematically. His insight, which is based on the observation that doubling or halving the size of an instrument’s string produces a new octave, is the cornerstone of the musical scale.
Twenty-five hundred years later, two Canadian mathematicians from the University of Moncton in New Brunswick have created an entirely new kind of string instrument that exploits a kind of mathematics owing more to Pythagoras’s theorem for triangles than to anything he ever thought about music.
Listen to the Tritare
Sample the scintillating sounds of a triple-necked guitar.
The Tritare is a Y-shaped guitar-like instrument, custom made by Claude Gauthier and Samuel Gaudet. The strings twist through three necks (Spinal Tap, eat your heart out), all of which project from the body of the instrument at different angles. When strummed, the result is a “network” of vibrations that yields a
sound somewhere between that of a regular guitar and a gong.
“Everyone who knows how to play guitar can play the Tritare. It’s very similar, but you can also obtain much more because it produces non-harmonic sounds,” said Gauthier.
The inspiration for the instrument came to Gauthier when he was working on Euler’s Theorem, first proved in 1736. While trying to solve the equation with theoretical numbers, Gauthier had to create ‘Y’ shaped graphs to explain his solution, which depended on a unique and original symmetry between the theoretical numbers and zero.
While discussing the problem with Gaudet, who is also a musician, the two decided to focus on how vibrations in a string would react to this new symmetry. “When we studied the problem of vibrations in a network of strings mathematically, we noticed that we could add some very different sounds than a regular string,” said Gautheir.
When the Tritare was presented at the Acoustic Society’s one hundred fifty-first meeting in Rhode Island this month, society members’ interest in the Tritare and other acoustical oddities revolved around problems of modeling the sounds these devices generate.
“At the base of all the work they were doing was mathematics,” said Gaudet. “Scales and harmonies can all be explained mathematically. There is a reason why you build a chord or a harmony a certain way, so math and music are intimately related.”
Credit: Samuel Gaudet
Although it began with Pythagoras, musicians have relied on math to understand more than just scales and harmonies. The shapes of instruments are often dictated by basic properties of sound that can be represented mathematically. For example, it is a harp’s distinctive shape that allows it to create a perfect tone.
“I didn’t understand why the top of a harp has that funny curve,” said Dave Rusin, associate professor of mathematics at Northern Illinois University. “It turns out to be a very easy application of calculus.”
Every detail, even the density of its strings, can affect the sound of an instrument. The way vibrations travel through the air in the hollow of an acoustic guitar is essential to the instrument’s sound and involves fairly complicated mathematics.
Math is integral not only to the craft of making instruments, but also to musical composition.
“Many musicians compose their music according to a sequence of numbers,” said Gauthier.
Mozart developed a method to compose minuets by using the roll of a die. The mathematician and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram used the cellular automata he pioneered to create ring tones as unique as fingerprints. The interlocking and repeating patterns characteristic of Bach’s fugues are “things that mathematicians pick up on,” said Rusin.
“Music is organizing time for no reason,” said Ben Vigoda, a graduate of MIT’s Media Lab who creates his own instruments. Music lovers the world over might argue that there is ample cause for organizing time into the opening strains of Beethoven’s Fifth or Bach’s Minuet in G minor—and without mathematics, neither would be possible.
Science Friday: The Edge of Infinity
DarkSyde interviews Sean Carroll about the big questions in cosmology. That’s Sean Carroll the physicist. Not Sean Carroll the biologist. The latter would have made for a very different interview.
Spiderweb Trapped in Amber
We assume a room hasn’t been touched in a while when we see cobwebs forming in the corner. But we generally don’t assume it hasn’t been touched in over a hundred million years.
The Southwest Regional Spaceport’s newly-poured concrete launch pad looks like a suburban driveway lost in the New Mexican desert. Fifteen feet beyond where the thick white slab ends, dust devils swirl through a landscape of spiky yucca plants.
“There’s nothing here now,” admits Bill Loomis, 58, a member of New Mexico’s Spaceport Authority, “but I get excited thinking what this place will be like in 20 or 50 years.” Loomis and I are standing where the launchpad of New Mexico’s $200-million spaceport is being built, a vast table-flat plain 150 miles south of Albuquerque. “The small rockets will launch here,” explains Loomis, a large man with a politician’s recall of names, “and the two 12,000-foot runways will be back there.”
The concrete pad is virtually the only manmade object in sight, but space pioneers don’t dwell in the present. And when Bill Loomis looks around he sees workshops, fuel tanks, assembly buildings and a terminal welcoming millionaire space tourists. The authority plans to turn this barren tract into the world’s busiest private space hub, creating $500 million in economic activity by 2020.
New Mexico isn’t the only state with atmospheric ambitions. In March the Wisconsin legislature voted for a $15-million spaceport in Sheboygan. Oklahoma is converting a former B-52 base into a launch site for things like rocket-powered Learjets. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is quietly building mission control for his space company, Blue Origin, on his West Texas ranch, while Virginia-based Space Adventures plans two enormous facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. Spaceports in Florida, Virginia, Nevada and Alabama are also in the pipeline.
Suddenly, the private space business has become the next biotech, and a dozen communities around the country are vying to call themselves “Rocket City, USA.” Some of these will fail, some could succeed, and one might even blow itself up&emdash;all in a race to become the O’Hare for the next century.
Despite enormous risks and expense, a half-dozen spaceports and rocket-makers are sprinting to meet federal regulations, secure funding and attract customers&emdash;and no one knows who will win, or even what winning means. The future of civilian space travel will be determined over the next decade by countless technical decisions, a handful of rocket scientists, and a few tense seconds on the launch pad.
For now, realistic long-term planning is measured in months. Nevertheless, certain trends are becoming evident.
First, suborbital rocket trips will be the short-term driver. Five minutes of exospheric weightlessness fetches $200,000 at Virgin Galactic (contracted to launch at New Mexico’s spaceport), and is offered by two other companies as well. While the flight experience will be more Chuck Yeager than Buck Rogers, these suborbital flights are only a first step. “Space tourism will drive the ability to go into orbit,” says Rick Homans, New Mexico’s secretary for economic development, a major backer of the spaceport.
Second, although the frenetic development of the private space business now resembles the disparate early days of the auto industry, or computer manufacturers in the 1980s, the private space industry will mimic commercial aviation. New firms are already organizing themselves into vehicle builders, spaceport operators and tourism firms, with only a few full-service operations (like Blue Origin). As with airlines and airports, space tourism firms will buy vehicles from manufacturers and pay user fees to spaceports, while the ports will provide the infrastructure to ensure safe and reliable launches. Forward-looking planners envision a global network of spaceports, allowing launches from a US spaceport to touch down at a sister port on the other side of the world.
Third, the spin-off technology from these ventures could create more markets. The stringent requirements for space flight necessitate the design of specialized systems and parts. For example, Oklahoma’s Rocketplane, Ltd., has built an entirely new aerodynamic vehicle around the pressure cabin of a Learjet. NASA is famously responsible for popularizing Tang drink mix and Velcro, and the spillover potential from the private space race could be even bigger.
Common challenges are also emerging. Because launch facilities are built in unpopulated areas to reduce the risks to “uninvolved parties” (like rockets landing on playgrounds), and highly specialized engineers and technicians don’t commonly inhabit unpopulated areas, the small, rural economies can’t supply the thousands of specialized workers needed to operate spaceports. “There is a real need for aerospace engineers in New Mexico,” says Paul Jaramillo, who heads a Las Cruces, New Mexico-based flight analysis firm that can’t find local staff. “A spaceport is going to require engineers and technicians at all levels,” he says. To address this problem, New Mexico recently funded the state’s first dedicated aerospace engineering program.
The private space industry is about to go critical as, over the next year, companies stop shooting off press releases and start firing rockets. This summer, Connecticut-based UP Aerospace hopes to inaugurate New Mexico’s spaceport by launching a 20-foot-tall payload rocket. Rocketplane plans test flights by mid-2007, as does Scaled Composites, which is building its SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. Space Adventures has hired a Russian firm to design a space plane to be ready for launch in 2008. In addition, some residents of Van Horn, TX, where Blue Origin is located, have noticed workers widening roads and laying utility wires to the secretive launch site.
In October, New Mexico will host the second-annual X-Prize Cup exposition&emdash;the start of the commercial space race is dated to the 2004 awarding of the first, $10-million X Prize&emdash;attracting the rocket whizzes, aerospace entrepreneurs and deep pockets at the vanguard of the private space economy. Despite some intense rivalries, many of these leaders are realizing that their own success requires their fledgling industry to create and market an entirely new business. Many believe that competition is beneficial. “Ten years from now, if New Mexico has the only spaceport, then the industry didn’t make it,” says Rick Homans. “My competition isn’t publicity hungry billionaires,” adds Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, referring to Virgin’s Richard Branson. “It’s the people out there in the world who don’t yet realize that space travel is possible for private citizens.” To win over a skeptical public, the private space industry must build success one launch at a time.
The Weather Channel reaches over more than 89 million households in the United States, but it might soon find its way to a whole new demographic: monkeys.
In an article published in the June 20th issue of Current Biology, a team of Scottish researchers reveal that monkeys may be able to remember past weather trends and act on this information when searching for food.
A team of researchers from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland monitored a group of gray-cheeked mangabeys (medium-sized monkeys that live in the rainforests of central Africa) over a period of 210 days, as the monkeys traveled from tree to tree in search of fruit.
A Mangabey’s diet is high in figs, which ripen faster when the weather is warm. Since figs ripen intermittently, mangabeys will return to trees that previously held unripe fruit in order check on the fruit’s progress.
“There is a lot of competition for fruit, so it would pay to be able to arrive first,” said primate researcher Karline Janmaat, the study’s lead author.
Janmaat and her fellow researchers discovered that after a period of warm and sunny days, monkeys were more likely to revisit trees where they’d previously found unripened fruit than after a stretch of cool and cloudy days. They also seemed to return sooner to the trees that had the most fruit if the weather since their last visit had been consistently warm.
“I really searched for other explanations, especially because the temperature differences we found were really small, like one degree [Celsius] average difference,” said Janmaat, who was able to ruled out many other confounding factors, such as ability to smell or see ripe fruit or increased level of physical activity during warm weather.
So far, the weather explanation looks solid, said Michael Platt, a neurobiologist at Duke University who studies primates. He addeds that the finding provides new evidence for an alternate theory of the origins and function of primate intelligence.
“This would, at the least, require an episodic memory for recent weather patterns and their associated patterns of fruit rewards,” said Platt. “This study adds to the very few that suggest a prominent role for foraging behavior in the evolution of primate intelligence.”
Traditionally, research has suggested that primates developed large brains to help them negotiate the social world, since primates that live in larger groups have larger brains relative to their body size, Janmaat said. But primates with diets rich in ripe fruit, which is harder to find than many other food sources, such as leaves, gums or insects, also have larger brains.
“It’s interesting to find out why fruit-eating animals would need large brains,” Janmaat said. “This gives us more insight into what challenges could be influencing intelligent behavior.”
Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001
These projects are great! “Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria”...so choice. (And while you’re poking around Objective: Ministries, check out Lambuel.)
The JET torus in 1996, showing a worker wearing protective clothing performing maintenance within the vessel. Photograph courtesy of EFDA-JET
It’s hard to take fusion energy seriously when its proponents employ descriptors like “power of the Sun” and “energy from a star” to explain it. This kind of hyperbole—and the fact that scientists have never created a sustained fusion reaction capable of generating more electricity than it soaks up—make fusion sound like a fantastical scheme devised by Lex Luthor. But in the wake of the current energy crisis, new money and political support may finally channel enough resources into fusion to make the elusive process a reality.
On May 24, the US, EU, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan and India signed on to help build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, in the south of France. ITER is the largest fusion research project to date and one of the biggest international scientific collaborations ever. Its budget is 10 billion euros over 20 years, more than three times that of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The reactor is scheduled to be functional by 2016.
“[ITER] is not only a scientific and technological experiment aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy, but it is also an experiment in international relations,” said Ned Sauthoff, the U.S. project manager for ITER. “Never before have the governments representing more than half the population of the world gotten together and tried to solve a global problem.”
Theoretically, fusion is an ideal energy source. It releases no carbon into the atmosphere and is fueled by hydrogen atoms, which can easily be derived from water. Traditional nuclear fission, on the other hand, requires uranium or plutonium, both limited and costly resources. While the radioactive byproducts of fission can linger for hundreds of thousands of years, the radioactive waste produced in fusion decays within 50 to 100 years. In addition, fusion eliminates the risk of a runaway reaction like the one that occurred at Chernobyl—a fusion reaction on Earth is so delicate that any error in operation would end the process rather than causing a meltdown.
In a fusion reactor, laser or charged-particle beams and radio waves heat hydrogen atoms, or the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, to more than 100 million degrees Celsuis—nearly seven times the heat of the Sun—creating a free-flowing thermonuclear plasma. Atoms in the plasma collide with each other, fusing into helium atoms and release single neutrons and disproportionately large amounts of energy that can then be transformed into electricity through a steam turbine cycle.
The Sun, a fusion reactor, keeps hydrogen atoms colliding via the enormous pressure at its core. ITER will test a device, called a tokamak, meant to replicate the containing effect of the Sun’s gravity. A tokamak is a vacuum vessel that cradles the plasma within a magnetic field generated by current-carrying coils. Scientists have used tokomaks experimentally for decades, but never one as large as the device at ITER, which will be two to three times larger than the current largest tokamak, the Joint European Torus located in England, outside Oxford.
In order for fusion to become a viable energy source, scientists must overcome a number of hurdles. For one, no one has ever managed to contain the ultra-hot plasma for long enough to sustain a fusion reaction that generates more energy than is required to keep it going. Other problems include the difficulty of finding materials suitable for reactors that need to sustain temperatures as hot as the Sun, and the prohibitive upfront costs of constructing commercial fusion plants.
“You know the joke about fusion: Fusion is thirty years away, and always will be,” said John Perkins, a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Perkins was involved with ITER in its first decade, after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the project in 1985. Then ITER was essentially a loose collective of physicists from all over the world working on the design of the large tokamak. Problems of cost and technical instability repeatedly threatened to end the endeavor entirely. In 1998, the U.S. stopped funding ITER-related projects, citing unanticipated expenses as well as papers by physicists, new at the time, that claimed the reactor would not work.
“People knew how to make a high density plasma, people knew how to make a very pure plasma, people knew how to make a long-time plasma and so forth, but nobody had done all of those things at once,” said William Dorland, now a physicist at the University of Maryland and co-author of a paper that doomed ITER in the eyes of its American backers.
However a redesign of the tokamak, and a scaling down of ITER’s goals to make the project less expensive, lured back many skeptics. The original plans for ITER included two stages of experimentation: In the first stage, researchers hoped to create a plasma that yielded more energy than it absorbed. In the second stage, researchers were to develop materials for a commercial power plant. In its new, scaled-back form, scientists at ITER will focus only on the plasma stage, while separate initiatives will tackle the materials issue. While a working reactor is a decade away, physicists predict a commercial power plant could follow any time in the following 20 to 50 years .
In creating a more convincing argument for ITER, physicists also teamed up with economists to argue the long-term economic viability of fusion as a fuel compared to coal and natural gas.
“The government borrows money to do fusion research at a certain rate, in effect, and then it gets paid back, or the world gets paid back, assuming we succeed in this R&D, at something like 80-to-1,” said Robert Goldston, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
These days, few scientists debate the importance of ITER. However, some environmentally-friendly politicians in Europe, as well as Greenpeace International, have called the project a drain on much-needed resources that could be better spent on known quantities like wind and solar development. Jim Riccio, an anti-nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace USA, called fusion a “welfare program for nuclear scientists.”
But even William Dorland, who once helped damn ITER in peer-reviewed journals, has come to support the project, though he suspects that “another design is likely to be able to produce large amounts of fusion” before ITER’s tokamak is ever successful.
In January of 2003, President Bush announced the U.S. would continue its involvement in ITER’s development, and this year, the Department of Energy allocated $25 million to the project. Bush has requested another $60 million in 2007 for building components, hiring staff and financing the construction of the Cadarache facility in France. Construction will start in November of this year, once the final agreements are signed.
Speaking at the National Building Museum back in February 2003—well ahead of his controversial comments on the U.S. addiction to foreign oil—Bush presented fusion research as a necessary gamble.
“[We’re] not sure if it will be able to produce affordable energy for everyday use,” he said. “It’s worth a look because the promise is so great.”
Earth View
If you were to stand on the sun (not advised), peer through some magnification and look at the earth right now, this is what it would look like. (via Chaotic Utopia)
“New & Notable” will henceforth be known as “I Can’t Believe It’s Science.” Long live, I Can’t Believe It’s Science.
Scent of a Woman
A new study published in the journal Analytical Chemistry shows that sperm have a sense of smell. Further, it’s so sophisticated that even an ovarian scent that’s diluted 100,000 times will cause the little gametes to turn tail and swim in its direction. The study’s authors note that sperm have olfactory receptor proteins—much like those in our noses—which reside over their outer membranes. The researchers used mouse sperm for their study, but they are confident their results apply to man-sperm as well. Apparently, sperm does not hold much of a species bias, as sperm from one mammal will respond to ovarian chemicals from another.
(source: Discovery News)
Polar Disorder
Now that global warming has made food less available, polar bears live in a cold, hard, bear-eat-bear world. Long, iceless seasons mean the polar bears can’t get to seals—their usual fare—so for the first time, scientists have observed polar bears stalking, killing and eating each other. There has even been one recorded incident of a polar bear killing a mother in her den shortly after she gave birth. Environmentalists argue that global climate change will cause polar bears to go extinct within the next hundred years. If they have to resort to eating one another, the prediction doesn’t sound so far-fetched at all.
(source: Associated Press)
Hold the Screaming Orgasm
Norwegians like their nights long, their herring pickled and their sex sober. According to a survey of 1736 people by Arcus, the only wine distiller in Norway, 52% of Norwegian men and 59% of Norwegian women think sex is better without social lubricant. However, 27% of men and 20% of women responded that it’s preferable to have a few glasses of wine before doing the deed. This study is the first step in Arcus’s grand plan to find out exactly when and how Norway wants its booze.
(source: Aftenposten) Thanks to Seed‘s Deputy Art Director Adam Billyeald for his translation assistance.
Fall Flat
In autumn, the leaves fall, the temperatures fall and our sexy spring figures fall. According to a study accepted for publication by the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, the location of our body fat changes along with the seasons. As testosterone levels start to rise in the summer, women gain fat around their waists, giving them a higher waist-to-hip ratio. Men experience the opposite effect, losing weight from their midsection as autumn approaches. Neither of the fall fashions looks particularly good: The literature shows that the curvaceous look of a low waist-to-hip ratio uniformly appeals to men, and chicks dig the more uniform, manlier physique on men.
(source: Discovery News)
The Aristocrats!
Richard Wiseman has discovered the world’s funniest joke—and God no, it’s not “The Aristocrats.” Wiseman, a professor at the University of Hertfordshire, got 300,000 people from around the world to vote online for the funniest yarn, and the winning joke has been traced to comedian Spike Milligan. All right, kids, here it is:
Two hunters are out in the woods in New Jersey when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’ The operator says: ‘Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’ There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says ‘OK, now what?’
If you didn’t laugh, you don’t belong to this world.
(source: the Telegraph)
Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth
Much like fellow royal Catherine the Great (story unconfirmed), an ant queen can die if she goes a little overboard with her sex life. An ant queen loses her virginity in a gang-bang so hardcore that the males she mates with all die of exhaustion after the bacchanal. This is the only time the queen has sex in her life, and she uses the stored up sperm to fertilize millions of eggs. Recent research found that the queen doesn’t fill up to capacity with sperm, and the scientists believe this is for health reasons.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have discovered that if a queen accumulates too much semen, she puts herself at risk of death by disease. The researchers hypothesize that the ant can put so much energy into keeping the precious sperm alive that she could compromise her own immune system.
Still, it’s good to be the queen.
(source: University of Copenhagen)
We’ve all seen it: Humphrey Bogart in black and white, chasing crooks through shadows and down dreary alleys. The moody, hard-boiled noir that Bogie personified defined an age of wartime anomie in Europe and the US, and made for gritty, stimulating film and novels. Today, the chiaroscuro tone of pulp is not only found in repertory theaters and airport bookshops: Detective narratives are turning up in efforts to solve the deepest mysteries of quantum mechanics.
Creative fiction is a powerful device for elucidating complex quantum phenomena, both for informing the public and among physicists themselves. Whodunits are natural fits for the portrayal, for example, of the duplicity of light: In the infamous double-slit experiments, photons seemingly change properties to avoid detection of their true nature by playing both sides of the wave-particle duality.
A recent article entitled “An Entangled Web of Crime: Bell’s Theorem as a Short Story,” in the American Journal of Physics, used a Sherlock Holmes plotline to explain effects of quantum non-locality. According to the co-author, Dr. Howard Wiseman of Griffith University in Australia, “A mystery or crime seemed to be the natural setting because of its adversarial structure with police questioning suspects who have something to hide. In quantum mechanics, nature seems like that; we can ask questions, but nature itself has something to hide and usually only gives up part of the truth.”
Hard-boiled narration is an apt complement to quantum information. Technical articles are filled with agents, ciphers, bombs, uncertainty and hidden variables. But it also goes the other way: Quantum theory appears in neo-noir works from Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency to I ♥ Huckabees. In his play Hapgood, Tom Stoppard famously used quanta to describe double agents; the Coen brothers invoked Heisenberg in an attempt to acquit The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Though the literati have well employed quantum theory in their art, physicists have done them one better. Last year, Nature published a widely-read detective serial in which an investigator used quantum communication to solve a murder, and Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld’s influential popular work, The Evolution of Physics, employed a lengthy scientist-as-detective metaphor.
As Raymond Chandler—crime fiction’s Einstein—said, “There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber…Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.” Perhaps the confluence of the obtuse with the low-brow may be what is needed to solve the murder of Schrödinger’s cat and tease out the secrets of that ultimate femme fatale, Mother Nature.
Heart And Lung Sounds
What does your heart sound like with a systolic murmur? What does your breathing sound like with pleural friction? Listen here, and live the hypochondriac’s dream.
With the collapse of communism in 1992, the bottom dropped out of the Soviet weapons labs. The US, worried that newly destitute weapons researchers would sell their skills to unsavory regimes, initiated an effort to direct scientists’ wartime skills to more peaceful endeavors. Financial support for former Soviet weapons scientists was written into disarmament programs. Russian researchers who had lived in secret cities were suddenly invited to tour Los Alamos. The Russian space program was soon invited to participate in the International Space Station&emdash;to keep ballistics experts working for the good guys&emdash;and later, microbiologists were paid to work on drugs and basic research to keep them from lucrative work developing bioweapons.
“American assistance was extremely useful in helping Russian scientists and engineers to find ourselves in new fields,” said Boris Ryabov, director of engineering at Sarov, once the USSR’s largest nuclear weapons lab.
Nearly 15 years after the end of the arms race, the focus of these programs has shifted from supporting fundamental research to encouraging former weapons scientists to develop marketable technologies with Western partners&emdash;the goal being the development of a self-sustaining R&D infrastructure.
“Commercialization has become a mantra, and in part, that’s been forced by the US Congress, which wants to see exit strategies. They’re not interested in long-term, welfare-type support for Russian science,” said Laura Holgate, vice president of the Russia program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Private programs like NTI, as well as government-supported initiatives like the International Science & Technology Center (ISTC) and US Department of Energy programs (both funded, in part, through the US’s Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991), have worked to disarm the former Soviet Union using a variety of means. ISTC alone has funded tens of thousands of former weapons scientists&emdash;in a given year, the ISTC pays more researchers than work at all the US nuclear weapons laboratories combined.
The focus on commercialization has had major impacts on sectors that have received more funding. Former Soviet weapons scientists have designed much of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner; longer-lasting plasma torches for industrial use; next-generation wind-power and art-restoration technologies; special gyros for oil drilling&emdash;the list goes on. “To see [former weapons scientists] engaged in some of these very exciting, very cutting-edge, very internationally collaborative areas, I think really is a testimony to the long-term impact that these programs have had,” said Anne Harrington, director of the US National AcademiesCommittee on International Security and Arms Control.
But the new emphasis has also resulted in scaled-back funding for basic research. Indeed, the landscape and culture of Russian research and science has shifted&emdash;and, in places, been dismantled&emdash;to make way for Western approaches to R&D. Funding has moved from government institutes to tech startups. Science in former Soviet countries is now much like the rest of the post-Soviet economy: driven for short-term profit, and partnered with support from the West.
“The purpose of these programs was never to save Russian science,” said Harrington. “If other people wanted to do that, that was fine. The purpose of these programs was to keep key people who could provide important or critical information on weapons science from doing that.”
How successful the programs have been at their original goal of nonproliferation is ultimately unknowable, both because so much of the intelligence is classified, and because it’s difficult to prove a negative. “There is no Russian equivalent of A.Q. Kahn as far as anyone knows,” said Holgate. On the other hand, the Russian government has certainly been threatened with sanctions because of suspected (non-nuclear) proliferation.
The golden age of nonproliferation funding for science may be reaching its terminus. “I think that these programs will be greatly winding down [within 10 years],” said Boris Mislavsky, vice president of the National Industry Coalition in Moscow, which helps form American research partnerships in Russia with Department of Energy funds. And whether a national R&D infrastructure can exist for long without basic research is a worrisome question for many.
“Fundamental science continues to replenish the people and the topics that then become, in essence, the underpinnings of an economy,” said Sig Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “What [my Russian colleagues] are concerned about is that those underpinnings are not being supported.”
“In the end, Russia is going to have to make the decisions on what it’s going to invest in pure science,” said Vic Alessi, president of the quasi-governmental US Industry Coalition, who serves on the board of the ISTC. “The rest of the world can’t do that. At some point, they have to belly up to the bar and [put funds toward] infrastructure and education and creating long term prospects for their country.”
We may all be hurtling into the future, but, according to University of California researchers, some of us are doing it backwards.
A team of scientists discovered that a group of indigenous people in South America, known as the Aymara, have a concept of time that places the future physically behind them and the past ahead.
The use of spatial abstractions for time is universal across all cultures, said Rafael Nunez, a cognitive scientist at UC-San Diego, and the lead author of a study on the Aymara appearing in the July issue of Cognitive Science. These abstractions are usually based on human bodily experience; for instance, if a thirsty man sees a water fountain 100 yards ahead, in order to get to it he will move both forward spatially and into the future. Such experiences have led many cultures to conceive of time as a linear path, with the past behind them.
“It’s very pervasive almost all over the world that the future is in front—up until this case, which is the first well-documented case to show the opposite,” said Nunez, who interviewed and documented 30 Aymara adults in northern Chile. “With this finding, we can see that humans have the ability to organize bodily experience to bring forth very different forms of thinking.”
In Aymara, qhipa, which means “back,” is used to mean “future,” while nayra is used for both “front” and “past.” For instance, the expression nayra mara, which is used to mean “last year,” can literally be translated to mean “front year,” while qhipa marana, which means “next year,” can be translated to mean “back year.”
It’s not just the linguistic roots that the Aymara have reversed, said Nunez, it’s also their physical gestures: When Aymara adults speak about the future, they gesture behind them; when they speak about the past, they gesture ahead. The movements, according to Nunez, suggest that Aymara speakers actually conceive of the past as being physically in front of them and the future behind.
“Gesture is really cool evidence,” said Mark Johnson, a philosopher at the University of Oregon who has written about language and metaphors in relation to time. “It’s a very powerful source of evidence for the conceptual reality of these metaphors.”
What the reverse gestures say about what is going on in the minds of the Aymara is not yet clear.
Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist at Stanford who studies abstract language and thought, said that while Nunez’s paper does a “beautiful job” of demonstrating that the reversed gestures do occur, the function of such gestures, and why they originated, is harder to determine.
Nunez and co-author Eve Sweetser, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, hypothesize that the Aymara gesture differently because they perceive the world differently, a difference that may have arisen along with the grammatical rules of their language.
In Aymara, speakers indicate whether they have personal knowledge of what they are saying—if, for instance, they actually saw a bridge collapse or they only heard about it from others. This emphasis on clearly delineating what is seen and what is not seen is consistent with placing the past, which is known, in front of the speaker’s eyes and the future, which is unknown, out of sight.
According to Nunez, some elderly Aymara speakers refuse to even discuss the future, because they consider what’s to come so unknowable that nothing reasonable could be said about it.
Aymara has two to three million speakers, though many of the younger Aymara also speak Spanish. These bilingual speakers gesture in the more typical fashion, suggesting that even though the language of Aymara is robust, a mode of thought could be dying out.
“This is something that’s more than just words,” Nunez said. “It’s about the way people conceive of the world.”
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Researchers Create a Butterfly Species, Discover a Rodent Family
Scientists have crossbred two butterfly species to create a distinct third species, the naturally occurring H. heurippa. The researchers had noticed that the distinctive red and white wing patterns of H. heurippa appeared to be an almost exact mix of the patterns of two other species. By mating butterflies of the two parent species, the scientists achieved hybrid speciation, where instead of one species diverging into two, as is usually the case, two species come together to form a third.
A live specimen of a rodent family thought to have been extinct for 11 million years was found recently in central Laos. The animal, which scientists have nicknamed the Laotian rock rat, is a calm, dark, furry, squirrel-like creature. The discoverers plan to study the species closely so as to preserve its habitat and thereby avoid sending the family into actual extinction.
A new microscope design, which allows for direct, real-time observation of genetic behavior, has revealed that some genes are expressed in spurts of activity rather than continuously. Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers observed a gene that helps regulate the life cycle of one species of amoeba and found that it activates in short pulses. The researchers hypothesize that the pulsing behavior may regulate development: Much as a thermostat only releases a little bit of heat at a time, so a house doesn’t overheat, this gene only activates briefly, so there isn’t too much activity at once.
Bush Safeguards 7,000 Species
On Thursday President Bush created the largest marine conservation area in the world. The sanctuary, which covers 140,000 square miles of Hawaiian Islands and surrounding waters, is home to over 7,000 species, many of which live exclusively within the new preserve. The refuge will be formed using a 100-year-old law known as the
National Antiquities Act, which gives the president the right to create national monuments.
A British and Dutch research team has found that Arctic sea level is dropping by as much as 2 millimeters per year. The data was collected by Europe’s ERS-2 satellite, which detects sea level by measuring the travel time of microwave pulses it generates. While sea level is not uniform across the globe, the receding sea level in the Arctic still puzzles scientists. The team’s leader, Dr Remko Scharroo, said he awaits an explanation from the geophysics community.
NASA‘s Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) has started collecting data that will reveal where aerosols are located and how they are affecting climate change. Aerosols, tiny, dust-like particles in the atmosphere, reflect some of the sun’s rays away from Earth, causing a “global cooling” effect. CALIPSO will use lidar, a radar-like technology that uses visible light instead of radio waves, to determine how much of the Earth’s atmosphere is covered by aerosol clouds.
Companies and Countries Encourage Alternate Energy
Bank of America has joined a small but growing contingent of organizations offering cash incentives to employees who purchase hybrid cars. The company will offer $3,000 to hybrid-purchasing workers in Boston, Los Angeles, and Charlotte, North Carolina, matching the $3,000 federal tax credit for purchasing a hybrid. Other companies offering such incentives include Google and Timberland.
Russia is preparing to build the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, which would be ideal for generating power in remote arctic areas, a state representative said. The $336 million unit will be built at an atomic submarine construction yard in the Arctic. Environmental groups have criticized the project as unsafe, but Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia’s Federal Atomic Power Agency, has assured them that “there will be no floating Chernobyl.”
A controversial nuclear cooperation deal between India and the United States appears to be making progress, both sides said Wednesday. The deal would allow India to access civilian nuclear technology, but it would also require international inspection of a majority of their reactors. Additionally, the United States has included a provision granting itself the right to cease cooperation if India begins nuclear weapons testing.
A United Nations plan to bolster renewable energy use in poor countries is expected to cut CO2 emissions by a billion metric tons by 2012. The program provides CO2 credits to wealthy investor nations that reduce global emissions by paying for renewable energy infrastructures in developing nations. The UN is considering over 800 individual projects for the program, with 200 already approved and 600 still awaiting evaluation.
Government Recalls Poison, Introduces Disease
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to phase out a common pesticide known to cause seizures, paralysis, and possibly death. The pesticide AZM is derived from a World War II era nerve agent and has been in use commercially since the late 1950s. The EPA decision follows a 2004 lawsuit in which farmers and environmental groups sued the EPA for continuing to allow farmers to use such a dangerous chemical. The case was settled when the EPA agreed to reconsider the use of AZM.
The federal government’s plan to open a bioterrorism simulation laboratory near San Francisco has met stiff resistance, and an appeals court is hearing arguments on whether the lab should be permitted. Opponents of the lab contend that insufficient research was done in choosing the research site. The designated area is near both the major population center of San Francisco and dangerous fault lines. San Francisco residents worry that an earthquake at the lab could expose them to the plague, HIV and anthrax, all of which would be stored in the facility.
Al Gore plans to train 1,000 people to give the now famous slideshow featured in his recent film An Inconvenient Truth. The slideshow presents evidence of human-caused global climate change, including increased concentrations of CO2, higher sea levels and more intense storms. Gore has pledged that the profits from the movie and the book of the same name will be devoted to training his 1,000 new recruits.
Red Rover, Red Rover, Send Bridget Right Over
Last Monday, British scientists unveiled a prototype of Bridget, the life-detecting robot they plan to send to Mars in 2011. According to the rover’s designers, Bridget will cover more ground than either of the NASA craft currently on Mars, and it will use more advanced equipment to gather samples from beneath the Red Planet’s surface and analyze them for signs of past or present life. The designers expect Bridget will cost €150 million or $189 million.
Stewart McPherson sweats in a wetsuit to demonstrate a blue whale’s insulation. Credit: Nick Pattinson
Once upon a time scientists tinkered away in their labs, emerging infrequently in order to announce a grand discovery. Naturally, the majority of the public could not understand such clever stuff, so the boffins would repack their beards and return to the lab to continue their investigations into science mysteries
Nowadays scientists are not like this. They want to engage and communicate with the public about their work. What’s more, they’ve seen celebrity chefs, gardeners, nannies and designers on TV and they want a slice of the action.
Who can blame them?
And so FameLab was born, brainchild of the and the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Billed as science’s answer to “Pop Idol”/“American Idol,” FameLab is a talent hunt for the new face of UK science—“the next Sir David Attenborough or Susan Greenfield.”
In its second year, the contest, dubbed “Boff Idol,” attracted 150 competitors from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all vying for the grand prize of £2,000 ($3,700) plus the chance to work with a television producer to develop a show for the alternative TV network, Channel 4.
In early spring, the hopefuls competed in five regional heats across the UK, delivering three-minute performances on a chosen scientific topic in front of a live audience and judges. Ten finalists were chosen and then asked to offer the public a sample of their talents in the form of a 99-second podcast on one of three subjects: what makes an octopus different to other sea creatures apart from its “legs;” why water doesn’t burn despite being made from hydrogen and oxygen; and “the weird world of quantum mechanics.”
The FameLab 2006 finals took place on the penultimate day of the Cheltenham Science Festival. A panel of four judges—including Roger Highfield, science editor of The Daily Telegraph and festival director Kathy Sykes—selected a winner from the 10 wannabes, basing their decision on a five-minute talk prepared by each competitor.
By 5 p.m., the eighteenth-century Town Hall auditorium was packed with the would-be stars’friends and relatives, reporters and curious ticket-goers. Posters mounted on the walls screamed “No Nerds Allowed!”
The contestants’ bios in the event program seemed intent on proving that these 10, ranging from 22 to 35 years old, were no classic science geeks, despite their number including a parasite lover, a materials scientist and an astrophysicist. The program listed their interests in a way that declared, perhaps a little to eagerly, that all live exciting lives outside the labs. Three of them were described as keen dancers whose specialties including belly dancing and swing jive, one taught a pet cockatiel tunes, one is into motor sports and another enjoys solo flying.
The crowd got its first chance to match a face to the extracurriculars when finalist Sima Adhya, 29, took the stage. The London space mission scientist, who is working with the European Space Agency on a mission to deflect an asteroid from potentially impacting Earth, used balloons as props to illustrate how the Earth gets its spin from an ancient collision with what became the moon. Afterwards she faced a grilling from the judges. Fortunately there was no Simon Cowell cruelty and thus no tearful outburst, just a couple of academic questions on theories surrounding the Earth’s spin, which she answered competently.
Davina Bristow, 26, a neuroscientist from London, who appeared on stage in a crimson dress and, via descriptions of the luridly colored bottoms and testicles of various monkeys, explained how red-clad competitors are winners, including references to World Cup uniforms.
Sarah Curtis, 22, took a mouthful from a helium balloon, and then squeaked out English soccer songs in an attempt to explain how the gas affects a person’s voice. A chemist from Leeds, she impressed the judges with her bravery, if not her knowledge.
“I bought a whole tank of helium to practice,” she announced to the crowd.
Karl Byrne, 26, a biologist from Belfast, employed his soothing Northern Irish accent for a talk on black holes; David Loong, 29, an Australian chemist based in London, explained how the bird flu vaccine works.
The 3 winners. Credit: Nick Pattinson
Sarah Forbes-Robertson, a 35-year-old genetic biologist from Swansea, had already won a digital radio for her podcast when she came onstage encumbered by a giant cell nucleus and a chromosome, with which she explained, in a slightly schoolmarmish manner, how the ends of chromosomes determine aging.
Stewart McPherson, 22, from Durham, appeared on stage in a wetsuit and sweated through a description of the blue whale. Steve Robertson, 27, a fungus expert from Newcastle gamboled on stage while delivering a comedic monologue about charcoal.
Lindsay Stenhouse, 25, a Scottish parasitologist, bounced on stage energetically while wearing a green beard. After foisting some spare facial hair on the judges, she gave an impassioned explanation of selfish genes. She had no doubt garnered some of her theatrical manner in the previous year while helping to create a science fringe festival, called oneEighty, now part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
Finally, the diminutive Jonathan Wood, 30, deputy editor of the journal Materials Today, came onstage to discuss spider web silk. His talk began with Spiderman and ended with genetically modified goats whose milk includes the proteins present in the silk.
While the judges deliberated, Quentin Cooper, host of BBC Radio 4’s “Material World,” invited the audience to vote via applause for their favorite communicator. They chose Adhya, who received a copy of the critically acclaimed book Mutants by Armand Leroi.
Unfortunately for Adhya, the judges had someone else in mind, and proclaimed Wood the winner because, according to Sykes, the festival director, he delivered both “passion and clarity.” Adhya shared runner-up honors with Stenhouse, described by the judges as “magical and passionate” even though they “weren’t entirely convinced by the green beard.”
“I only entered to see whether or not I’d be any good at communicating science,” said Wood.
Adhya agreed that she had been similarly motivated and added that had she won, she wouldn’t have re-ordered her life.
“I love science,” she said. “I’ll definitely stay a scientist even if I do get to go on TV.”
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During his presentation in the chandelier-festooned ballroom of Atlanta’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Akihiro Matsuura motioned to the Plexiglas cylinder lying horizontally in front of him and asked his audience what path a an elastic rubber ball would take if rolled along the cylinder’s interior wall.
“Spiral!” yelled one person in the audience. “Helix!” yelled another. The ball defied them both by rolling around the cylinder with a discrete elliptical route, returning to Matsuura’s hand like a yo-yo tethered to a string.
“NO!” The spectators gasped. There was a rumbling of flummoxed unease. With a mime’s spare grace, Matsuura, a lecturer in computer science at Tokyo Denki University, then turned the transparent cylinder on its end and asked again: “Now what route will it travel?” The audience conferred: town, of course—but how? Would it drop straight, or curve like a corkscrew? Matsuura released the ball. It took a curving path downward, as expected, but then reversed course and climbed the cylinder, completing a three-dimensional figure eight—ending, again, in Matsuura’s ready hand.
Matsuura might well have announced the unification of quantum mechanics and special relativity in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom that day, judging by the cries of incredulity that erupted from his audience. But Matsuura just shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t help myself,” he said.
So concluded the 43rd presentation of math and magic at “Gathering for Gardner,” a bi-annual pilgrimage honoring Martin Gardner, who, from 1957 to 1981, enraptured mathematicians and scientists, hobbyists and professionals, magicians and puzzlists and skeptics alike with his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Known among the faithful as “G4G7” (as in “Gathering for Gardner,” and seven because it is the seventh such gathering), the events are organized by Atlanta businessman Tom Rodgers, who one night had all 250-plus members of the international cult of Gardner over to his Japanese-style house, incongruously set atop red clay hills and a forest of Georgia pines, for sushi.
The legend himself did not attend; living as he does in Norman, OK, and despising travel, Gardner has made it to only two of the events in his honor. Now a youthful 91, he performs his trademark tricks with more dexterity than ever. One Gardnerite, invoking George Bernard Shaw, observed that “We don’t stop playing because we get old—we get old because we stop playing.” Gardner himself has not stopped—currently he is writing a collection of essays, one on each of 12 books by the “prince of paradox,” G.K. Chesterton.
The conference equivalent of speed-dating, G4G7 was packed with math-and-magic presentations of 10, 20 or 30 minutes. Subjects addressed a curiosity cabinet of intellectual jewels, each revealing something quizzical about the world—like the presentation by Michael Cantor, an Atlanta experimental psychologist, on “Competence: Drivers, Aviators, Jugglers and More”—or concealing something magical, like the Swede Lennart Green’s masterfully clumsy card tricks. Green doesn’t deal cards, he fumbles and spills them, crumpled, in a seemingly chaotic mess—but reveals a royal flush. Then there was the talk by Bob Friedhoffer, who addressed an always-controversial issue: “Performing Fleas, Were They Up to Scratch?”
Wiping his sweaty brow and repositioning his baseball cap (fittingly emblazoned with 3.141592) at the end of day two, Atlanta high-school teacher Steven Sigur willed himself to stay in his seat. “It’s all very interesting, but I’m about to OD,” he said. By day four, even Princeton’s John Conway—typically the earliest to rise and last to bed—was lamenting the overload. “There’s infinitely much to know,” he said. “You simply can’t know it all, despite the fact that that is my aim.”
This being the seventh Gathering for Gardner, the event celebrated “seven” in all its incarnations. The mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose pondered “Seven: Geometry and Beyond.” “Part of mathematics is like puzzle solving,” said Sir Roger, “and it is a good way of getting people interested in mathematics without them realizing it is mathematics.” Neil Sloane, a fellow at AT&T in Florham Park, NJ and creator of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, expounded on “Seven Staggering Sequences.” One in particular, discovered by Bernardo Recamán Santos, contained a pattern of numbers so difficult to decipher that those who’ve tried have dubbed it “How to Recamán’s Life.”
And abiding by a rather lowbrow G4G tradition, the numerological riff by LA-based Scot Morris (best known as the erstwhile “Games” editor from Omni magazine) was a comprehensive chronicling of the importance of the “Cosmic Seven.” He pointed out there are seven colors in the spectrum, seven notes in the diatonic scale, seven seas, seven continents, seven wonders of the world, seven dirty words (according to George Carlin) and seven holes in the typical human head. “That was such a load of crap,” countered Robert Sandfield, a puzzle designer from Houston. As is the G4G custom with these two good-natured banterers, Sandfield followed with his own presentation, on “Anti-Seven.” “Why did six fear seven?” asked this grown man, keeping an entirely straight face. “Because seven eight nine.”
In a case of Greek mythology gone green, scientists in California have created a double-tailed plant: a mutant with a second root where its stalk would typically reside.
Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego grew the mutant in order to study how the fate of a plant is determined in its embryonic stages; their findings could be used for developing agricultural plants with more desirable traits.
“Considering a huge proportion of what we eat are actually plants, it’s important to understand how plants make roots and shoots, leaves and flowers,” said Jeff Long, an assistant professor in the department of plant cellular and molecular biology at Salk and lead author of the study, which was published in the June 9th issue of Science.
The scientists determined that a variant of the gene known as TOPLESS can cause the development of a root instead of a shoot during the development of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, resulting in a young plant with roots at both ends. Arabidopsis is a wild mustard plant, widely used as a model organism in plant genetics. It was also the first flowering plant to have its genome sequenced.
Scientists previously thought that the division of plants into root and shoot regions was regulated by transcription factors—proteins that directly bind to DNA and activate genes. But it turns out that the division happens as a result of a different class of proteins, called repressors, which bind transcription factors and disrupt gene activation.
Normally, the TOPLESS gene codes for one of these repressor proteins, which inactivates the genes that cause root development in the shoot area of the plant. But when the TOPLESS gene is deactivated through mutation, root-producing genes are activated, and the fate of the top half of the plant cell goes from shoot to root.
“Repression is probably as important, if not more important, as activation,” said John Bowman, a plant biology professor at the University of California, Davis. “It’s probably just as important, or more important, to turn off sets of genes and keep them off.”
Surprisingly, this mechanism of gene regulation in the development of body structure is almost exactly the same as in animals, Long said.
“If plants and animals actually did arise from a single-celled organism millions of years ago and broke off into different evolutionary pathways, both the animal line and the plant line inherited a common set of basic genes,” he said. “So it just turned out that in evolution, the way things developed into multicellular organisms, the same kinds of genes were used for these similar processes.”
Understanding these mechanisms at a molecular level can help us adjust the behavior of agricultural plants, Long noted. If scientists can identify genes that determine certain traits—such as kernel size in corn—they can better engineer plants to have more desirable traits.
“Arabidopsis belongs to the family of cabbages and turnips, and we eat those all the time,” Long said. “We can go back and look at those genes in our domesticated crops and see what kinds of genes were selected for to improve yield in the future.”
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The Rise of The Feathered Dragons
When a landmark paper is published in the field of avian evolution, where would we turn if not to GrrlScientist for the perfect blog post? Even if you never thought you cared about birds, it’s totally worth a read.
Sex Selection Medical Tourism
Here’s the libertarian take on foreigners coming to the US to choose the sex of their babies.
Last December, Oregon State University forest scientist Dan Donato prepared an article for publication in Science indicating that the practice of forest recovery was not really a help to nature, and immediately found himself at the center of a heated debate.
Before Donato’s findings made it to press, a group of his OSU colleagues launched an aggressive campaign to stop the article’s publication.
“The best way to start a bar fight in the Northwest is to mention forest recovery,” said Donato.
It sounds like common sense: After a blaze razes a stretch of wooded area, why not clear out any remaining trees and replant new ones? This way, the timber industry picks up a tidy profit from everything left standing, and the forest seemingly gets to start with a green bill of health.
Apparently, Congress agrees with that logic: Last month, the House voted 243-to-182 for a bill that would subsidize as well as ease restrictions on the practice of forest recovery on public lands. If the bill follows a similar track in the Senate, the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act could be on the books this year, even before the leaves start to fall.
The bill’s supporters claim its relatively broad support follows naturally from hundreds of studies validating the practice. But Donato and other ecologists claim that the science is skewed by the influence of the timber industry.
According to Donato’s research, clumps of healthy trees left after forest fires are 70% more effective at reseeding surrounding areas than humans are. Further, harvesting burnt trees leaves lots of scrap twigs and broken branches behind—an ideal kindling for yet another fire.
These findings met with vehement disagreement from other scientists at OSU. The most outspoken of these critics was forest engineer John Sessions. Part of his objection, Sessions said, was that Donato’s research focused on a limited area from a 2002, 500,000-acre blaze in northern California and southern Oregon, so the results might not be widely applicable.
Sessions went as far as going on a popular Oregon conservative radio talk show, where he demeaned Donato’s research and announced the campaign to halt its publication. He and his fellow antagonists wrote letters to the editors of Science demanding that they not print the paper.
“This is really irresponsible science,” Sessions said. “We have dozens of other studies from many other conditions that show that [human] seeding works as well if not better [than natural reseeding]. And if the recovery is performed properly, the workers clean any waste that could be a fire hazard.”
According to Sessions, Donato’s research also ignores economic factors. If forest recovery had taken place for the whole burn area immediately after the 2002 blaze, two billion board feet of timber could have been recovered, delivering eight to 10 jobs per million board feet by Sessions’ calculations.
“You don’t want to send the wrong kind of message when it can rob communities of that kind of economic benefit,” he said.
The aggressiveness of the attempts to preempt the paper prompted a sharp counterresponse from environmentalists, who object to human-led forest recovery because burnt forestland provides a unique ecosystem upon which certain plants and animals depend.
“Wildfires are an important part of life for the plants and animals involved,” said Richard Hutto, director of the Avian Science Center at the University of Montana. “They’ve got the routine perfected, and there’s not much we can do but stay out of their way.”
Six species of woodpecker live exclusively on burnt forest, eating the grubs of beetles that seek out the still-smoldering embers of burnt woods as a warm place to lay their eggs. Species ranging from bats that burrow under burnt bark to arboreal frogs that are drawn by the rich soil similarly thrive in the scorched earth.
“There are a lot of points of view that get overlooked a little too easily by the scientists that we are supposed to trust on this issue,” said Oregon’s Democratic State Senator Charlie Ringo.
Shortly after learning of the efforts to suppress Donato’s research, Ringo filed a Freedom of Information Act petition to acquire thousands of emails from OSU’s School of Forestry.
“We found really shockingly blatant bias on behalf of the timber industry,” Ringo said, citing one message from OSU’s vice president to the College of Forestry’s dean, which contained the phrases “our partners in industry” and “our nemeses in sustainability.”
OSU is currently conducting a review of its relationship with the timber industry, which contributes 10% of the university’s funding. Bias like this may very well be a widespread problem among research entities that rely on the timber industry’s contributions.
“There is good research out there, but it gets suppressed or overlooked,” said Dominick DellaSala, an expert in forest ecology for the World Wildlife Fund.
DellaSala is one of 169 environmentalists who wrote a letter to Congress in April, urging its members to consider research that argues that the human-led forest recovery process is detrimental and unprofitable. DellaSala’s group calculated a $14 million dollar loss would have occurred in an instance where Sessions had calculated a $17 million dollar profit. One major difference in his and Sessions’ estimates, DellaSala said, is that he included the cost of helicopters that would have been needed to remove timber where roads could not be created.
Additionally forest recovery would not create as many jobs as expected, DellaSala suggested. Wood mills typically set aside their current supply of timber when additional sources come in, creating a backlog of timber. The backlog drives timber prices down, deflating profits.
“One thing that everyone agrees on is that if this bill is made into law, it will dramatically change the lifecycle of our county’s forest ecosystems,” DellaSala said. “We owe it to our environment to have a clear, unbiased perspective of what our influence will be.”
Laotian Rock Rat
Watch a video of the recently discovered “living fossil.” Scientists thought this family of rodent went extinct 11 million years ago. The almost-cute waddler seen here begs to differ.
“American Idol” wannabes take note: Singing a sexy song could increase your chance of reproductive success─if you’re a canary.
A new study, published in this month’s issue of Ethology, suggests that canary mothers are more devoted to their young when they hear a sexy male serenade prior to reproduction.
“Females are able to allocate different investment in their young according to the attractiveness of the mate,” said Stefan Leitner, a postdoctoral biologist at the Royal Holloway, University of London and the lead author of the study.
Male canaries sing complex songs consisting of a distinct pattern of phrases, each containing a two-note “syllable” repeated over and over. These songs stimulate female canaries to build nests, begin pre-mating rituals and lay eggs.
But not all songs are created equal.
Researchers discovered that certain phrases in a canary’s song are “sexier” than other syllables, and can elicit more mating displays, in which the female bird crouches and flaps her wings. The songs generally judged to be sexy involve syllables that are complex—typically faster and covering a wider range of frequencies than less stimulating syllables.
“In canaries, the amazing thing is that some syllables in the song repertoire are known to be more attractive to females,” Leitner said. “The remarkable finding is that the female can alter physiology according to an acoustic stimulus.”
Leitner and his colleagues found that sexier songs don’t just influence a female’s outward behavior—they also affect reproduction. When the researchers played female canaries a recording of males singing sexy syllables, the females laid significantly larger eggs than birds that heard recordings of normal songs.
“It may be that this is a difficult kind of vocal gymnastics to achieve; it may be that males who do this are in very good condition,” said Roderick Suthers, a biologist at Indiana University who studies avian song production. “Maybe the female canaries pay attention to this particular kind of syllable because it tells them something about male quality—if these syllables are more difficult to produce, only the most competent males could produce them.”
A number of studies have shown that female birds invest more in eggs and offspring of males they perceive to be especially attractive. Such males often have genes that are more evolutionarily fit, and females are more likely to invest in making sure that the offspring of those males survive. This gives male canaries that croon sexy tunes better odds of passing their genes down to subsequent generations.
“Larger eggs,” Leitner said, “could mean that they could put more resources and more energy into these eggs, and the offspring hatch with a greater weight or are healthier.”
Picture a psychiatrist at her desk reviewing a case file. The report describes a young, teenaged male who, with several others his age, killed nearly a hundred victims. The case is astounding—not only because of the intensity and magnitude of the violence, but because nothing remotely like it has ever happened in the community before. Not even a single murder. As the psychiatrist turns the pages and reads on, the pieces of the puzzle start to come together. A few years before, the young killers had witnessed the massacre of their families and been orphaned. Afterwards, although still very young, they were relocated to another community with few adults to raise them; importantly, it was absent of older, mentoring males.
Resignedly, the psychiatrist writes her opinion: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She recommends intensive counselling and psychotherapy. Trauma and social breakdown—in this case, loss of a mother and community—compromise normal brain and behavior development, often resulting in hyper-aggression, violence and other asocial behaviors. Although treatment is called for, such developmental trauma, in the absence of family and friends who can psychologically, emotionally and physically support recovery, often leads to a pattern of psychobiological disorders. Trauma becomes neurobiologically etched and may be transmitted across generations. Unfortunately, the teenagers’ story echoes those of many others, each unpleasantly familiar in their association with a string of wars and genocide in Uganda, Rwanda, Iraq and Sudan. However, there is something different and perhaps more disturbing about this account.
These teenagers are young male African elephants. At a South African park, in the 1990’s, three young males attacked and killed 58 white and five black rhinoceroses; at a second park, young male elephants killed 40 white rhinoceroses. While these events have by far been the most dramatic, elsewhere in Africa and Asia, reports of elephant aggression are appearing more frequently. Moreover, violence is not just directed at other species. In yet another African park, male-on-male intraspecific mortality is responsible for 70% to 90% of adult male elephant deaths.
Until recently, these types of behavior have been almost unheard of, leaving conservation biologists searching for an explanation. Habitat destruction, starvation, social breakdown from poaching and culls, and the loss of herd coherence are factors known to severely threaten elephant survival. But the levels and types of atypical behavior being observed suggest an added dimension to the problem. Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part, revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths. Could it be that elephants, like humans, also suffer psychological trauma as a result of violence?
Until a few years ago, making such inference and diagnosing elephants with PTSD would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism. But no longer. Elephant psychopathology, chimpanzee infanticide and other un-animal-like behaviors are part of a growing body of research that suggests science is building toward a radical paradigm shift. Streams of new data and theories, critically from neuroscience, are converging into a new, trans-species model of the psyche. Humans are being reinstated back into the species continuum that Darwin articulated, a continuum that includes laughing rats, octopuses with personalities, sheep who read emotions from the faces of their family members and tool-wielding crows.
We now understand that all vertebrates, and it is argued even some invertebrates, share many biological structures and processes that underlie attributes once considered uniquely human: empathy, personality, culture, emotion, language, intention, tool-use and violence. Furthermore, we are able to see beyond species differences in ways we have never been able to before. Neuroimaging advances such as PET and fMRI can help map more elusive subjective qualities—such as emotion, states of consciousness and sense of self—to specific regions of the brain. In conjunction with a rich legacy of observational data and theories on animal behavior and human psychology, neuroscience is bridging long-standing conceptual and perceptual gaps.
Whether or not this paradigm shift conforms precisely to science philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s definition, its potential effects on science and society are revolutionary. The idea that humans share a psyche with other animals is enormously challenging. First, it alters the basic model around which biomedical and other disciplines have organized theory and terminology. Concepts like sense of self, empathy and intention have largely been considered exclusive to humans, and have therefore defined what animals are not. Such perceived dissimilarities have shaped theory, practice, law and custom for centuries. The human-animal gap influences how we live, how we formulate scientific questions, how we practice science and even what we eat. Today, in contrast, models of species’ similarity are replacing models of difference, and the lines between species have become increasingly blurred—blurred to the extent that many insist on limits to stem cell-chimera research to avoid mixing the neuronal and psychological capacities of humans and other species.
In itself, similarity among species is not new. Animal models that employ diverse species as surrogate humans have long been a staple of scientific research. Together, rats, mice, cats, dogs, apes and even invertebrates form the backbone of the biomedical and anthropological research that shapes the theories, practices and policies of human health and well-being. It is this understanding of relatedness that grounds scientific inference and makes studies on animals translatable to humans. Consequently, violent elephants and rats with a sense of humor are not remarkable because of the similarities they expose, per se, but because of the specific nature of the similarities.
For instance, the notion of “at-risk elephants” conflicts with our sense of what defines an elephant as well as what defines a human being. Because so much of human identity—who, how and what we are—has been based on what other species appear to lack, the possibility of a shared, trans-species model of brain and psyche simultaneously prompts us to reflect on what it means to be human.
Nonetheless, similarity does not confer identity—and species’ differences do exist. The task before us is to understand the significance and meaning of these differences, under a paradigm of similarity. An apple and an orange are both fruits and therefore the same if we are comparing fruits with doughnuts. But their differences become important when we are trying to decide which one to eat. The same holds true for the species we study. Since so much of science has been built on, and references, the assumption of human-animal difference, shifting to a model of human-animal similarity recalibrates the scale by which differences are measured. Accordingly then, today’s theory, practice, law and customs in science and society, which have been shaped by human-animal dissimilarities, must be revised. Clearly, ethical considerations may be compelled to change, but science itself is also affected. For example, consider how intraspecific violence and infanticide in multiple species might now be assessed. Diverse explanations have been put forward, largely depending on the species. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, primate infanticide can be seen as an adaptive reproductive strategy. On the other hand, in our society, these behaviors are regarded as abnormal and dealt with by the law and psychiatry. A trans-species model of vertebrate brain and behavior requires resolving whether this atypical behavior observed in chimpanzees and elephants is a disorder caused by trauma or an adaptive strategy. How might one or the other conclusion affect science’s current theories and practice, conservation and even law?
Neuroscience has made it possible to make inferences about animals from humans, in much the same way as animal models have been long used to infer human behavior from animals. Inference, then, is no longer unidirectional—and, it seems, models of the psyche are no longer limited to humans. Future historians of science may very well look back and consider the violent young elephants as symbols of a dramatic epistemic turning point in science and culture. For now, they have helped us realize that neuroscience has brought us much more understanding about what it means to be—no matter the species.
President Bush’s ignoring the advice of experts has been a common thread to many science stories during his administration. Credit: Natalie Slocum
From the JUNE/JULY issue of Seed:
When the “eminent NASA climatologist versus 24-year-old Republican apparatchik” story broke earlier this year, America went into yet another round of convulsions about science and the Bush administration. Having just finished touring to discuss my book The Republican War on Science, my initial reaction to the news could be summarized as follows: Here we go again. I was outraged, certainly. But I was also, perhaps, experiencing a bout of issue fatigue as I dutifully filed away yet another case study.
After a while, though, I started to ask myself why this issue can’t seem to stay dormant for more than a week at a time—why it’s showing up in “Doonesbury” strips and even in overseas headlines. And I realized something: Even I, who had written a book about the Bush White House’s conflicts with science, had probably underestimated the heft and political longevity of this particular meme. Perhaps we all did. The White House PR machine itself, I suspect, “misunderestimated” the potency of a science-based critique of President Bush—and even as the James Hansen-NASA scandal hit, had been positioning itself for damage control.
Just days later, there was Bush giving his State of the Union address, trying to reclaim the science issue by announcing a new plan to promote science education and shore up America’s scientific competitiveness. To make the image complete, the president then had himself photographed peering into a microscope at a Dallas high school. (In Texas, at least, Bush and science are still chums.)
If Bush’s handlers thought he needed better marks on science badly enough to make such an appeal—and, moreover, to make it at a time when his poll ratings had taken a considerable plunge—then somebody must have sensed a political vulnerability. After all, never in the history of the United States has good science been so crucial to good policymaking, and never has a presidential administration been dogged by such extensive and persuasive accusations of political abuses of science. The effect of these charges, it seems, may be lingering along with many, many other issues bringing the presidential acumen into question.
The mystery, of course, is how such lingering is possible. It certainly would seem to defy the laws of political arithmetic. When people go to the polls in the United States, few pull the levers based upon how they feel about science policy. And science isn’t typically an issue that affects the political fortunes of presidents.
Nevertheless, we’re seeing a fascinating kind of synergy here, one in which the science policy issue has gained remarkable salience because it is—in a complex but undeniable way—now wrapped up in the larger, more prominent debates about Bush’s handling of central issues like Iraq and New Orleans. Bush’s mistreatment of science has expanded into a story that resonates deeply within his own country, and widely throughout the world, because it’s similar to the greater political narratives already being played out.
For instance, a key case study of this administration’s abuse of science is its promotion of the dubious notion that Iraq’s confiscated aluminum tubes were intended for centrifuges and uranium enrichment, rather than for rocketry—a claim that the Department of Energy’s own centrifuge experts pretty uniformly rejected. Does that sound familiar? If it does, it’s because a similar pattern—ignore experts, favor ideologues—has been followed by the administration on any number of other science issues, ranging from global warming to the morning after pill.
Or consider Hurricane Katrina. President Bush himself grossly misstated the actual state of scientific knowledge when he so confidently declared, just after the storm, that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” In fact, every hurricane expert—and anyone who’d read a series of articles in the Times-Picayune years earlier—knew that New Orleans’ levee systems would likely not withstand a direct hit from a major hurricane; in the event, even a sideswipe from Katrina did the city in. If Iraq raised questions of presidential honesty, New Orleans raised questions of basic competence: Had Bush ignored clear vulnerabilities and failed to staff the government with the right experts on emergency preparedness and response?
These days, such concerns are all part of a package, a collection of anecdotes that together speak the same message: The president, for whatever reason, hasn’t shown that he respects what’s going on in what one of his aides so hilariously described as the “reality-based community.” The “Bush is anti science” meme carries political weight because it underscores why so many Americans (including previous supporters) are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Bush: They don’t think he’s fit to lead, and they don’t believe many of his appointees are competent administrators of various branches of the government, virtually all of which require some form of scientific or other expertise. Bush’s recently-exposed decision to meet with television producer and novelist Michael Crichton to discuss global warming—rather than heeding the advice of the National Academy of Sciences on this subject—epitomizes the president’s disregard for the critical role of legitimate expertise in decision-making, whether it’s about global warming, educational policy or nation-building.
When I give talks about what I dubbed the “war on science” that has been waged during this administration, I often get questions asking whether that isn’t too narrow a framing of the issue. Shouldn’t I be talking about a “war on expertise,” or even a “war on truth”? Whenever I hear this, I generally agree with the person asking the question, and then go on to crack a joke about how the attacks on science alone are more than enough for one writer to handle.
But now I realize something more: These questions are proof positive that those who are worried about the politics of science nurture their concern within a much broader context. These Americans are thinking: As science goes, so goes the nation. On some level, the science community has always known that. What’s new is that now, we have a heck of a lot of company.
Stouts for Broads
Scientists at the Czech Republic’s Research Institute for Brewing and Malting have created a non-alcoholic beer with 10 times the normal amount of the hormone phytoestrogen that they hope will help menopausal women keep their hormone levels up, thus easing the transition into post-reproductive life. The new drink is considered a breakthrough in the thriving field of “functional beer,” a research area that ought to be especially near-and-dear to Czechs, whose national per capita beer consumption is the world’s largest.
(source: Cee-FoodIndustry.com)
Rain Or Shine, All is Mine!
China has decided it will not be nature’s subordinate, especially when it comes to the country’s precious 2008 Olympics in Beijing. During the Summer Games, China’s Weather Modification Office (seriously) plans to blast chemicals into the atmosphere so that clouds will dissolve and let the sun shine in. China has long been shooting dry ice into the sky, coaxing water droplets to condense around crystals and rain on its northern regions, where farmers often have to work with dry, infertile land. The Chinese think they can slightly modify this process to dissolve clouds without roducing rain. And if the plan fails and rain falls during the Olympics, at least the evidence won’t show up on Google.
(source: CNN)
It’s Hip to Be Square
The youth of today are high and dry compared to the kids of 1991, according to a new CDC study. The study found that while marijuana use has increased since 1991—with the percent of high school students who have tried marijuana jumping from 31% to 38%—fewer high schoolers are drinking, as the proportion who have had at least one drink decreased from 82% in 1991 to 74% in 2005. Kids today are also less likely to have tried smoking (54% now, down from 70% then) and less likely to have had sex (47% now, 54% then). Of those who have some carnal knowledge, more are making safe choices: Today 63% report using condoms, whereas only 46% donned a love glove in 1991. If this slow but steady trend toward adolescent responsibility isn’t disconcerting enough, a new market research study found that more college students think iPods are “in” than think beer is “all that.”
(sources: Los Angeles Times, CNN)
Hurts So Good
Sketchy men: Next time you’re at a club, instead of grinding with the girl so drunk she’s immune to the pungent odor of your cologne, try the girl in the corner—the one holding her head in her hands and weeping from the pain, the nausea and the bursts of light clouding her vision. She may not be in the mood now, but according to a new study published in the journal Headache, she’ll be totally frisky later. Researchers found that migraine sufferers have a 20% higher sex drive than people who simply endure tension headaches. On average, women who experience migraines have about the same level of sexual desire as an average man who doesn’t suffer from headaches of doom. The scientists say that both migraines and high sex drive may be related to low system levels of the brain chemical serotonin.
(source: Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center)
Pollute the Air, Save the Earth
Lack of sufficient pollution apparently caused Katrina. Yeah, you read that right. According to a new study published in the journal Eos, the decline of aerosol pollution in our atmosphere may be leading to more Atlantic hurricanes. Aerosols, man-made pollution particles that eat ozone concentrate in the air, dim the sunlight over a region and can mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases by keeping that region cool. Aerosol emissions were sharply cut in the 1970s and 1980s, and the blazing rays of the sun now beam down onto the Northern Atlantic, heating up the waters and setting the stage for more hurricanes.
(source: Discovery News)
Bass-ic Research
The traditional arguing style of speaking louder than your opponent may now be overtaken by a new workplace tactic: speaking lower than your opponent. New British research shows that the average pitch of women aged 18 to 25 dropped by a semi-tone between 1945 and 1993. The researchers attribute this change to women trying to get ahead in a male-dominated workforce. Famous lowered-talkers include Margaret Thatcher, who dropped her pitch at the behest of image maker Gordon Reece; Princess Diana, who received coaching to tone down her sound; and “Weakest Link” host Anne Robinson, who reportedly changed her voice to sound more authoritative.
(source: Daily Mail, London)
Compensating Much?
A new study out of the University of Sussex shows that men engage in unhealthy “masculine” behaviors such as binge drinking when they feel they need to compensate for a lack of masculinity in another area. The researchers say this might explain why men drink heavily while they watch sports: Since they’re not man enough to play in the World Cup, they’ll show the world they’re man enough to guzzle down a stadium full of brewskis. Interviews with men between the ages of 18 and 21 found that they believe the ideal guy is physically tough, capable of supporting his family financially and confident in both risk-taking and sex.
(source: UK Economic & Social Research Council)
The Split Brain Experiments
Do your own cartoon research on Mr. Split Brainy. Write grant proposals! Submit papers! Extrapolate vast conclusions from one subject’s data!
Can you hear this?
All of us spring chickens can hear it just fine. Now where’s the Excedrin?
Can you guess which chick is transgenic? Courtesy of Robert Kay, Origen Therapeutics
Move over lab mice, it’s time to make room for an invasion of “lab chickens.”
Origen Therapeutics, a California biotechnology company, has developed a new method to create transgenic chickens—fowl that express genes from other organisms. The new technique, which the company revealed in the June 8th issue of Nature, may make the squawking barnyard birds as easy to genetically manipulate as that workhorse of animal research, the mouse.
“This is the first time that we’ve had an open slate to make genetic modifications to the chicken,” said Robert Kay, Origen’s president and CEO.
Previous procedures for creating transgenic chickens put limitations on the size of a gene that could be inserted or gave scientists little control over where it would end up in the genome. Origen’s innovative process involves manipulating primordial germ cells—the precursors to sperm and egg cells—allowing scientists to create chickens that give birth to offspring with a wide range of potential new genes and traits.
The research team, a coalition of scientists from Origen and the University of California, Davis, extracted and cultured primordial germ cells from the blood of chicken embryos. By using a unique combination of growth factors, the researchers were able to coax chicken germ cells to proliferate on the lab bench, a process that, according to Kay, remains arduous.
The scientists then modified the germ cells by inserting a sequence of DNA that produces a protein that glows green under ultraviolet light. The germ cells were then re-inserted into the embryos, which were allowed to develop normally.
When the resulting chickens had offspring, they passed along the green gene via their sperm or eggs. Under UV light, the offspring glowed green, verifying that their bodies were making the new protein, and that a new line of permanently altered chickens had been produced.
When compared to other techniques, such as the use of viral vectors to embed foreign DNA, Origen’s method allows scientists to modify the chicken genome in a more targeted way and to insert considerably longer sequences of DNA, noted James Petitte, a poultry scientist at North Carolina State University.
“It’s a step forward, there’s no question about it,” said Petitte, who has experimented with older methods for creating transgenic birds. Petitte also said that this new technique could eventually make chickens as useful to geneticists as mice.
Kay agreed with Petitte’s analysis, pointing out that green chickens are just a novelty and a test case. The real breakthrough is the ability to make a genetic modification to a chicken that will be transmitted through generations because it would have enormous practical potential for both agriculture and medicine. The method presents an opportunity to enhance chickens, genetically modifying them to be resistant to certain diseases—even avian flu.
A transgenic embryo Courtesy of Robert Kay, Origen Therapeutics
Transgenic chickens could also be used to produce human proteins, such as antibodies or growth hormones, which would allow for a flock of transgenic chickens to lay eggs from which these substances could be extracted and, potentially, turned into pharmaceuticals.
“There are people who want to make proteins of very high medicinal importance,” said Perry Hackett, a geneticist at the University of Minnesota. “If you can get an animal to make it and secrete it, you should be able to get a quality protein for a whole lot less money. That’s one of the major drivers of making transgenic animals.”
Scientists can already create transgenic goats and cows that secrete human proteins in their mik, but producing such animals remains controversial. Hackett eventually quit studying transgenic fish because he faced so much opposition. Critics argue that genetic engineering is immoral, or that transgenic animals will escape from the laboratory and breed in the wild, allowing their modified genes to enter the natural environment.
Aside from ethical concerns, it will be a while before transgenic animals truly become usable pharmaceutical factories. Even if the relevant proteins can be produced and collected, many phases of testing will be required before they could be used in humans. So far, according to Kay, no human protein produced by any transgenic animal has been approved for medical use.
“Right now everything’s in the laboratory phase,” Petitte said. “It’s going to be a while before we see them commercially.”
But scientists remain optimistic—particularly about chickens. Eric Wong, a molecular biologist at Virginia Tech who participated in a project to create transgenic turkeys, points out that chickens reproduce quickly, can be bred for high egg production and are especially well suited to produce human proteins.
According to Kay, a 5,000-chicken flock could lay eggs containing a total of up to 100 kilograms of human proteins a year.
“The egg is a very nice vehicle for producing these proteins,” he said.
Mae West, the noted actress, sex symbol and wit, once said, “I speak two languages, Body and English.” While West was evidently adept at speaking both simultaneously, most bilinguals are neurologically incapable of speaking more than one language at a time. Scientists long assumed multilingual people used distinct areas of the brain—one for each language—but mounting evidence indicates that polyglots use only one area for all the languages they speak. The brain must therefore transition between multiple “modes” in order for the speaker to switch languages while continuing to use the same section of the brain for language processing.
A new study led by University College London neurologist Jenny Crinion pinpointed the left caudate—an area of the brain known for its role in motor control—as the area responsible for controlling language and preventing the speaker from switching between dialects at inopportune times. Their results are published in the June 9th issue of the journal Science.
“[Our result] highlights how this brain area is actually monitoring the fact that languages are changing, so that allows us to sort of make inferences about it playing an important role in bilingualism,” said study coauthor Cathy Price, a UCL neuroscientist.
The researchers recorded the brain activity of 35 subjects presented with word pairs. The participants represented three groups of bilinguals: two groups of German/English speakers—whose brain functions were monitored by two different mechanisms, fMRI or positron emission topography—and one group of Japanese/English speakers, measured by fMRI. The words in each pair came in one of four combinations: similar meaning, same language; similar meaning, different language; different meaning, same language; and different meaning, different language. The scientists observed that only the left caudate became active when the words were either in different languages or had different meanings, indicating that this area is responsible for the change in mental state needed to switch between languages or topics.
“What we’ve shown is that this area is involved irrespective of the language that’s being spoken,” Price said. “It generalizes both to a European language, like German, and also to a different linguistic family, like Japanese.”
The UCL team’s finding that the left caudate is universally responsible for making a language switch jives with a 2000 case study led by Jubin Abutalebi, a neuroscientist at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy.
Welcome to ScienceBlogs
You think you know ScienceBlogs? You don’t know ScienceBlogs! The network exploded last Friday with 24 additional blogs and a snazzy new front page. Go and (binge) drink in the nice, cool, fresh content.
Penis evolution
Know your genitals. PZ discusses the evolution and mechanics of the phallus.
Extreme Science Class
And for those of you who’d rather stay away from the penis, this science class will likely be more to your taste. Just remember to pay attention to the science.
Got something for Seed‘s Daily Zeitgeist? Email the Zeitgeister.
Scientists from Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco have boldly gone where the federal government fears to tread—they plan to create cloned human embryos as part of continuing stem cell research. By creating stem cells that are genetically identical to a patient, scientists hope to develop therapies for diseases such sickle-cell anemia, diabetes and Lou Gehrig’s disease. The human cloning research is privately funded, as the federal financing ban prevents government funding for the work.
It is possible to fix human genetic disorders through cloning, argues Professor Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in his new book, After Dolly. Wilmut, one of the scientists involved in creating the cloned sheep for which the book is titled, explains how an embryo afflicted with a genetic disorder could have its stem cells removed and modified in order to fix the defect. The cells would then be cloned, and from them a doctor would create a new embryo, free of genetic disease, which would be implanted in the mother.
Two cloned mules failed to take first place in the 20th annual Winnemucca Mule Races, Show & Draft on Sunday June 4th. The two mules, Idaho Gem and Idaho Star, came in 3rd and 7th place, respectively, proving that cloned animals can be fierce competitors. Idaho Gem was the first mule clone and, therefore, the first mule descended from any other, as mules are sterile animals. (Read more about this story here.)
Life Survived Adverse Conditions, Life Succumbed to Adverse Conditions
Minute droplets of oil from 2.4 billion years ago are providing evidence that life on Earth survived a period when the planet was covered with more than a half-mile of snow; an era affectionately deemed “Snowball Earth.” The oil, retrieved from ancient rock crystals, contains molecular fossils that scientists can identify as having come from specific life forms. A paper published in the June edition of Geology concludes that eukaryotes and cyanobacteria were alive before “Snowball Earth” and survived the hostile period.
The same meteor that created a 300 mile-wide crater in Antarctica may have also caused a massive extinction 250 million years ago, Ohio State University geologist Ralph von Frese announced on Wednesday. Satellite data shows that the crater, which lies more than a mile beneath a sheet of ice, dates back to the same period as the Permian-Triassic extinction, when nearly all of Earth’s animal life died out. Scientists had believed that a series of volcanic eruptions caused the extinction that cleared the stage for the dinosaurs to inherit the Earth.
A tooth extracted from a Neanderthal child found in Belgium has provided the oldest human-type DNA ever found. The DNA is around 100,000 years old, and it shows evidence of a more genetically diverse Neanderthal population than scientists had previously suspected. Researchers had expected to find the more limited genetic variance present in humans around 35,000 years ago, and scientists now postulate that disease or climate change may have wiped out some of the earlier diversity.
Cornell scientists believe they have found evidence of evolution in action in the form of African electric fish called mormyrids. The fish all look the same and have the same DNA sequences, but two groups are distinguished by having different electric “fingerprints,” characteristic electric impulses they use to sense surroundings and communicate with other fish. Each fish will only mate with others that have its own fingerprint. As all of the fish are genetically identical, they cannot be classified into two species, but the researchers said they believe the electric fingerprint may be the first step in speciation. (Read more about this story here.)
Energy Supplements
Britain and Sweden are the only two members of the Kyoto pact who are on target to reach their CO2 emissions goals by 2012, says a new UN report. To reach the target greenhouse gas emission level—a 5% reduction from the 1990 level—other countries will have to create more rigorous policies, the report says. The United States still rejects the Kyoto pact, instead relying on voluntary cutbacks by industry, coupled with government-funded research to curb global warming. US emissions of greenhouse gases rose 16% between 1990 and 2004, according to the latest EPA assessment.
China has green-lighted a project to construct a new dam capable of generating 12,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power. The dam will be built on the Jinsha River, the main headwater stream of the Yangtze, and will be the third largest in China, behind the Three Gorges station, which generates 18,200 megawatts, and the Xiluodo hydropower station, which has a 12,600 megawatt capacity.
The Sky Is Falling
A new test can tell if a bird may be infected with avian flu in just four hours, said Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns on Tuesday, although it requires a follow-up confirmation test that takes about a week for a diagnosis. The next most efficient test takes a day to produce results. The test can find H5N1 in humans just as quickly as it can in birds, said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, but four hours is too long to wait for results if avian flu becomes highly contagious between humans.
The NASA Glenn Research Center will be taking on major role in the project to replace the aging space shuttle by building the vehicles that will take astronauts to the moon and, eventually, to Mars. NASA Glenn will be responsible for designing the power and propulsion systems for the new module. A recent reshuffling of NASA’s budget had cut aeronautics research, NASA Glenn’s specialty, but the new project will bring in fresh funds as well as direction for the center, said NASA Glenn director Woodrow Whitlow, Jr.
At a news briefing on Monday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said he would welcome future cooperation on space missions between the United States and Russia, especially if Russia were interested in pursuing planetary exploration. Griffin further emphasized the heavily international nature of NASA projects, most notably the International Space Station. Griffin’s remarks came in response to a reporter’s assertion that Russian space officials have said they regret that NASA has not coordinated on exploration more frequently.
Doctors Transplant Beating Heart
A new system for heart-transplant storage keeps the donated heart beating and pumping blood during transportation, instead of packing it in ice before the transplant operation. A 58-year-old British man received the first heart to be stored with this technique two weeks ago at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. The operation appears to be a success, as the man is said to be having an excellent recovery.
Men who complete high school are less likely to smoke than those who drop out, according to a study forthcoming in the July issue of the Journal of Labor Economics. Of the subjects in the study, 47% of male high school dropouts were current smokers, whereas only about 21% of male high school graduates smoked. The authors, Cornell University researchers, also analyzed the relationship between obesity and education level but found little correlation.
A National Institute of Health study released last week calculated that AIDS drugs in the United States alone have saved 2.8 million years of life. Drugs that prevent transmission of HIV from a mother to her child have saved some 2,900 infants from the disease, while those with the disease who entered therapy in 2003 are expected to live 13 years longer than if they’d begun treatment in 1989. The NIH has spent $30 billion on AIDS research since the early 1980s.
Sperm quality declines as men age, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While women’s fertility drops off abruptly, however, male sperm quality gradually deteriorates. When sperm quality declines, the researchers said, men have trouble fathering children and offspring are at increased risk for dwarfism.
In what seems like a freshwater version of playing hard to get, a peculiar species of electric fish in Gabon’s Ivindo River Basin may provide a rare snapshot of the evolutionary divergence of one species into two.
Researchers from Cornell University found that genetically identical fish are sending out two different electric signals, and certain male members of the species ignore some signals emitted by females, responding only to pulses similar to their own. The strict selectivity for specific signals observed in these electric fish may eventually result in different mating groups, leading researchers to surmise that the fish could be on the verge of speciation.
“Evolution is a historical, inferential science—you can’t really see it happening before your eyes,” said Matt Arnegard, a neurobiology and behavior postdoc at Cornell and lead author of the study, which appears in the June issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. “We think maybe this is an example where we’re really close to seeing it happen before our eyes.”
Arnegard and his mentor, professor Carl Hopkins, caught male fish and studied their responses to electrodes emitting both types of signals that could come from prospective mates. Some males responded to both type I and type II female signals, while others ignored type I female signals but vigorously attacked the electrode that emitted the type II signal. The researchers found that the electric signal receptors of all the male fish generated different responses to each signal, indicating that they could distinguish them.
Surprisingly, when Arnegard compared the DNA sequences between the selective and non-selective fish, he found they were mostly the same.
“We came across this thing that really violates that pattern in all other electric fish that we know of,” Arnegard said. “One hypothesis is they’re so close to when they form two species that the genomes are largely identical.”
According to Peter Dijkstra, a graduate researcher in behavioral biology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, it would be difficult to determine if these electric fish are actually on the verge of speciation. Instead, he said, the distinct types could be simply due to different reproductive tactics or may be the result of two previously separate species that merged into one but still exhibit features of both ancestral species.
Arnegard hopes to solve that mystery. He is heading back to Africa to more closely examine the breeding conditions and courtship behaviors of the fish, and he also plans to be involved in sequencing a gene that functions in producing the electric signals. Different DNA sequences between the two types would provide more evidence that the species is diverging.
“There’s going to be a lot more surprises in store,” Arnegard said. “This is going to be a revealing system.”
And Now, the HPV Vaccine
The highly anticipated vaccine makes its stunning FDA approved debut, but will it live up to the hype?
Can journals game the impact factor system?
Everyone’s always trying to beat the system and become better known and respected. Do you agree? If so, link to Seed articles. That’ll show ‘em.
It’s not the palm trees and lush terrain that have lured so many different species to habitats along the Earth’s equator—it’s the temperature.
According to a study slated for publication in the June 13th issue of Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, the immense biodiversity in the world’s tropical habitats could be a result of high environmental temperatures, which speed evolutionary change.
A research team led by biologist Andrew Allen of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis created a model to quantify the effects of temperature on genetic evolution. In devising the algorithm, the group assumed that metabolism—the rate at which an organism transforms energy—influences the rate of genetic change.
For cold-blooded animals especially, environmental temperature plays a big role in regulating metabolism. Thus, by the researchers’ model, high temperatures found along the equator can speed up the metabolisms of certain organisms that live there, thus fostering faster genetic change and, eventually, the evolution of new species.
“If you speed up the rate at which organisms transform energy, they reproduce more quickly and they die younger,” Allen said. “DNA gets replicated more quickly because reproduction happens more quickly.”
Furthermore, Allen said, it’s possible that organisms with faster metabolisms accrue genetic mutations more quickly because their bodies generate more free radicals, unstable chemical elements or compounds that have one unpaired electron, which are thought to induce mutations.
Allen’s model predicted that the rate of genetic variation in a certain type of plankton is 15 times faster when it lives near the equator than when it lives in the Arctic. Data spanning 30 million years of the plankton fossil record supported the model’s predictions, according to Allen.
The research group also found that the amount of energy needed to create a new species is fixed—as well as enormous. It takes 1023 joules of energy—more than the entire world consumes via fossil fuels in a year—to create just one new species of plankton, Allen said.
“It’s a huge number,” he said. “But when you think about how many generations and millions of years it really takes for a species to evolve, it makes sense.”
Kaustuv Roy, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego agreed that the idea of environmental temperature driving speciation was interesting, but he suggested this relationship may be too simple.
“Whether temperature’s the only cause of the global distribution that we see remains to be seen,” Roy said.
Indeed, factors beyond environmental temperature are likely to also contribute to rates of speciation, said Allen, especially for warm-blooded animals, which can internally regulate their own temperatures.
The following commercial may be coming soon to a television near you.
Fade in:
An LA expressway at rush hour. A 40-year-old middle manager driving a 10-year-old Geo gets cut off by a long-haired teen in a cherry-red Mustang. The elder man raises his hand quickly, but instead of shaking it wildly, he smiles and waves.
Cut to exterior of a Planned Parenthood clinic during a pro-life rally:
A woman entering the clinic drops handbag, splaying condoms and lipstick onto the ground. Protester picks up handbag, passes it to the woman and wishes her a “nice day.”
Cut to a grassy meadow:
“Daily Show” curmudgeon Lewis Black hugs a Starbucks executive (or Dick Cheney).
Voiceover:
“If you have three or more outbursts or instances of rage per year, you may suffer from IED, a condition that affects nearly 20 million Americans. Ask your doctor about Simmadoun, a new medicine that may help calm urges to overreact to life’s unfortunate moments. Side effects may include incontinence, vaginal dryness and a tendency to be stared at in Midtown Manhattan. See our ad in Guns & Ammo magazine for more information.”
Closing Scene:
Irish soccer fan takes Brazilian player into a bar, buys him a beer and pats him on the ass.
It’s neither a propensity for spontaneous combustion nor anything a big bottle of Bean-o could solve. Rather, it’s a condition described by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as an impulse-control disorder that results in violent outbursts or “rages” that cause harm to others or property, and are “grossly out of proportion to the stressor.”
“It’s kind of embarrassing, but anger isn’t something that you think to bring up in a diagnosis,” said Harvard’s Ron Kessler, the report’s lead author. “You tend to focus on sadness or moodiness. The fact is that what psychologists are trained to think of as a mental illness was historically defined over drinks and cigars by aggressive, middle-aged men.”
The scientists say they were shocked to find that there is such a large population of angry Americans. So, in line with our over-medicated ways, they are adding a new entry to the list of popular mental illnesses skulking on the underside of America’s psyche—right between ADHD and restless leg syndrome. Age, race and socioeconomic status don’t seem to be factors in predicting who suffers from IED—but gender does: The study found nearly twice as many men display symptoms than women.
Thus far, IED has mostly appeared on the national radar when used as a defense in court, like in the 2001 case of millionaire transvestite dermatologist Richard Sharp of Lawrence, MA, who claimed that the condition led him to shoot his wife of 26 years.
“This is a biological condition that can be effectively treated,” said University of Chicago’s Emil Coccaro, one of the paper’s coauthors.
Coccaro also pointed to studies—which he admits had very small sample groups—showing that people who have been diagnosed with IED tend to react to annoyances with a lack of activity in the brain’s seat of reasoning (the frontal cortex) and over activity in the “fight or flight” center (the amygdala). IED is often treated with a class of drugs called serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most popular of which is Prozac.
The new study was a part of a much larger project conducted between 2001 and 2003 called the National Comorbidity Survey, where researchers showed up at more than 9,000 households to test the severity and prevalence of a broad range of mental disorders. To rank IED, interviewers asked respondents to report times when “all of a sudden you lost control and broke or smashed something worth more than a few dollars.” Subjects were also asked whether or not they thought their response was angrier than average. Those who reported more than three over-reactions in a year averaged $1,359 in total property damage.
Despite the damage assessment, some psychologists aren’t buying IED.
“Pharmaceutical companies and research academics are making it so that entries in the DSM become a list of excuses for patients to get their drug of choice and an easy way out for psychiatrists,” said Simon Sobo, a Connecticut-based psychologist who has written extensively on overmedication. “If you walk into a doctor’s office and have strep throat, then he knows what is causing your problem and can give you antibiotics to clear that up.
“We don’t immediately know what causes the problems in our heads,” he continued, “so we shouldn’t dole out knee-jerk medications as if we did—especially not when counseling or rooting out a life problem will do the trick.”
Sobo and like-minded psychologists are worried IED will follow the same path as ADHD—a disorder for which 5 million Americans receive treatment. As studies in the late ‘90s suggested that many adults may suffer from the same disorder as their children, adult use of drugs such as Ritalin doubled in a three year timespan. More recently, editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine have hinted that these prescriptions may be unnecessary. Prescriptions to children rose at the same rate, leading the Consumers Union—the publisher of Consumer Reports—to issue a warning last September that the drugs were probably being vastly over-prescribed.
For their part, the paper’s authors hypothesize that individuals with hair-trigger tempers aren’t anything new in our society. The problem, they say, is that we live in a world with a lot more stressors, which make the starting point for rage a lot closer to the explosion point for everyone.
“This is why you pick up the paper and see more road rage and more instances of stupid violence,” Coccara said.
Still, Coccara doesn’t advocate relying on quickie solutions like Prozac to buffer our increasingly high-strung lives. Rather, he suggests that those of us who can hold our tempers long enough try counting to 10.
Knockin’ boots and breakin’ hips
When blue hairs get frisky, blue hairs get risky. While you may not be jumping out of your chair to think about seniors “having relations,” it’s worth reading Tara’s take on the new STD outbreak.
The Monkey Chow Diaries
Aw, man! This guy is going a week entirely on monkey chow. Sure, Barry Marshall won the Nobel prize after infecting himself with the ulcer bacterium, but really, stop.
Blink-free photos, guaranteed
A physicist and a photographer figure out how many pictures you need to take to be 99% sure you’ll have one with nobody blinking. Nifty stuff.
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.
Male big horn sheep live in what are often called “homosexual societies.” They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males “effeminate.”
Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.
As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there’s a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.
Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution’s Rainbow—and weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her being transgendered—Roughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has neglected evidence that mating isn’t only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden’s theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution.
Darwin’s theory of sex began with an observation about peacocks. For a man who liked to see the world in terms of functional adaptations, the tails of male peacocks seemed like a useless absurdity. Why would nature invest in such a baroque display of feathers? Did male peacocks want to be eaten by predators?
Darwin’s hypothesis was typically brilliant: The peacocks did it for the sake of reproduction. The male’s fancy tail entranced the staid peahen. Darwin used this idea to explain the biological quirks that natural selection couldn’t explain. If a trait wasn’t in the service of survival, then it was probably in the service of seduction. Furthermore, the mechanics of sex helped explain why the genders were so different. Because eggs are expensive and sperm are cheap, “Males of almost all animals have stronger passions than females,” Darwin wrote. “The female…with the rarest of exceptions is less eager than the male…she is coy.” Darwin is telling the familiar Mars and Venus story: Men want sex while women want to cuddle. Females, by choosing who to bed, impose sexual selection onto the species.
Darwin’s theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of evolution, one of his great scientific legacies. The culture wars over evolution and common descent notwithstanding, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has been thoroughly assimilated into mass culture. From sitcoms to beer ads, our coital “instincts” are constantly reaffirmed. Females are wary, and males are horny. Sex is this simple. Or is it?
Indeed, biology now knows better. Nobody is hornier than a female macaque or bonobo (which mount the males because the males are too exhausted to continue the fornication). Peacocks are actually the exception, not the rule.
Roughgarden first began thinking Darwin may have been in error after she attended the 1997 gay pride parade in San Francisco, where she had gone to walk alongside a float in support of transgendered people. Although she had lived her first 52 years as a man, Roughgarden was about to become a woman. The decision hadn’t been easy. For one thing, she was worried about losing her job as a tenured professor of biology at Stanford. (The fear turned out to be unfounded.)
After living for a year in Santa Barbara while undergoing the “physical aspects of the transition,” Roughgarden returned to Stanford in the spring of 1999 and decided to write a book about the biology of sexual diversity. In particular, she wanted to answer the question that had first surfaced in her mind back in 1997. “When I was at that gay pride parade,” Roughgarden remembers, “I was just stunned by the sheer magnitude of the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] population. Because I’m a biologist, I started asking myself some difficult questions. My discipline teaches that homosexuality is some sort of anomaly. But if the purpose of sexual contact is just reproduction, as Darwin believed, then why do all these gay people exist? A lot of biologists assume that they are somehow defective, that some developmental error or environmental influence has misdirected their sexual orientation. If so, gay and lesbian people are a mistake that should have been corrected a long time ago. But this hasn’t happened. That’s when I had my epiphany. When scientific theory says something’s wrong with so many people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people.”
Credit: Catherine Ledner
The resulting book, Evolution’s Rainbow, was an audacious attack on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. To make her case, Roughgarden filled the text with a staggering collection of animal perversities, from the penises of female spotted hyenas to the mènage à trois tactics of bluegill sunfish. As Roughgarden put it, “What’s coming out [in the past 10-15 years] is to the rest of the species what the Kinsey Report was to humans.”
According to Roughgarden, classic sexual selection can’t account for these strange carnal habits. After all, Darwin imagined sex as a relatively straightforward transaction. Males compete for females. Evolutionary success is defined by the quantity of offspring. Thus, any distractions from the business of making babies—distractions like homosexuality, masturbation, etc.—are precious wastes of fluids. You’d think by now, several hundred million years after sex began, nature would have done away with such inefficiencies, and males and females would only act to maximize rates of sexual reproduction.
But the opposite has happened. Instead of copulation becoming more functional and straightforward, it has only gotten weirder as species have evolved—more sodomy and other frivolous pleasures that are useless for propagating the species. The more socially complex the animal, the more sexual “deviance” it exhibits. Look at primates: Compared to our closest relatives, contemporary, Westernized Homo sapiens are the staid ones.
Despite this new evidence, sexual selection theory is still stuck in the 19th century. The Victorian peacock remains the standard bearer. But as far as Roughgarden is concerned, that’s bad science: “The time has come to declare that sexual theory is indeed false and to stop shoe-horning one exception after another into a sexual selection framework…To do otherwise suggests that sexual selection theory is unfalsifiable, not subject to refutation.”
Roughgarden is an ambitious scientist. She believes it is impossible to comprehend the diversity of sexuality without disowning Darwin. Although she isn’t the first biologist to condemn sexual selection—Darwin’s theory has never been very popular with feminists—she is unusually vocal about cataloguing his empirical errors. “When I began, I didn’t set out to criticize Darwin,” she says. “But I quickly realized that most scientists are pretty dismissive about same-sex sexuality in vertebrates. They think these animals are just having fun or practicing. As long as scientists clung to this old dogma, homosexuality would always be this funny anomaly you didn’t have to account for.”
Roughgarden’s first order of business was proving that homosexuality isn’t a maladaptive trait. At first glance, this seems like a futile endeavor. Being gay clearly makes individuals less likely to pass on their genes, a major biological faux pas. From the perspective of evolution, homosexual behavior has always been a genetic dead end, something that has to be explained away.
But Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, “a ‘common genetic disease’ is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease.”
So how might homosexuality be good for us? Any concept of sexual selection that emphasizes the selfish propagation of genes and sperm won’t be able to account for the abundance of non-heterosexual sex. All those gay penguins and persons will remain inexplicable. However, if one looks at homosexuality from the perspective of a community, one can begin to see why nature might foster a variety of sexual interactions.
According to Roughgarden, gayness is a necessary side effect of getting along. Homosexuality evolved in tandem with vertebrate societies, in which a motley group of individuals has to either live together or die alone. In fact, Roughgarden even argues that homosexuality is a defining feature of advanced animal communities, which require communal bonds in order to function. “The more complex and sophisticated a social system is,” she writes, “the more likely it is to have homosexuality intermixed with heterosexuality.”
Japanese macaques, an old world primate, illustrate this principle perfectly. Macaque society revolves around females, who form intricate dominance hierarchies within a given group. Males are transient. To help maintain the necessary social networks, female macaques engage in rampant lesbianism. These friendly copulations, which can last up to four days, form the bedrock of macaque society, preventing unnecessary violence and aggression. Females that sleep together will even defend each other from the unwanted advances of male macaques. In fact, behavioral scientist Paul Vasey has found that females will choose to mate with another female, as opposed to a horny male, 92.5% of the time. While this lesbianism probably decreases reproductive success for macaques in the short term, in the long run it is clearly beneficial for the species, since it fosters social stability. “Same-sex sexuality is just another way of maintaining physical intimacy,” Roughgarden says. “It’s like grooming, except we have lots of pleasure neurons in our genitals. When animals exhibit homosexual behavior, they are just using their genitals for a socially significant purpose.”
Roughgarden is now using this model of homosexuality to reimagine heterosexuality. Her conclusions, published last February in Science, are predictably controversial. While Darwin saw males and females as locked in conflict, acting out the ancient battle of their gametes, Roughgarden describes sexual partners as a model of solidarity. “This whole view of the sexes as being at war is just so flawed from the start. First of all, there are all these empirical exceptions, like homosexuality. And then there’s the logical inconsistency of it all. Why would a male ever jettison control of his evolutionary destiny? Why would he entrust females to serendipitously raise their shared young? The fact is, males and females are committed to cooperate.”
Consider the Eurasian oystercatcher, a shore bird that enjoys feasting on shellfish. A consistent minority of oystercatcher families are polygynous, in which a lucky male mates with two different females simultaneously. These threesomes come in two different flavors: aggressive and cooperative. In an aggressive threesome, the females are at war; they attack each other frequently, and try to disrupt the egg-laying process of their fellow spouse. So far, so Darwinian: Life is nasty, brutish and short. However, the cooperative threesome is everything Darwin didn’t expect. These females share a nest, mate with each other several times a day, and preen their feathers together. It’s domestic bliss.
Credit: Catherine Ledner
In Roughgarden’s Science paper, she uses “cooperative game theory” to elucidate the diverse mating habits of the oystercatcher. Whereas Darwin held that conflict was the natural state of life (we are all Hobbesian bullies at heart), Roughgarden sees cooperation as our default position. This makes mathematical sense: The family that sleeps together has more offspring. Why, then, do oystercatcher females occasionally engage in all out war? According to Roughgarden, violence occurs when “social negotiations” break down. Although the birds really want to get along (who doesn’t like being preened?), something goes awry. The end result is risky violence, in which one female or both will end the breeding season without an egg.
The advantage of Roughgarden’s new theory is that it can explain a wider spectrum of sexual behaviors than Darwinian sexual selection. Lesbian oystercatchers and gay mountain sheep? Their homosexuality is just a prelude to social cooperation, a pleasurable way of avoiding wanton conflict. But what about the peacock and all those other examples of sexual dimorphism? According to Roughgarden, “expensive, functionally useless badges like the peacock’s tail…are admission tickets”: they just get you in the door. If you don’t have a ticket, you are ruthlessly denied breeding rights, like an uncool kid at the prom.
Of course, most humans don’t see sex as a way of maintaining the social contract. Our lust doesn’t seem logical, especially when that logic involves the abstruse calculations of game theory. Furthermore, it’s strange for most people to think of themselves as naturally bisexual. Being gay or straight seems to be an intrinsic and implacable part of our identity. Roughgarden disagrees. “In our culture, we assume that there is a straight-gay binary, and that you are either one or the other. But if you look at vertebrates, that just isn’t the case. You will almost never find animals or primates that are exclusively gay. Other human cultures show the same thing.” Since Roughgarden believes that the hetero/homo distinction is a purely cultural creation, and not a fact of biology, she thinks it is only a matter of time before we return to the standard primate model. “I’m convinced that in 50 years, the gay-straight dichotomy will dissolve. I think it just takes too much social energy to preserve. All this campy, flamboyant behavior: It’s just such hard work.”
Despite Roughgarden’s long list of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, most evolutionary biologists remain skeptical of her conclusions. For one thing, it’s tough to measure the benefits of diversity—or lesbian pair bonding. It’s even harder to imagine how traits that are good for the group get passed on by individuals. (As a result, group selection has largely been replaced by kin selection.) In the absence of anything conclusive, most scientists stick with Darwin and Dawkins.
Other biologists think Roughgarden is exaggerating the importance of homosexuality. Invertebrate zoologist Stephen Shuster told Nature that Roughgarden “throws out a very healthy baby with some slightly soiled bathwater.” And biologist Alison Jolly, in an otherwise positive review of Evolution’s Rainbow for Science, conceded that Roughgarden ultimately fails in her ambition to “revolutionize current biological theories of sexual selection.” As far as these mainstream biologists are concerned, Roughgarden’s gay primates and transgendered fish are simply interesting sexual deviants, statistical outliers in a world that contains plenty of peacocks. As Paul Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, put it, “I think much of what Roughgarden says is very interesting. But I think she discounts many of the modifications that have been made to sexual selection since Darwin originally proposed it. So in that sense, her Darwin is a straw man. You don’t have to dismiss the modern version of sexual selection in order to explain social bonding or homosexuality.”
Roughgarden remains defiant. “I think many scientists discount me because of who I am. They assume that I can’t be objective, that I’ve got some bias or hidden LGBT agenda. But I’m just trying to understand the data. At this point, we have thousands of species that deviate from the standard account of Darwinian sexual selection. So we get all these special case exemptions, and we end up downplaying whatever facts don’t fit. The theory is becoming Ptolemaic. It clearly has the trajectory of a hypothesis in trouble.”
Roughgarden’s cataloging of sexual diversity has challenged a fundamental biological theory. If Darwinian sexual selection—whatever its current variant—is to survive, it must adapt to this new data and come up with convincing explanations for why a host of animals just aren’t like peacocks.
The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment
These dudes can make a science experiment explode to music. As one character said in Harold & Kumar: On a scale from one to 10, one being not so extreme and 10 being extremely extreme, I give this a 9.5! (via Aetiology)
Rant on Technology
Palazzo gets to the core of what technology is and sneaks in a key argument for basic research.
The Demon Fish of South Atlanta
These fish undercut everything we know about physics, order and nature. They must be destroyed.
Ann Coulter fills me with anticipation
We personally have never engaged in bestiality only because we always assumed it violated Boyle’s law. Now that PZ has cleared things up for us, fear our wanton immorality!
What a gas!
We always suspected there was some cognitive deficiency in New Jersey, but it takes the penetrating journalism of the Daily Show to pinpoint it precisely.
Got something for Seed‘s Daily Zeitgeist? Email the Zeitgeister.
Can you guess which dopamine receptor genes they have? Credit: Adam Judd
Are you unhappy with your ability to function sexually? Do you lack interest in sex or find it difficult to become aroused? Are you unsatisfied with your orgasms? If so, you may be genetically predisposed to have a moderate to low sex drive.
Israeli researchers published a study online in the April 18th issue of Molecular Psychiatry suggesting a link between a dopamine receptor gene and human sexual desire, arousal and function. They conclude that one gene variant found in about 60% of the population may lead to a more subdued sex drive while another, found in about 30% of the population, contributes to higher sexual desire, arousal and function.
“This rarer variant that seems to give the higher performance or desire has been associated by us and by some other people with things like novelty seeking, a sort of extroverted personality, as well as attention deficit in children and in adolescents,” said Hebrew University psychology professor Richard Ebstein, an author of the study.
Ebstein’s team studied 150 university students, each of whom donated a DNA sample so the researchers could catalogue their D4 receptor gene, which controls the number of dopamine receptors in the brain. (Dopamine, a naturally produced neurotransmitter, is typically associated with feelings of pleasure and enjoyment.)
The subjects were scored on their sex drives based on their answers to a survey with questions such as “Approximately how often do you get sexually aroused?” and “How satisfied are you with the frequency of your sexual intercourses?”
Comparing the questionnaire scores with the gene variants, the researchers found that subjects with the less common variant self-reported significantly higher sex drives, which was somewhat surprising because that variant apparently coded for fewer dopamine receptors in the brain.
“In general you would have thought that more dopamine, or more dopaminergic activity, would give you more sexual activity, ” Ebstein said. “If you give an animal something that stimulates dopamine, it facilitates sexual behavior.”
The gene-to-sex drive correlation was nearly identical in males and females, although Ebstein noted the self-reports confirmed that in terms of “how horny people are,” men score higher than women.
This study is the first to provide data linking common genetic variations and differences in human sexual phenotype, according to Ebstein. However, other papers have indicated a general link between genetics and sexual function. For example, one study of twins found that difficulty in reaching a female orgasm has a 45% heritability.
Keele University epidemiologist Kate Dunn, the lead author of the female orgasm paper, notes that genetics is only one component of human sexuality.
“Genetics are very unlikely to explain everything,” Dunn said. “Previous research has shown that there are many other social and psychological influences on sexual problems and sexual behavior.”
Ebstein said his discovery of a genetic component to sexual function could give solace to people unhappy with their libidos.
“It may be that people shouldn’t worry about whether they don’t have much desire or interest,” Ebstein said. “They don’t have to pay much attention to popular culture because they know they’re just like a lot of other people.”
Not all alternative fuels are created equal. That’s because not all alternative fuels involve intestinal bacteria consuming candy and then excreting hydrogen. Scientists from the University of Birmingham in the UK have created a method of energy production by feeding chocolate-factory waste—diluted caramel and nougat—to E. coli. After bingeing, the bacteria produced hydrogen, which the researchers harnessed to power a fuel cell that was able to drive a small fan. In a perfect world, the researchers would use chocolate waste to make more chocolate.
(source: New Scientist Tech)
IPOs By Any Other Name
If Wii, the new Nintendo console, were a company, its stock would probably flop soon after its initial public offering. A study by Princeton psychologists shows that a stock’s early performance is influenced by how easily the company’s name or three-letter ticker symbol is pronounced. The researchers asked a group of students how well they thought a series of fictional stocks would perform based only on their names, and were unable to ignore the strong relationship between ease of pronunciation and predicted performance. The scientists then hit the market and found that stocks with pronounceable names are more likely to do well initially but not necessarily in the long run. The researchers caution that people should not change their portfolios based on the study. Right…sounds like somebody wants a bigger piece of the pie.
(source: Princeton University)
Tune In Next Time
Research out of Vanderbilt indicates kids tend to ignore information presented on TV. Researchers told two-year-olds where a toy would be hidden either by giving them information in person or via a recorded video message. Kids who got the information face-to-face found the toy 77% of the time in the first place they looked; only 27% of those who got the message on tape visited the correct location first. The researchers think kids quickly learn to distinguish between socially relevant interaction, which occurs in the flesh, and asocial television. However, when the kids were primed with a live video chat with the researcher, they were able to use the recorded video message to find the hidden toy more effectively. The researchers suggest that educational TV programs make lecturing seem more like a conversation when trying to reach young viewers.
(source: BPS Research Digest Blog)
The Food Coma Explained
British scientists have dug up a biological excuse for those lazy Europeans who nap after lunch. A University of Manchester study says that an intake of glucose can inhibit the neurons, which make the proteins that help regulate consciousness. Problems with these orexin neurons can lead to narcolepsy or obesity. When the brain cells are blocked after a hearty meal, the sated person plummets towards a food coma. Conversely, when one is hungry, and his or her orexins are fully functional, it may be hard for that person to fall asleep.
(source: University of Manchester)
Fight Drugs With…Drugs?
Switzerland’s crazy-liberal policy of offering heroin addicts methadone or buprenorphine as a substitute for their addiction, successfully decreases the number of heroin dependents, according to a new paper published in the Lancet. The number of new Swiss heroin users declined precipitously from 850 new users in 1990 to 150 in 2002. In other, more conservative countries such as the UK, Italy and Australia, the number of new heroin users is on the rise. While the crutch program does wonders for stopping heroin addiction before it starts, it’s not so good at actually helping people quit. The low cessation rate nearly balances out the low start rate, so overall number of Swiss heroin dependents only declines by 4% each year.
(source: Lancet)
Don’t Schtupp Thinking About Tomorrow
Scientists have successfully debunked the old wives tale that having sex in the final weeks of pregnancy can make for a speedy delivery. In a study of 93 women, the ones who had sex near the end of term had an average pregnancy of 39.9 weeks, whereas those who did not averaged 39.3 weeks. The doctors examined the sexually active women to see whether the deed had a “ripening” effect on the cervix and found no correlation between intercourse frequency and size of the cervix or length of pregnancy. The author acknowledged that the study doesn’t examine specific components of sexual behavior that might affect the onset of labor.
(source: Ohio State University Medical Center)
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the government’s primary agency for military research and development, has the time and resources to dream up some of the most groundbreaking ideas that modern science will allow. This pie-in-the-sky thinking can lead to great breakthroughs, though over the years there have been a few spectacular flops—Anyone remember weaponized bees?
When a biology graduate student submits a doctoral thesis on the physiological benefits of REM sleep, DARPA saw an opportunity to research and develop a pill that could eliminate a soldier’s need for sleep. When chemists discovered a vaccine against a biological agent, DARPA identified a portable defense against biological weapons. At its essence, the agency thrives on its ability to find exotic military uses for otherwise mundane scientific breakthroughs.
“Throughout the government you would be hard pressed to find a group that focuses more on blue sky projects and thinks more out of the box than DARPA,” said Noah Shachtman, editor of the blog DefenseTech. “If you have an idea that is just so crazy it might work, DARPA is one of the places you can go to try it. There is no punishment for failure, and that’s really not the case with most military or government offices.”
Between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, DARPA’s focus has shifted from developing weapons to researching the practice of intelligence gathering. Some of its current projects involve lasers that can detect biological agents at stand-off distances, a cognitive program to improve soldier information intake under stress and creating “fiber-biotics” that can digest indigestible fiber.
The “Unique Signature Detection Project,” formerly known as the “Odortype Detection Program,” is designed to help identify terrorists based on scents they secrete in their sweat, tears, urine and other bodily fluids. According to experts, a person’s smell is so unique it offers the military an alternative method of identification, as effective as retinal scans and fingerprinting but far less invasive.
“[It can be used] to identify and distinguish specific ‘high-level-of-interest individuals’ within groups of enemy troops or combatants,” said DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker via e-mail.
If successful, a Unique Signature Detection program could give the military advantages in identification that retinal scans just can’t match. Unlike eyelids, a person’s smell is not under their direct control. Even after leaving the scene of a crime, a terrorist’s scent could spread over a large distance and linger for a considerable time, said Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center and a researcher for the DARPA-funded project.
Although the science behind this field is nascent, says Beauchamp, evidence to support the theory of odor detection is all around us. Countless animals rely on odor to find food, identify one another and mark territory. USDA researchers even trained wasps to act as hound dogs, sniffing out drugs, bombs and cadavers.
“We see, even in insects, that they are using odor signatures in a very detailed way to go about their natural activities,” said entomologist W. J. Lewis. “These wasps could detect different species of closely related host insects based on the trail odors associated with them.”
Researchers believe the unique smell that we each emit is tied to the make-up of the major histocompatibility complex, a group of genes found on T-cell surfaces that are crucial to the immune system. These genes lend themselves perfectly to creating an idiosyncratic pattern for every person’s immune system, says Beauchamp, because they are “the most varied in all of nature.” In fact, this complex is what makes the process of organ transplants so specific and therefore complicated. Because T-cells are designed to recognize a body’s specific histocompatibility proteins and attack anything it determines is foreign, if a donor’s organ comes from someone whose immune system differs too much from the recipient’s, it will be rejected. In addition, scientists have found that mice, which like dogs characterize individuals by their unique odor-type, can differentiate between two individuals whose genetic make-up differs by only one amino acid in the histocompatability complex.
“We’ve proven a million times over that these genes, in ways that we still are not clear how, code for individual differences in smell,” said Beauchamp. “The next question would be, ‘Is this the same for people?’ and that is the focus of the research.”
Substantial hurdles remain in the path of researchers wishing to make scent detection an everyday technology. For one, as Beuchamp mentioned, scientists aren’t sure how these genetic differences translate into different smells. More daunting is that researchers don’t know how environmental factors, such as diet, health or even shampoo selection, can alter one’s natural smell. Beauchamp points out that dogs and other animals with more sophisticated olfactory systems seem to be able to smell past these surface alterations.
“It’s as if there is a core individual-identifying smell that is not changed by that,” said Beauchamp.
As part of the Novel Sensors for Force Protection Program, over $15 million has been allocated to smell detection research from the 2007 DARPA budget, up from under $10 million in 2004.
“If we identify an exploitable, robust signature, the program will then pursue detector development,” said Walker, a DARPA spokesperson.
While a working smell detector as sophisticated as the one Walker describes is years off, Beauchamp believes there are other uses for the military funded research that, like the Internet, will benefit civilians.
If the immune system does in fact create a unique smell that helps identify individuals, the process could also be reverse-engineered, allowing scientists to track down a specific type of immune system. This would be beneficial for organ transplantation: If a donor’s odor-type is similar enough to a recipient’s, doctors can be reasonably confident that the latter’s body will accept a donated organ. Also, if specific diseases can alter a person’s odor, smell detection could prove to be an effective tool for early diagnosis.
“The idea of having some way of being able to diagnose a disease early, non-invasively and inexpensively,” Beauchamp said, “is one of the ancillary payoffs that may come from this research.”
FRONTLINE: the age of aids
PBS has an enormous two-part documentary on HIV, and it’s all available online for your viewing pleasure. (via Tara)
Science Friday: Tis The Season
It’s hurricane time, which means violent, raging, howling debates on whether global warming is influencing storm strength and frequency. DarkSyde affirms.
Penn State and MIT researchers have concluded that human induced climate change may be responsible for increased hurricane frequency and strength. The scientists discovered evidence to support an anthropogenic cause of Atlantic Ocean warming. Plus, they found that such warming directly influences the production of hurricanes, which draw energy from the ocean.
Scientists have uncovered evidence of ancient Arctic climate change. Researchers analyzed sediment samples from 430 meters (1411 feet) beneath the Arctic Ocean to uncover the climate history of the arctic. They report that about 55 million years ago Arctic temperatures rose to subtropical levels, 49 million years ago the Arctic contained green plant life including large amounts of ferns, and 45 million years ago the Arctic Ocean included ice.
The earth’s ozone layer appears to be mending itself, with worldwide ozone levels remaining constant over the last nine years, a group of NASA and university researchers reported last week. The hole over Antarctica, however, remains wide open. The researchers attribute about half of this repair to the Montreal Protocol’s mandated reductions in the use of CFCs, ozone-destroying gases.
Cave-Dwellers Come To Light
Last week, scientists discovered eight previously unknown animal species in an Israeli cave thought to have been cut off from the outside world for millions of years. The new invertebrate species serve as an example of evolution due to isolation and evolution in a lightless environment. Scientists say the cave is an isolated ecosystem, and they hope to uncover more of its unique story.
The public favors free access to publicly funded research by a 4 to 1 ratio, with 82% for access, concluded an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive®. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe that if such research were made publicly available, it would be a boon to researchers looking to create cures for diseases. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) recently introduced a bill that would federal agencies that heavily fund research to publish freely available electronic manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from the research.
Blair’s Tone Is Light Green
British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently softened his stance on global warming in response to pressure from the United States, said a report issued last Sunday. In an earlier speech on foreign policy at Georgetown University, Blair said only, “We must act on climate change,” but he did not go into further detail. Blair’s office denied that White House pressures influenced any of his remarks.
Last Wednesday, the former head of a French radiation-monitoring organization was charged with “aggravated deceit” for a cover-up of the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on France. The state-run organization allegedly knew of, but failed to report, high levels of contamination in Corsica and southeastern France. This negligence may have caused an increase in thyroid cancer in the affected area’s population.
China will not be able to sustain its economic growth if it behaves according to the Western economic model, environmentalist Lester Brown said last Tuesday. If current trends continue, he said, China’s demand will outrun the world production capacity on several key resources within two decades. The western model of life cannot persist as is, let alone spread to the rest of the world, if humans want to avoid an environmental and economic disaster, Brown concluded.
Tropic Expansion
Atmospheric warming may be expanding the area of the tropics, researchers report in the May 26th issue of Science. Warming has caused jet streams that mark the boundaries of the tropics to shift away from the equator and toward the poles by about 113 km (70 miles) over the last 26 years. The researchers say an expansion of the tropics also causes the earth’s desert areas to expand and may cause global droughts.
Compounding the problem of sea level rise, New Orleans is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico faster than was previously believed, according to new research out of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. This sinking likely contributed to the Katrina disaster, the researchers say, since some of the levees were built 40 years ago and have sunk some 3 feet since their construction.
A series of three powerful earthquakes in two days has offered further evidence that the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an area that stretches from the North American west coast to Indonesia and New Zealand, is a serious hotbed of seismic activity. Seismologists say this ring of weakness, a series of fault lines in the earth’s crust where continental plates meet, accounts for all three earthquakes.
Roll Over, Enceladus
Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, may have historically experienced a dramatic reorientation with respect to its axis of rotation, concludes a study published in the June 1st issue of Nature. The Cassini spacecraft had previously located a region of active water vapor geysers near the pole of Encladus, and researchers had struggled to explain how a pole could play host to an active region. A past reorientation could explain why these unusual features occur where they do.
New data from the Voyager 2 space probe pinpoints the shape of the edge of the solar system, or heliosphere, and may reveal the trajectory of the solar system itself. The data indicates that Voyager 2 is reaching the edge of the heliosphere much earlier than expected. To explain this early arrival, a scientist from the Binary Research Institute has proposed that the motion of the solar system in interstellar space is distorting the heliosphere, causing it to bulge in some areas and shrink in others.
Scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have pinpointed conditions under which the Han purple pigment transitions from three-dimensions to two. When it is exposed to high magnetic fields and extremely low temperatures, the dye, which was developed some 2,000 years ago and used on ancient Chinese terra cotta warrior statues, turns into a two-dimensional Bose Einstein condensate.
In the midst of preparing for the arrival of another intense hurricane season, the city of New Orleans is continuing to rebuild from the decimation caused by Hurricane Katrina less than a year ago.
Urban planners in the Big Easy have their work cut out for them. But in addition to protecting the city from future storms, scientists are recommending that it be rebuilt as a sinking city.
According to researchers at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, New Orleans is sinking—in some areas up to 20mm per year. This phenomenon, combined with the expected worldwide rise in sea levels resulting from melting glaciers, means that, over the course of 100 years, the city could fall further under sea level, with levees falling several meters below the level where they were originally built. The group says this subsiding should be kept in mind with future levee designs.
“They are happy to fix those levees, but they haven’t had time to do a new design,” said Falk Amelung, a professor of geophysics at Miami and coauthor of the study. “When they really do a new design and want to build levees that can handle a category 5 hurricane, they must take this subsiding into account.”
In its research, published in the June 1st issue of Nature, researchers used a Canadian satellite equipped with radar technology to obtain map-images of New Orleans. The images were taken at different times from the same spot in the satellite’s orbit. Using “exploits points,” or man-made structures on the ground that strongly reflect radar, scientists were able to calculate the rate at which parts of the city are sinking.
This drop may have contributed to their inability to protect New Orleans from Katrina last year.
“In the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal, where we have a high subsidence rate, the levees were completely overtopped and St. Bernard Parish was heavily flooded because of it,” said Amelung
According to the team’s estimates, some of the current levees may now stand three feet shorter than when they were built 40 years ago. By 2106, for example, they believe the ground will be nearly three feet lower on average than it is now.
“Its very important that the levees are updated frequently to account for the sinking,” said Amelung. “That means every few years: make them higher. Or from the very beginning, making a high levee that is up to the cause.”
While engineers have a tough task ahead, so do researchers, who are still in search of just what is causing the city to subside. Some believe the city is slumping into the gulf due to tectonic shifts while others point fingers at a large drainage system that is at work at the Mississippi Delta.
“[The rate of subsiding] may be a combination of both, at this point we don’t know,” said Amelung. “If it has deep roots, then it will continue to sink as we see it now, and that is bad news for New Orleans.”
New Orleans isn’t the only city slowly crawling into the nearest body of water; Venice has been falling into the Adriatic Sea for years. City engineers devised a controversial system of gates to protect the lagoon from rising tides, said John Keahey, author of Venice Against the Sea. New Orleans’ fragile delta location makes it even more difficult to save from rising tide levels.
“Gates will not be the solution for New Orleans, they need a whole new concept of neighborhoods and rebuilding,” said Keahey. “They have to ask if homes should be allowed to be reconstructed if they were built in swamplands below sea level.”
Quirks & Quarks: Happiness
Canadian radio interviews scientists on the latest in happiness research. The clip includes cheesy music and fascinating science. A feast for the senses! (via boing boing)
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
John Rinn, snowboarder, skateboarder, and “genomic origamist,” on why we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner.
Seed examines the radical changes within science itself by assessing the evolving role of scientists and the shifting dimensions of scientific practice.
EV1 at a charging station Photo by Chris Paine, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, all rights reserved.
Filmmaker Chris Paine Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, all rights reserved.
