Later On

I guess we’ll find out. Katherine Harmon at Scientific American:

Bacteria, viruses and fungi have been primarily cast as the villains in the battle for better human health. But a growing community of researchers is sounding the warning that many of these microscopic guests are really ancient allies.

Having evolved along with the human species, most of the miniscule beasties that live in and on us are actually helping to keep us healthy, just as our well-being promotes theirs. In fact, some researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates.
The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing?

With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world’s larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment—which is still largely uncharacterized—most of these rapid changes are not yet understood. "This is the next frontier and has real significance for human health, public health and medicine," says Betsy Foxman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan (U.M.) School of Public Health in Ann Arbor.

Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They’re actually missing some component of their microbiota that they’ve evolved to have," Foxman says…

Continue reading.

Ker Than for National Geographic News:

Dark matter may have been "felt" for the first time deep in a Minnesota mine, physicists say.

Detectors in the mine, part of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, were tripped recently by what might be weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

WIMPs are among the most popular candidates for dark matter, the invisible material that scientists think makes up more than 80 percent of the mass in the universe.

Recently detectors in the mine recorded two hits with "characteristics consistent with those expected from WIMPs," according to a statement posted on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Web site.

There is a one-in-four chance, however, that the particles detected are not dark matter but ordinary subatomic particles such as neutrons, the team cautions. (Related: "Dark Matter Proof Found Over Antarctica?")

Mike Shull, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, also urged restraint in interpreting the results.

"I regard this as interesting but very much an interim ‘progress report’ on a promising technique," said Shull, who did not participate in the research.

"I hope they’ve detected [WIMPs]," he added, "It’s exciting if it’s true."

Scientists have predicted that WIMPs can interact with normal atoms but only weakly and very rarely—hence the name.

When such an interaction happens, a WIMP careens like a billiard ball off an atom, the theory goes. But the collision leaves behind a unique signature in the form of a small amount of heat, which can be detected.

The smashup also creates charged atoms, or ions, that are detectable.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment uses 30 detectors made of …

Continue reading.

Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine:

Chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, and other alternative medicine practitioners constantly criticize mainstream medicine for “only treating the symptoms,” while alternative medicine allegedly treats “the underlying causes” of disease.

Nope. Not true. Exactly backwards. Think about it. When you go to a doctor with a fever, does he just treat the symptom? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the fever and if it’s pneumonia, he identifies which microbe is responsible and gives you the right drugs to treat that particular infection. If you have abdominal pain, does the doctor just give you narcotics to treat the symptom of pain? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the pain and if he determines you have acute appendicitis he operates to remove your appendix.

I guess what they’re trying to say is that something must have been wrong in the first place to allow the disease to develop. But they don’t have any better insight into what that something might be than scientific medicine does. All they have is wild, imaginative guesses. And they all disagree with one another. The chiropractor says if your spine is in proper alignment you can’t get sick. Acupuncturists talk about the proper flow of qi through the meridians. Energy medicine practitioners talk about disturbances in energy fields. Nutrition faddists claim that people who eat right won’t get sick. None of them can produce any evidence to support those claims. No alternative medicine has been scientifically shown to prevent disease or to cure it. If it had, it would have been incorporated into conventional medicine and would no longer be “alternative.”

Are these practitioners treating the underlying cause, or are they simply applying their one chosen tool to treat everything? Chiropractors treat every patient with chiropractic adjustments. What if a doctor used one treatment for everything? You have pneumonia? Here’s some penicillin. You have a broken leg? Here’s some penicillin. You have diabetes? Here’s some penicillin. Acupuncturists only know to stick needles in people. Homeopaths only know to give out ridiculously high dilutions that amount to nothing but water. Therapeutic touch practitioners only know to smooth out the wrinkles in imaginary energy fields. They are not trying to determine any underlying cause: they are just using one treatment indiscriminately.

How do you define “cause”? …

Continue reading.

Interesting note by a reader at TPM:

In a remarkable bit of good timing, I’ve been re-reading Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War, in particular his first volume (covering 1861-1862). It provides some much-needed perspective on the current situation with health care reform.

Like President Obama, President Lincoln was seen by many of his supporters as something of a disappointment once in office. This was largely due to the number and types of compromises he needed to make, most notably with the institution of slavery. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln came out and said that he was not bound and determined to end slavery, that the President does not in any case have the power to unilaterally change the law of the land, and that his first priority was the preservation of the Union, even if the price of that preservation was to accept the continuation of slavery. During the war, when pressed by a group of ministers about why he had not more forcefully worked to end slavery, he reiterated that his overriding priority was to preserve the Union, and added that there were four slave states which had stayed loyal and which were currently contributing 50,000 soldiers to the war effort; these, he pointed out, were states and soldiers which he could not afford to lose in a dispute over slavery.

When Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, its scope was remarkably circumscribed: it did not call for the emancipation of slaves in loyal states (for this, Lincoln would need the participation of Congress, and in any event, as described above, he did not seek such an act for fear of worsening the Union’s position in the war); it did not call for the emancipation of slaves in those areas under military control by the Union; it limited emancipation to those areas which would be brought under military control subsequent to January 1, 1863, which was about 3 months after the Proclamation itself was issued. As one historian noted, this meant the Proclamation carefully excused all of the slaves which the United States actually had any authority over at the time of issuance! As another historian noted, the Proclamation was in essence the offer of a bribe: any state then in rebellion which would lay down its arms and return to the Union would not be compelled to give up its slaves; any state conquered by force of arms after January 1, 1863 would be so compelled.

Needless to say, the Proclamation was seen by anti-slavery partisans of the time as wholly unacceptable, a compromise too far, and yet more evidence of the unfitness of their elected standard-bearer in the White House. And yet, as Foote points out, Lincoln is today hailed as the preserver of the Union, which he was, but as The Great Emancipator, which he was not. This is because the Proclamation, while useless in a practical sense at the moment of issuance, was the crucial starting point for the abolition of slavery, a project which was completed just a few years later.

I trust that the parallels with our own current situation are apparent (though I think that the Senate HCR bill is far more immediately useful now then the Emancipation Proclamation was then). I would also note that after winning election both Lincoln and Davis were widely condemned as weak, stupid, cowardly, vain, and tyrannical by their supporters, who wondered aloud why they had ever voted for those people and what was to become of a nation led by such a man. Apparently intense dissatisfaction with elected officials you have heretofore supported is an American tradition.

Take a look. God knows what their houses and lawns look like during the holiday season.

Interesting:

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public. The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning—Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles)—reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as "auditory learners" and "visual learners"), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.

Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail /./

Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Schneier:

This is interesting:

Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and that for nearly a century the federal government tacitly or overtly supported the segregationist state governments. That the Civil Rights movement employed nonviolent tactics should fool us no more than it did the segregationists, who correctly saw themselves as being at war. Significant change was never going to occur within the political system: it had to be forced. The aim of the segregationists was to keep the federal government on the sidelines. The aim of the Civil Rights movement was to "capture" the federal government — to get it to apply its weight against the Southern states. As to why it matters: a major reason we were slow to grasp the emergence and extent of the insurgency in Iraq is that it didn’t — and doesn’t — look like a classic insurgency. In fact, the official Department of Defense definition of insurgency still reflects a Vietnam era understanding of the term. Looking at the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency is useful because it assists in thinking more comprehensively about the phenomenon of insurgency and assists in a more complete — and therefore more useful — definition of the term.

The link to his talk is broken, unfortunately. Video here.

Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing:

A couple hundred thousand years ago, the planet became a much colder and drier place. In Africa, deserts expanded, species were wiped out and the human race was in deep trouble.

See, humans today may look pretty different from one another but, genetically speaking, there’s not much diversity at all within our species. In fact, chimpanzees, which look pretty much the same from one individual to the next, are much more genetically diverse than we are. To scientists, that suggests that humans have come through a genetic bottleneck—a point where our numbers shrunk dramatically, and a relatively small population had to rebuild the species. For about 20 years, genetic anthropologists have been comparing the genes of modern human populations. Over time, they’ve used bigger and bigger samples, and better and better analysis, to hone in on when our bottleneck likely happened, and how many humans managed to slip through it.

Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals—just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our species to the brink, said Curtis Marean, Ph.D., a professor with the Institute of Human Origins and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

What saved us? According to Marean, the answer may be "shellfish".

"They’re a great source of protein," he said. "And shellfish are immune to colder ocean temperatures. In fact, when the water gets colder, those populations go up."

Marean used climate models to pinpoint locations in Africa where human hunter-gatherers could have hunkered down during a long glacial period that dried out the continent and expanded deserts. Of the four-to-six possible locations, he focused in on an area along the coast of South Africa.

"That area has a super high diversity of below-ground tuberous plants, which have high carb loads. People are excellent foragers for them. You need a digging stick and there wouldn’t be a lot of animal competitors," he said. "And the tuberous plants are adapted to arid environments."

His team eventually found a site, dating to 164,000 years ago, that shows evidence of humans eating shellfish, working with natural pigments and creating technologically sophisticated tools. He thinks this could be the remnants of the humans of the bottleneck—ancestors of everyone alive today.

Other researchers have theorized that …

Continue reading.

Take a look at these top 5 frugality blogs that MakeUseOf.com found, all with tips on saving money.

You knew it all along:

A University of California study on human subjects seems to indicate what food activists have long believed: high fructose corn syrup has special qualities which cause humans to pork up like animals in a feed lot. Oh, and it also may help cause life-threatening chronic diseases. The study was small, but frightening.

Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver, and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

People in both groups put on a similar amount of weight. However, researchers at the University of California who conducted the trial, said the levels of weight gain among the fructose consumers would be greater over the long term.

High fructose corn syrup is in nearly everything Americans eat, from fruit juices to bread to ketchup. It’s cheap, but is such cheap sweetness worth it in the long run, when it may actually be killing us?

Child diabetes blamed on food sweetener [Times Online]

Now will you check nutrition labels and put back on the shelf all foods and drinks containing HFCS?

UPDATE: As Mike points out in the comment below, the Tmes report has many problems. Look, as he suggests, at this corrected report.

Lots more information (and a different video) here. From the link:

Octopuses are masters of camouflage that can change their shape, colour and texture to perfectly blend into their environment. But the soft bodies that make them such excellent con artists also make them incredibly vulnerable, should they be spotted. Some species have solved that problem with their fierce intellect, which allows them to make use of other materials that are much harder. The veined octopus, for example, dons a suit of armour made of coconut shells.

The veined octopus (Amphioctus marginatus) lives in sandy, exposed habitats that have little in the way of cover. To protect itself, it hides among the hollow husks of coconuts. It even carries its armour around with it, tucking the shell under its body, sitting on it like a bowl, and moving around on tip-tentacles.

Continue reading.

I read fairly often that the global warming the earth is obviously experiencing is "natural variation", but that does not explain where all the heat is coming from. (The actual source of the heat—the sun’s rays trapped by the rapidly growing greenhouse gasses due to human activity—is well known, but the skeptics don’t accept that, which leaves them the burden of discovery for the source of the heat.) Steve Connor in The Independent points out a few things:

Climate sceptics who dispute the link between global warming and carbon dioxide emissions frequently argue that the increase in world temperatures over the past half century is part of a natural cycle. They cite previous periods in history when the climate has swayed into extremes, such as the "medieval warm period" when vines grew in northern England and the Vikings settled in Greenland.

Or they quote the Little Ice Age, which happened somewhere between the 14th and 18th centuries, when the Thames froze over and the Bruegels painted their snowy winter landscapes. History shows that climate is a variable feast, they argue, and what we are getting now is just another side dish.

At the heart of this view is the belief that natural variations in the Sun’s activity are responsible for the warming of the past few decades. No one would dispute that the Sun is the main driver of climate – without it we would not have any climate. But what the sceptics are arguing is more subtle and complex.

They cite the work of two Danish scientists – Professor Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Centre, and Henrik Svensmark, who works in the same institute. Together, they have provided the rationale for believing that global warming has got more to do with natural variations in the cycle of sunspots on the solar surface than man-made emissions of CO2.

The theory is not that the intensity of the Sun has simply increased. Scientists are confident from 31 years of accurate, direct measurements of total solar radiation by satellites that there has been no overall increase in the amount of sunlight coming to Earth. Total solar irradiance, as it is called, has stayed remarkably constant and so cannot be held responsible for the warming of the past half century.

No, the theory of Friis-Christensen and Svensmark revolves around a far more subtle argument connected to the well-established 11-year cycle of sunspots that appear on the surface of the Sun. Sunspots are dark pools of magnetic activity that well up to the solar surface in periodic peaks of 11 years or so. When there are a lot of sunspots, the Sun is said to be more active.

In fact 11 years is only the average length of the activity cycle, which can vary between seven and 17 years. Shorter cycles of 10 years or less are associated with a more magnetically active Sun, when the solar wind of charged particles streams out towards the Earth with greater-than-normal intensity.

When sunspots are most active there is also a slight increase in solar intensity of 0.1 per cent. But this is hardly enough to account for the increase in global warming over the past half century, and this cyclical variation is not what Friis-Christensen and Svensmark are proposing as the cause of global warming.

The two Danes believe instead that there is a complex relationship between the length of the solar cycle and the amount of low-level cloud that forms in the Earth’s atmosphere. Because shorter cycles are associated with a more magnetically active Sun, this affects the cloud cover and hence the climate on Earth.

The crux of their argument relies on several unproven suppositions. The main one is that clouds are more likely to form when solar activity is at its lowest and fewer magnetic pulses reach Earth. A second is that there will be enough of these clouds to reflect sunlight and lower global temperatures significantly, perhaps accounting for that famous Little Ice Age.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

Conservatives spend a lot of time whining these days about how Barack Obama is always blaming them for all the problems he faces.  Personally, though, I’d say Obama has been remarkably restrained about the whole thing, especially when it comes to our disastrous fiscal situation.  In a mere eight years, George Bush and the Republican Party managed to take a thriving economy and a federal surplus and turn it into a hair’s breadth escape from Great Depression II and an endless fiscal sinkhole.  Rome may not have been built in a day, but it didn’t take much longer than that for the modern Republican Party to bankrupt America.

Anyway, here’s a nice chart from the wonks at the CBPP to illustrate this. 

I think they take the right tone here:

While President Obama inherited a bad fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s deficit problem. But we should all recognize how we got where we are today.

All clear now?

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones blogs:

A freelance writer tells a story of how failure finally turned into success:

I had high-quality skills and a good education. I was fast on turnaround and very professional. I hustled and I delivered on my promises, every single time. I worked hard and built the business, putting in long hours and reinvesting a lot of the money I made.

I really, really wanted to make this work. But I was still having a hard time landing jobs. I was being turned down for gigs I should’ve gotten, for reasons I couldn’t put a finger on. My pay rate had hit a plateau, too. I knew I should be earning more. Others were, and I soaked up everything they could teach me, but still, there was something strange about it [...]

One day, I tossed out a pen name, because I didn’t want to be associated with my current business, the one that was still struggling to grow. I picked a name that sounded to me like it might convey a good business image. Like it might command respect.

Instantly, jobs became easier to get. There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all. Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.

Without knowing more about this, it’s impossible to say if this is really the whole story.  But the writer is a woman, and the pen name she chose was "James Chartrand."  And suddenly life changed.  It’s all very plausible if you also remember stories like this and this.

Read the full story at that first link of the post. Amazing.

Very good breakfast at Toasties, and then The Wife and I went for a 5-minute walk. Not onerous at all.

Late start, but did the Nordic (8 min) and now going to pick up The Wife for breakfast at Toasties. And enjoy your snow, East Coast:

Mark Buchanan in New Scientist:

IN THIS season of goodwill, spare a thought for that much-maligned bunch, the men and women at the top of the management tree. Yes, the murky machinations of the banking bosses might have needlessly plunged millions into penury. Yes, the actions of our political leaders might seem to be informed more by dubious wheeler-dealing than by Socratic wisdom. And yes, the high-ups in your own company might well be the self-important time-wasters you’ve always held them for.

Don’t blame them, though. It’s not their fault. There are good reasons to expect that bosses can’t help but be incompetent – adrift on a sea of troubles they neither understand nor can control. Better to take pity on the poor souls: there with the grace of the promotion committee go all of us.

The idea that high-level incompetence is inevitable was formulated in the 1969 best-selling book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. Its authors, psychologist Laurence Peter and playwright Raymond Hull, started from the observation that while jobs generally get more difficult the higher up any ladder you climb, most people only come equipped with a more or less fixed level of talent that corresponds to their intelligence, knowledge and energy. At some point, then, they will be promoted into a job they can’t quite handle. They will, as Peter and Hull put it, "reach the level of their own incompetence". And there they will stay, fouling up operations until they either retire or some egregiously inept act gets them fired…

Continue reading to see whether that explanation holds.

Very interesting note by Linda Geddes in New Scientist:

Beethoven is said to have overcome his deafness by attaching a rod to his piano and clenching it between his teeth, enabling the musical vibrations to travel through his jawbone to his inner ear. Next year, a similar but less unwieldy approach might restore hearing to people with a common form of deafness.

Single-sided deafness (SSD) affects around 9 million people in the US, and makes it difficult for them to pinpoint the exact source of sounds. This can make crossing roads extremely hazardous, and also makes it hard to hear conversations in noisy rooms.

Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small device that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and down the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. The same process of "bone conduction" explains how we hear our own voices, and why they sound different when they are recorded and played back to us.

Some existing hearing aids also use bone conduction to transmit sounds to the cochlea, but these either require a titanium post to be drilled into the skull, or rely on cumbersome headsets. It also differs from conventional hearing aids, which employ air conduction to simply turn up the volume of sound travelling into the ear. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio voted Sonitus’s device its top medical innovation for 2010.

Sonitus is testing the device in people with SSD…

Continue reading for results of studies.

BPA, a hormone mimic, can cause erectile dysfunction, so it’s a good thing to avoid. The problem is: how? it’s in all sorts of plastics, including those (like the lining of the cans of tomatoes) that package the food we eat. Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

Ordinarily, concerns about leaching plastics are way down on my list of food safety worries (bacteria are #1), but the evidence against bisphenol A (BPA) continues to pile up.  The latest report says that BPA adversely affects the immunity of the digestive system and causes inflammation.  This, among other considerations, has led the National Institute of Environmental Sciences to invest $30 million to study it.

These and other concerns about its safety hazards have the plastics industry and its users in a tizzy and must also be paralyzing food safety regulators .  The FDA has postponed the release of its report on the safety of BPA.  The report was due out at the end of November but the FDA is not saying when it will be published.  The FDA just says the report is coming soon.  That’s not good enough, say critics who say that the delay is raising questions about the FDA’s credibility.

While all this is happening, United Nations’ agencies are planning a summit on BPS safety to be held in Canada in – don’t hold your breath – October 2010.

What to do?  Avoidance seems prudent.  BPA turns up in plastics coded with numbers 7 (the catchall category) and, sometimes, 3.  Can’t keep the numbers straight?  Try glass?

I was looking for non-BPA plastic as a water bottle for the car, but The Younger Daughter has a better idea: eschew plastic altogether. She uses Thermos stainless steel.

Nordic Track for 8 minutes because today it seemed easier.

OTOH, the Strong Women Stay Young exercises were more challenging because I’m getting close to the proper weights for me to use.

And I walked to the end of the block and back: 2.5 minutes, no knee sensation at all. Tomorrow I’ll go two blocks to get to 5 minutes, then hold it at that for a week.