Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Saturday, November 10, 2012

The Right will drop Climate Change Denialism within the next six months

My prediction for 2013 - the American Right will effectively drop Climate Change Denialism by April of 2013. They'll never admit it of course. They'll act as though they always accepted that human activity was warming the earth and that effete Liberals have been responsible for all inaction.

This is a good thing.

Some may wonder how this could happen so quickly. I used to think it would take longer myself but I've changed my mind.

A year ago I thought this would only happen after a crushing GOP victory, but since then we've seen the GOP make a complete policy reversal on immigration. We've seen Christian evangelicals purge all record of decades of anti-Mormon sentiment. We've seen a hard-right primary candidate morph into an Obama-clone, and his base act as though nothing had changed. We've realized that the GOP elite often believe what they say, and believe they've always believed whatever they now believe.

If you are not anchored to data, and to reality, then it's not hard to change direction. The  U.S. military's preparation for climate change disruption (and climate engineering wars) will be tied to budget requests, and it's hard for the GOP to say no to increasingly large sums of military money. The combination of military requests, electoral defeat, and Sandy are sufficient to precipitate radical realignment.

Don't be shocked if a Carbon Tax, in one form or another, makes it into the 2016 budget process.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Tachytely and human evolution: implications for the Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox

I haven't done a Drake/Fermi Paradox post for ages. A lot has happened in the meantime; in particular estimates of the number of potentially-life-compatible planets in our galaxy has grown exponentially.

Of course not all life supporting planets will develop sentient tool using species. Unless there's something about sentience and tool use feedback loops that produce tachytelic development. That would boost the Drake estimate into the low thousands. We ought to be tripping over little green things.

But we don't. Of course if technological civilizations all self-destruct quickly this would all make sense.

Monday, September 03, 2012

Do evolutionary strategies evolve?

Biologists study evolutionary "strategies", such as r and K selection.

These are the strategies deployed the Great Programmer as she fiddles with the game states of the multiver... erkkk. Just kidding. These are, of course, human terms for the emergent phenomena of natural selection.

At a more granular level, a predator's niche might be contested on the basis of bigger teeth, stronger claws, faster moves, greater endurance, or bigger brains.

Likewise, microbes, who rule the earth, have a range of "strategies". Symbiosis, parasitism, fast reproduction, encysting and so on.

Presumably the catalog of strategies changes over time. Before there were teeth, big teeth strategies were not available.

Before there were neurons, big brain strategies didn't work.

So that leads to the obvious question, do evolutionary strategies evolve? That is, do new strategies emerge from variations of strategies such that the strategies themselves are subject to selection pressure (a sort of meta-selection I suppose)?

Seems an obvious question, but as of Sept 2012 Google has 9 hits on that precise phrase, none by biologists.

So I guess it's an obvious question, but maybe obviously dumb. I'm surprised though that I didn't find a blog post explaining why it's dumb.

(A bit of context, this came up in a discussion with my 13yo about what species would fill our ecological niche (global multicellular apex predator). Having hit upon the strategy of investing in brains, would natural selection keep returning to the theme?)

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Time-reversal symmetry violation

When did physicists first begin to suspect that what we experience as time emerges from quantum entanglement, much as we experience heat from the kinetic energy of molecules?

I suspect it was a long time ago, perhaps around the time of the double-slit experiment in 1909, but certainly by the 1960s. More recently some of the physicists I read have been openly speculating that time is emergent at the macro level, presumably in the context of a collapse of the wave function (measured in unit.

So it's particularly interesting that new experimental evidence of an "arrow of time" used quantum entanglement to expose T symmetry violation in kaons...

The arrow of time: Backward ran sentences… | The Economist

... The main hint that nature violates the time-reversal (T) symmetry ... —and thus that there really is an arrow of time—came from seemingly disparate discoveries about matter and antimatter. Mathematically, particles and their anti-versions differ in two ways: they have opposite electrical charges and they are each other’s mirror reflections. But in 1964 some particles called kaons were shown not to respect this charge-conjugation/parity (CP) symmetry, as it is known. Matter and antimatter are not, in other words, quite equal and opposite. However, according to another law, C, P and T symmetries, when lumped together into a single, overarching CPT symmetry, must be conserved. This means that if CP is violated, then T must be too, in order to even things out.

The obvious place to look for this T violation is where C and P are already known to misbehave. Between 1999 and 2008 a laboratory in California was set up to do just that. The old linear accelerator at Stanford was repurposed, turning it from the machine that co-discovered a particle known as the charm quark (thus winning its operators a Nobel prize) into a factory for making particles called B mesons. These are interesting because they and their antiparticles exhibit CP-violating tendencies. They are thus a promising place to look for T violations, too.

Which is what the scientists of SLAC’s BaBar experiment have been doing. Though the B-meson factory itself has been silent for four years (the accelerator is now in its third incarnation, as the world’s most powerful X-ray camera), its data live on, and the collaborators have been ploughing through them. They are looking in particular at how long it takes a B-meson to change its nature, focusing on one particular member of the extended B-meson family, the electrically neutral B0.

As with many things quantum, B0 can exist in a number of forms. These are known as B, B-bar, B-plus and B-minus. Like a subatomic werewolf, a B0 constantly shifts between them. If time truly has an arrow, though, some of these shifts will occur at a different rate when going in one direction rather than the other. In particular, CP-violation theory predicts that B-bar will turn into B-minus faster than B-minus turns into B-bar. All that remains is to measure the difference.

Unfortunately, that is not as easy as it sounds. A particle’s final state can be known by looking at what other sorts of particle it decays into. What cannot easily be known is what it was beforehand, and for how long.

In the wacky world of quantum physics, however, it is not always impossible to work out what a particle once was but no longer is. That is because B-mesons are sometimes born as quantum-mechanically conjoined twins. One twin gives away the initial state of the other and how long it lasted in that state—and all is revealed.

That revelation, which has been submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters, leaves no room for doubt: B-bars turn into B-minuses far faster than B-minuses turn into B-bars. As many as five B-minuses are produced for every B-bar. The chance of this result being a fluke is a nugatory one in 10**43...

It feels as though we're closing in on the nature of time. The next few years should be fun.

See also:

Friday, August 24, 2012

The Ocean is a weird place: floating islands of pumice

A research vessel diverts course to avoid a 9 mile long floating island of volcanic rock: "the raft was already about 15 kilometers (9 miles) long. It eventually grew to more than 20,000 square kilometers". The article doesn't tell us how close to the surface the pumice came. Did it truly float? What old stories of the sea might have been about these transient islands?

Monday, August 06, 2012

Coin flips and climate

The weather is unusual, but is the climate truly different? How would we know?

I toss a fair coin 10 times. Which of these patterns is more likely than the other?

  • HTHTHTHTHT
  • HHHHHTTTTT
  • TTTTTTHHHH
  • HTTHHHTHTT

Now toss a fair coin nine times. I get HHHHHHHHH. What's the chance of getting T on the next toss?

The answer to the first question is that all of these outcomes are equally likely, though some seem odder to us than others. They all show five tails and five heads, the most common result of tossing a coin ten times. [1].

The answer to the second question is, of course 50%.

Now for the interesting question.

I toss a coin 100 times and I get 95 tails. What is the chance that the coin is fair [2]?

What if find one side of the coin is more magnetic than the other?

What if you inspect the rim and notice a color change from one side to the other?

Each of those three observations makes it less likely that the coin is fair. Taken together they strongly suggest the coin isn't fair.

We know that weather is not "fair". It is biased by climate.  If the distribution of weather events changes, we may infer that the climate bias is changing. If we have strong reason to suspect that atmospheric CO2 concentrations change climate, and we know CO2 is rising and weather events are changing, we have even more reason to suspect that climate is changing.

That's why we can say, beyond a reasonable doubt, that our climate is changing.

[1] Contemplation of these results doubtless leads to speculations on the arrow of time, Boltzman's brains, and the insanely unlikely probability of my certain existence. But that's not for today.
[2] Can I reject the null hypothesis of a fair coin, where a fair coin, tossed a very large number of times, will turn up heads and tails with equal frequency?

Thursday, July 05, 2012

The Standard Model - summarized

In a most excellent overview of the Higgs(es?) news, The Economist manages the best concise summary of the Standard Model that I've read anywhere (emphases mine) ...

The Higgs boson: Gotcha! | The Economist:

... the Standard Model, the best explanation to date for how the universe works—except in the domain of gravity, which is governed by the general theory of relativity. The model comprises 17 particles. Of these, 12 are fermions such as quarks (which coalesce into neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei) and electrons (which whizz around those nuclei). They make up matter. A further four particles, known as gauge bosons, transmit forces and so allow fermions to interact: photons convey electromagnetism, which holds electrons in orbit around atoms; gluons link quarks into protons and neutrons via the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. And then there is the Higgs.

The Higgs, though a boson (meaning it has a particular sort of value of a quantum-mechanical property known as spin), is not a gauge boson. Physicists need it not to transmit a force but to give mass to other particles. Two of the 16 others, the photon and the gluon, are massless. But without the Higgs, or something like it, there is no explanation of where the mass of the other particles comes from.

For fermions this is no big deal. The Standard Model’s rules would let mass be ascribed to them without further explanation. But the same trick does not work with bosons. In the absence of a Higgs, the rules of the Standard Model demand that bosons be massless. The W and Z are not. They are very heavy indeed, weighing almost as much as 100 protons. This makes the Higgs the keystone of the Standard Model...

I've read elsewhere that in the absence of the Higgs particles would zip around at the speed of light. Evidently, not so! The problem is rather with the W and Z bosons. That's quite different, but there's something about this summary that feels more authoritative.

I've pasted that text into Notational Velocity/SimpleNote so I have it in my extended memory.

There's more in the article ...

...  the model requires its 20 or so constants to be exactly what they are to an uncomfortable 32 decimal places. Insert different values and the upshot is nonsensical predictions, like phenomena occurring with a likelihood of more than 100%.

... One way to look beyond the Standard Model is to question the Higgs’s status as an elementary particle. According to an idea called technicolour, if it were instead made up of all-new kinds of quark held together by a new interaction, akin to but distinct from the strong force, the need for fine-tuning disappears.

Alternatively, the Higgs can maintain its elementary status, but gain siblings. This is a consequence of an idea called supersymmetry, or susy for short. Just as all the known particles of matter have antimatter versions in the Standard Model, in the world of susy every known boson, including the Higgs, has one or more fermion partners, and every known fermion has one or more associated bosons....

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Air Conditioning and obesity

I ate lunch at my favorite diner. Great food, but too much.

Sometimes I put enough aside; but not today. I ate the whole thing.

After lunch I left the cool hole-in-the-wall and walked into the great heat wave of 2012 (which will seem benign in 2022). I walked slowly back to the office, trying not to touch myself.

I blame it on the air conditioning. If China Restaurant hadn't been pleasantly cool, I know I'd have stopped sooner. 

Of course there would be other consequences of a world without air conditioning. I'm relatively slender, and I feel the heat. If I were heavier, the heat would be even more uncomfortable. Another incentive to weigh less.

So is modern air conditioning a factor in our losing battle with fat?

The question has been asked ... 

International Journal of Obesity - Putative contributors to the secular increase in obesity: exploring the roads less traveled June 2006

...The thermoneutral zone (TNZ) is the range of ambient temperature in which energy expenditure is not required for homeothermy. Exposure to ambient temperatures above or below the TNZ increases energy expenditure, which all other things being equal, decreases energy stores (i.e., fat). This effect was shown in short-term controlled human experiments 41, 42 and the decreases in adiposity were evident in controlled animal experiments; these effects are widely exploited in livestock husbandry, where selecting the environment to maximize weight gain is critical.43 Animal44 and human45 studies show that excursions above the TNZ markedly reduce food intake. Herman45 cited a consumer survey suggesting that after an air-conditioning breakdown, restaurant sales drop dramatically...

Suggestive data, but the relationship to "TNZ" sounds dubious. The authors should have described the findings as interesting correlations with some evidence of causation, then mentioned TNZ as one mechanism among many.

I couldn't find any more recent references.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Medicine 2020: Integrative Personal Omics (iPOP) identifies RSV triggered onset of Type II Diabetes

Speaking as a physician, and as someone who was involved in a genomics project two years ago, I find this astounding. It's a snapshot of Medicine 2020, or perhaps Medicine 2030 - with a slice of Big (BIG) Data on the side. Notice the project had one subject (the lead researcher) and 40 collaborators ...

Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks - ScienceNOW  
... Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, analyzed his blood 20 different times to pluck out a wide variety of biochemical data depicting the status of his body's immune system, metabolism, and gene activity. In today's issue of Cell, Snyder and a team of 40 other researchers present the results ... an integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) ... genomics (study of one's DNA), metabolomics (study of metabolism), and proteomics (study of proteins)... 
... Snyder, now 56, says he began the study 2 years ago because of a slew of technological advances that make it feasible to view the working of the body more intimately than ever before. "The way we're practicing medicine now seems woefully inadequate," he says. "When you go to the doctor's office and they do a blood test, they typically measure no more than 20 things. With the technology out there now, we feel you should be able to measure thousands if not tens of thousands if not ultimately millions of things. That would be a much clearer picture of what's going on." 
... Snyder had a cold at the first blood draw, which allowed the researchers to track how a rhinovirus infection alters the human body in perhaps more detail than ever before. The initial sequencing of his genome had also showed that he had an increased risk for type 2 diabetes ... later became infected with respiratory syncytial virus, and his group saw that a sharp rise in glucose levels followed almost immediately... 
A physician later diagnosed Snyder with type 2 diabetes, leading him to change his diet and increase his exercise. It took 6 months for his glucose levels to return to normal...
The serendipity of capturing the evolution of type II DM resembles many 'happy accidents' in medical history. This will energize an already very active research program on RSV and DM II. Vaccine development for DM II susceptible adults will become much more interesting, and of course there will be a need to closely follow children who develop RSV infection.

There will be a lot more like this. It's potentially Nobel class work.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Americans Elect - another try at GOP 2.0

Unsurprisingly, given the current state of the GOP presidential primary, people who'd prefer to vote GOP are advocating third party equivalents. This endorsement is from a Marketarian venture capitalist ...

A VC: Americans Elect (Fred Wilson)

Yesterday my partner Albert and I sat down with the people behind Americans Elect. For those that don't know, Americans Elect is an online third party movement. In their words, "Pick A President, Not A Party."...

Fred and  his kin assert the usual 'false equivalence' claim that both parties are equally dysfunctional. Sorry, that's not true. Team Obama is a good representative of a reason (data + logic, including evaluation of political realities) based implementation of social compact ("Branch I") values for a multicultural nation. The 2012 Dems are about as healthy as political parties get in an era where voters tolerate widespread corruption.

The problem, of course, is with the GOP. It has fallen into a political death-spiral where its survival depends on tribes that lack a common framework for interpreting reality. Some cleave to particular religious doctrines, others to secular tribal beliefs. The modern GOP is the party of unreason.

Obviously, this is bad. It's bad because the GOP has quite a good chance of taking full control of government. It's bad because a weak GOP will lead the Dems to destroy themsevles - and we'll have no government at all.

We all need need GOP 2.0, a reason based representation of Branch II values, a party that speaks for the powerful, the incorporated, the status quo, the authoritarian impulse and all those wary of change and disruption. Americans Elect is a part of the process of finding GOP 2.0. I wish them luck; we need this process to succeed.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'?

Newt Gingrich has written many Amazon book reviews. One of them was on a physics book I'd read, maybe Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos -- though I don't see the review there now.

I don't remember which book, but I remember Gingrich claimed he'd finished it in a few days of easy reading. Given Gingrich's historical record he's either the world's smartest fool or a master of bull poop. Modern physics books are a hard slog for the non-genius, non-physicist. I've read a few of them, and I'm always impressed by how much work it is to integrate the concept space, and how insane the working scientist authors are to write these complex tomes.

Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? The guys an untentured Caltech theoretical physicist -- he's supposed to be cranking out grants and papers. I mean, I love the book, but this isn't survival behavior. His blogging is sinful enough, but the book is another level.

Part of the reason might be getting some of his personal theories more attention. Carroll believes cosmological inflation, while "true", simply "begs the question". That is, while cosmological inflation explains some properties of the observable cosmos, it raises even more questions about the state of the pre-inflationary cosmos. Carroll believes the physics of entropy is a possible key to that puzzle. In today's physics community this seems to be mildly heretical and probably not a great way to get tenure. [3]

So frustration with the establishment is probably a part of his compulsion, but it's not all. There's a clue to the rest buried in the footnotes [2] ...

273. What would be even better is if some young person read this book, became convinced this was a serious problem worthy of our attention, and went on to solve it.... if you end up finding an explanation for the arrow of time that becomes widely accepted within the physics community, please let me know if this book had anything to do with it.

The work of puzzle solving goes on, from one mortal generation to the next. That's our little way of poking a stick in the Eye of Entropy.

[1] The unrelated Sean B. Carroll is another working scientist author of popular biology books.
[2]  Consecutively numbered - brilliant. Wish everyone did this instead of renumbering each chapter. After reading the core book, go back and read the footnotes. I made the mistake of borrowing this book from the library -- and blowing through multiple renewal periods and fines and so on. Finally, with 30 pages to go, I gave up and bought the sucker. If Carroll ever does another edition though, he ought to include a concept glossary as well.
[3] Most serious books of lay physics, including Greene's work, has this element. Like Greene and other working physicists, Carroll sticks with establishment physics for 90% of the book, then lays out his own ideas with clear warnings that "dragons are here". It's a good practice and it's part of what distinguishes books by reality-based physicists from the flaky side of the cosmos.  Of course in modern physics "reality" is profoundly unreal.

See also:

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Bexarotene clears amyloid plaques in ApoE4 defective mice - and an Alzheimer's review

While it's true that we can cure just about anything in mice (at least once), this is still remarkable ...

BBC News - Alzheimer's brain plaques 'rapidly cleared' in mice

... Scientists at the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio were investigating ways of boosting levels of ApoE, which in theory should reduce levels of beta-amyloid.

They tested bexarotene, which has been approved for use to treat cancers in the skin, on mice with an illness similar to Alzheimer's.

After one dose in [genetically engineered mice with dysfunctional ApoE4] young mice, the levels of beta-amyloid in the brain were "rapidly lowered" within six hours and a 25% reduction was sustained for 70 hours...

What's remarkable is the speed of the result, and that the drug is already FDA approved for another use. That means, although as chemotherapy agent for mycosis fungoides it has nasty side effects, Bexarotene will be very soon studied in humans with advanced dementia. We may find, however, that the drug is primarily useful for people who have remarkably poor ApoE4 directed amyloid clearance.

The role of amyloid in Alzheimer's dementia was well described in a 2010 NYT review ...

Insights Give Hope for New Attack on Alzheimer’s - NYT 12/13/10 - Kolata

... most people with Alzheimer’s seem to make perfectly normal amounts of amyloid. They just can’t get rid of it

... Researchers have also found that amyloid, in its normal small amounts, seems to have a purpose in the brain — it may be acting like a circuit breaker to prevent nerve firing from getting out of control. But too much amyloid can shut down nerves, eventually leading to cell death. That means that if amyloid levels were reduced early in the disease, when excess amyloid is stunning nerve cells but has not yet killed them, the damage might be reversed....

... With Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Bateman discovered, beta amyloid is made at a normal rate, but it hangs around, draining at a rate that is 30 percent slower than in healthy people the same age. And healthy older people, in turn, clear the substance from their brains more slowly than healthy younger people...

... beta amyloid seemed to be part of a nerve cell feedback loop. A nerve will start firing, but under some conditions, the signal can get too intense. Then the nerve releases beta amyloid, bringing the signaling down to normal levels, at which point the nerve stops releasing beta amyloid... [especially in the 'default network']

... There may be another way to protect nerves from too much beta amyloid, and it involves a different protein linked to Alzheimer’s. Problems with it show up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients later, after there has already been a buildup of beta amyloid.

The protein is tau, an integral part of normal cells. It becomes tangled and twisted in Alzheimer’s, after cells are already dying, looking like strands of tangled spaghetti...

... New studies by Dr. Lennart Mucke, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease there, and others suggest that tau facilitates beta amyloid’s lethal effects. In genetically engineered mice and in laboratory experiments, the researchers found that without tau, beta amyloid cannot impair nerve cells...

...Amyloid was in ...  the default network. It is used not only in daydreaming but in memory and in the sense of self...

... The default network is costly for the brain to run, using huge amounts of glucose, Dr. Raichle said. And one indication that a person is getting Alzheimer’s is that in scans, the brain’s glucose use is markedly lower. The observation that Alzheimer’s attacks the default network, then, explains the observation that a low use of glucose by the brain is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

... Beta amyloid synthesis increased when they were awake, when the default network is most active, and decreased when they slept...

... the less active the person’s brain, the less beta amyloid it made. That made the researchers ask whether something similar was happening during sleep — the default network was less active, so perhaps less beta amyloid was being made. If so, the implication, which Dr. Holtzman is studying, is that people who are sleep-deprived might be at greater risk of Alzheimer’s.

I am prone to believe in the sleep loss/dementia connection, I wrote about that in 2008 and more emphatically in 2010.

The role of ApoE4, exercise and dementia was also highlighted two weeks ago in the NYT ...

How Exercise May Keep Alzheimer's at Bay - NYT 1/18/2012

... Most of those who carried the APOE-e4 gene displayed much larger accumulations of amyloid plaques than those without it.

Unless they exercised. The carriers of the gene who reported walking or jogging for at least 30 minutes five times a week had plaque accumulation similar to that of volunteers who were e4-negative. In essence, the APOE-e4 gene carriers mitigated their inherited risk for developing Alzheimer’s by working out. Or, as the study authors wrote, a “physically active lifestyle may allow e4 carriers to experience brain amyloid levels equivalent to e4-negative individuals.”..

... An overwhelming majority of the people in the study were sedentary, and for them, an inactive lifestyle seemed to be accelerating the accumulation of amyloid plaques. Those with the e4 variant who rarely or never exercised had the most plaques, putting them at heightened risk for the memory loss of Alzheimer’s in the years to come.

From another angle, another recent article points to a prion like spread of malformed tau protein as a critical component of Alzheimer progression. (see tau references in the 2010 article) ...

Alzheimer’s Spreads in the Brain Like a Virus, Studies Find - NYT Kolata 2/1/2012

Alzheimer’s disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau...

The studies, done independently by researchers at Columbia and Harvard, involved genetically engineered mice that could make abnormal human tau proteins, predominantly in the entorhinal (pronounced en-toh-RYE-nal) cortex, a sliver of tissue behind the ears, toward the middle of the brain, where cells first start dying in Alzheimer’s disease. As expected, tau showed up there. And, as also expected, entorhinal cortex cells in the mice started dying, filled with tangled, spaghettilike strands of tau.

Over the next two years, the cell death and destruction spread outward to other cells along the same network. Since those other cells could not make human tau, the only way they could get the protein was by transmission from nerve cell to nerve cell...

... beta amyloid, which accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients, forming hard, barnaclelike plaques. But beta amyloid is very different from tau. It is secreted and clumps outside cells. Although researchers have looked, they have never seen evidence that amyloid spreads from cell to cell in a network.

Still, amyloid creates what amounts to a bad neighborhood in memory regions of the brain. Then tau comes in — some researchers call it “the executioner” — piling up inside cells and killing them...

... it may be necessary to block both beta amyloid production, which seems to get the disease going, and the spread of tau, which continues it, to bring Alzheimer’s to a halt...

These are exciting times in dementia research, particularly given the discouraging state of the art only three years ago.

Alas, good news can't come fast enough for the 40+ set - our brains start running downhill fast at around age 45 [1]. While we wait to see if anything will come of this, our take away lessons are ...

  • Avoid head injury.
  • Exercise. If somehow you know you have problematic ApoE4 this seems utterly essential. Probably good for all of us.
  • Sleep 8 hours a night. (Speculative, but I bet this will be true).

[1] Yes, raising the retirement age is a sick joke.

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Translating brain electrical activity into word sounds

Under some conditions, researchers are able to translate brain electrical signals into concepts/sounds which can be expressed using English words.

From the description I think the analysis focused on sound generation, so it was downstream from concept generation (which might express words before we were conscious of thinking them).

I have been following this research from a distance, and I knew the 'lie detectors' were getting pretty good, but this genuinely surprises me.

Science fiction writers are now frantically revising works in press. Charles Stross is probably banging his head on the wall right now.

Stunning, really. I'd been hopeful that I'd avoid the inevitable Singularity*, and that my kids would have good lives before it hits. Now I'm less optimistic.

* My favorite explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Do whipworms make dogs eat dirt?

The canine whipworm (Trichuris vulpis) is a common dog parasite.

The juvenile form of the parasite develops in dirt; it's transmitted by eating dirt (geophagy). It may be particularly common in dog parks [1]

Some dogs eat dirt.

Many parasites change the behaviors of their hosts to facilitate their life cycle.

So do whipworm infested dogs find dirt particularly tasty?

The association between geophagy and worm infection has been studied in humans, but a PubMed query on geophagy and trichuris vulpis in dogs produced no hits (PubMed includes veterinary literature).

I'm sure someone is studying this even as I write this post. I'm hoping for an article within the year.

[1] I don't know how hard it is to study this. A visit to the local dog park might be the basis for a great high school science experiment.

Saturday, January 07, 2012

Does earlier menarche explain the growing girl-boy academic gap?

Firstly, the age of menarche in Western nations has been declining...

Secular trends in age at menarche... [Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2011] - PubMed - NCBI

Menarcheal age decreased over time in Western countries until cohorts born in the mid-20th century. It then stabilised, but limited data are available for recent cohorts. Menarche data were collected retrospectively by questionnaire in 2003-10 from 94,170 women who were participating in the Breakthrough Generations Study, aged 16-98 years, born 1908-93 and resident in the UK. Average menarcheal age declined from women born in 1908-19 (mean=13.5 years) to those born in 1945-49 (mean=12.6 years). It was then stable for several birth cohorts, but resumed its downward trend in recent cohorts (mean=12.3 years in 1990-93 cohort). Trends differed between socio-economic groups, but the recent decline was present in each group. In conclusion, menarcheal age appears to have decreased again in recent cohorts after a period of stabilization….

Surprisingly, we don't have good recent data - this is the best I could find.  There's no evidence of a similar shift in males.

Secondly, in athletics, we know a maturational advantage of a few months can make a big difference in competitive events.

High school education is a competitive event. So, if girls are maturing earlier, how does this impact their academic performance relative to boys? Does this explain why our middle and senior high school honor role events are all female? Do boys get discouraged because they can't compete?

Seems like an interesting question. I'm thinking an 'all boy' school might be a good idea for our middle son.

Sunday, January 01, 2012

Medical fads - are they cycling faster?

We've always had crazy fads in medicine.

I fell for a few when I had wet ears. Magnesium Sulfate post-MI is the one I remember best. That one even made it to textbooks before it died.

It's typical of medical fads that they infest journals, and now newspapers, but usually die before they get to textbooks. Estrogen for osteoporosis wasn't in that class -- that was a somewhat understandable research problem. Medical fads are less forgivable; they really aren't supported by evidence. They're built on easy money and bored specialists.

It feels like the fads are cycling faster. Emily and I thought the Vitamin D craze had another year or two, but it died fast.

Our local minor neurotrauma ("acute mild head injury") craze reeks of fadism. In Minnesota recommendations are being written into law, with little basis in science. As of today, PubMed has precious few studies.

Maybe it will be real. Some cults become established religions, some fads become science.

I don't think this one will make it to science, I do think it will cause significant harm along the way. Labels are powerful.

Hope this cycles as fast as Vitamin D, but putting minor traumatic brain injury into law may stretch its lifespan. Medical fadism is a crime against the vulnerable...

Update: More on the Vitamin D fad.

A few readers asked me for more detail on the vitamin D fad.

Briefly, for a year or two, I couldn't avoid popular articles claiming that Americans suffered from an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency causing a wide range of disorders, and that recommended daily allowances were inadequate. Then, at the end of 2010, the Institute of Medicine published a report declaring that the science wasn't there, and that overdosing was more harmful than expected ... (emphases mine)

... The committee provided an exhaustive review of studies on potential health outcomes and found that the evidence supported a role for these nutrients in bone health but not in other health conditions. Overall, the committee concludes that the majority of Americans and Canadians are receiving adequate amounts of both calcium and vitamin D. Further, there is emerging evidence that too much of these nutrients may be harmful...

In retrospect, within a few months of the IOM report, the media attention ended. The fad moved on.

There's still science to be done of course. Ever since medical school I've wondered about the relationship of latitude to multiple sclerosis, and whether there was some kind of cutaneous immunity/solar radiation component. Today there are many interesting articles on the relationship between vitamin D and MS. That's research though, the fad is over.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

GOP 2.0: What rational climate change politics might look like

"With great power comes great responsibility." Gingrich's inner geek smiled at that one. Certainly they had the power. The Democrats had been crushed by the 2012 elections. President Romney now controlled the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court -- and the filibuster had been eliminated in early 2013.

Gingrich was philosophical about the Vice Presidency; Cheney had taught him what could be done. Romney was happy enough to hand off the big one to him.

Not health care of course. That had been a trivial problem; it took only a few months to tweak ObamaCare, throw in some vouchers and a few distractions, and launch RomneyCare. The GOP base was fine with rebranding, and the dispirited remnant of the Democrats saw little real change.

No, the big one was climate change. Romney and Gingrich had never truly doubted that human CO2 emissions were driving global climate change, but pivoting the base took a bit of work. They'd begun with ritual purges; Hansen was quickly exiled to the lecture circuit. Then came the American Commission on Truth in Science. There wasn't even much tormenting of old enemies; the size of the GOP victory had taken the fun out of that. In short order the "weak mindedness" of the Democrats was exposed and the "honest and rigorous" examination of the Romney administration was completed. It was time, Murdoch's empire declared, for strong minded Americans to face hard (but not inconvenient) facts.

The hardest challenge came from a contingent that felt global warming was a good thing, even God's plan. American drought was weakening that group, but they were a constant headache.

Now though it was time for policy, and Gingrich couldn't be happier. He'd been meeting with Bill Clinton of course; the two rogues loved the evening debates. Clinton's engagement wasn't just for fun, despite the GOP's dominance there was still room for politics. America's wealthy had been irrationally terrified of Obama, but they were also afraid of runaway warming -- and they had considerable power. Trillions of dollars were at stake in any real attack on global warming, and every corporation in America was at the door. The Military was pushing for aggressive management. Lastly, Gingrich knew that power can shift. He'd seen it before.

He wrote out the options, and labeled them by their natural political base ...

  • Climate engineering: solar radiation reduction, massive sequestration projects (R)
  • CO2 pricing (by hook or crook) (R/D - political debate is how revenues are used)
  • Subsidies for public transit (D)
  • Urban planning measures (D)
  • Military strategy to manage anticipated collapse of African nations (R)
  • Military strategy to manage anticipated climate engineering conflicts with China (climate wars) (R)
  • Tariff's on Chinese imports to charge China for their CO2 emissions (R/D - but probably tied to American CO2 pricing)
  • Massive investments in solar power and conservation technologies (D)
  • Massive investments in fusion power (R)

The Climate Wars were particularly troublesome. There were simple things China could do, like pump massive amounts of sulfuric acid, that would alleviate the disaster their scientists had predicted. These measures, however, would be disastrous for the US. On the other hand, war with China was unthinkable.

Gingrich new he had to put a price on Carbon and he had to get China to avoid the most dangerous (for the US) forms of climate engineering. The rest was in play. This was what Great Men were made for ...

See also:

Gordon's Notes

Others

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Ferret flu: An existential challenge to anti-Darwinist Republicans?

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought.

Yes, influenza can be weaponized by guiding Darwinian natural selection - but that takes years of patient work and advanced technologies. It's beyond the grasp of, say, Anonymous.

So this research is good news - for most of us.

Isn't it a problem for the anti-Darwinist wing of the GOP though? The group that opposes the teaching of natural selection? How do their Senators get their heads around this issue?

Monday, December 26, 2011

Spider brains and the evolution of computation

Brains have a big return on investment ...

Tiniest of Spiders Are Loaded With Brains, Researchers Find - NYTimes

... In the smallest spiders, Dr. Eberhard and his colleagues found, the central nervous systems filled nearly 80 percent of the cephalothorax, or body cavity, including 25 percent of the legs.

“The brain tissue of the nervous tissue is metabolically expensive,” he said. “These little spiders are paying a very large price to keep these brains functioning.”

At times, that price includes a deformed body cavity bulging with brain matter, which may in turn compromise the size of the digestive system, Dr. Eberhard said....

Were spider brains this big 200 million years ago? Across all organisms, are brains bigger than they once were? Across all worlds, where does computation stop having positive evolutionary returns?

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Did canine distemper arise from measles in the new world?

(I wrote this 9/2011, but I was mistakenly left as a draft until now.)

Six years ago I read that new world dogs (canis familiaris) died in large numbers after the European invasion.

So what killed the Amerindian dog?

I assumed it was some European plague, and I suspected distemper.
I'd guess distemper. Recently I read that wild African dogs are now dying of epidemic distemper. Seems to fit. The Euros carried viruses that killed many of the native americans, it's not surprising that their dogs would have done the same thing.
Recently I read of a twist to this story
Evidence of a New World Origin for Canine Distemper -- Uhl et al. 25 (1): 613.4 -- The FASEB Journal 
.... The historical, epidemiological, paleopathological and molecular evidence supports the hypothesis that canine distemper arose in the New World from MV after the European conquest....
The Europeans brought Measles from the old world. In the new world it produced massive epidemics with astounding mortality. Tens of millions of native Americans died of Measles and other Old World diseases.

As is seen with other plagues, under these circumstances the measles virus jumped species. It went from humans to their dogs. It may have been even more lethal in the dogs of the 1500s.

Why didn't it then go back to Europe and wipe out the European dog? Did the virus adapt to its new host so it became less lethal? Could a historian who knew what to look for find evidence of massive die offs in European dogs in the 16th century?

I suspect we'll find out in the next year or two.