An App, the GoodGuide, Aids in Careful Shopping - NYTimes.com
... GoodGuide, a Web site and iPhone application that lets consumers dig past the package’s marketing spiel by entering a product’s name and discovering its health, environmental and social impacts....Kellogg got an OK rating.
New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins - Nicholas Wade - NYTimes.com
.... 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun’s outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon’s face, heated Earth’s surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.
Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?
The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?
The questions may seem moot, since life did start somehow. But for the small group of researchers who insist on learning exactly how it started, frustration has abounded. Many once-promising leads have led only to years of wasted effort. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick, the chief theorist of molecular biology, have quietly suggested that life may have formed elsewhere before seeding the planet, so hard does it seem to find a plausible explanation for its emergence on Earth.
In the last few years, however, four surprising advances have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life’s origins will eventually emerge.
One is a series of discoveries about the cell-like structures that could have formed naturally from fatty chemicals likely to have been present on the primitive Earth. This lead emerged from a long argument between three colleagues as to whether a genetic system or a cell membrane came first in the development of life. They eventually agreed that genetics and membranes had to have evolved together.
The three researchers, Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel and P. Luigi Luisi, published a somewhat adventurous manifesto in Nature in 2001, declaring that the way to make a synthetic cell was to get a protocell and a genetic molecule to grow and divide in parallel, with the molecules being encapsulated in the cell. If the molecules gave the cell a survival advantage over other cells, the outcome would be “a sustainable, autonomously replicating system, capable of Darwinian evolution,” they wrote.
“It would be truly alive,” they added.
One of the authors, Dr. Szostak, of the Massachusetts General Hospital, has since managed to achieve a surprising amount of this program.
Simple fatty acids, of the sort likely to have been around on the primitive Earth, will spontaneously form double-layered spheres, much like the double-layered membrane of today’s living cells. These protocells will incorporate new fatty acids fed into the water, and eventually divide.
Living cells are generally impermeable and have elaborate mechanisms for admitting only the nutrients they need. But Dr. Szostak and his colleagues have shown that small molecules can easily enter the protocells. If they combine into larger molecules, however, they cannot get out, just the arrangement a primitive cell would need. If a protocell is made to encapsulate a short piece of DNA and is then fed with nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, the nucleotides will spontaneously enter the cell and link into another DNA molecule.
At a symposium on evolution at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island last month, Dr. Szostak said he was “optimistic about getting a chemical replication system going” inside a protocell. He then hopes to integrate a replicating nucleic acid system with dividing protocells.
Dr. Szostak’s experiments have come close to creating a spontaneously dividing cell from chemicals assumed to have existed on the primitive Earth. But some of his ingredients, like the nucleotide building blocks of nucleic acids, are quite complex. Prebiotic chemists, who study the prelife chemistry of the primitive Earth, have long been close to despair over how nucleotides could ever have arisen spontaneously.
Nucleotides consist of a sugar molecule, like ribose or deoxyribose, joined to a base at one end and a phosphate group at the other. Prebiotic chemists discovered with delight that bases like adenine will easily form from simple chemicals like hydrogen cyanide. But years of disappointment followed when the adenine proved incapable of linking naturally to the ribose.
Last month, John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester in England, reported in Nature his discovery of a quite unexpected route for synthesizing nucleotides from prebiotic chemicals. Instead of making the base and sugar separately from chemicals likely to have existed on the primitive Earth, Dr. Sutherland showed how under the right conditions the base and sugar could be built up as a single unit, and so did not need to be linked.
“I think the Sutherland paper has been the biggest advance in the last five years in terms of prebiotic chemistry,” said Gerald F. Joyce, an expert on the origins of life at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
Once a self-replicating system develops from chemicals, this is the beginning of genetic history, since each molecule carries the imprint of its ancestor. Dr. Crick, who was interested in the chemistry that preceded replication, once observed, “After this point, the rest is just history.”
Dr. Joyce has been studying the possible beginning of history by developing RNA molecules with the capacity for replication. RNA, a close cousin of DNA, almost certainly preceded it as the genetic molecule of living cells. Besides carrying information, RNA can also act as an enzyme to promote chemical reactions. Dr. Joyce reported in Science earlier this year that he had developed two RNA molecules that can promote each other’s synthesis from the four kinds of RNA nucleotides.
“We finally have a molecule that’s immortal,” he said, meaning one whose information can be passed on indefinitely. The system is not alive, he says, but performs central functions of life like replication and adapting to new conditions.
“Gerry Joyce is getting ever closer to showing you can have self-replication of RNA species,” Dr. Sutherland said. “So only a pessimist wouldn’t allow him success in a few years.”
Another striking advance has come from new studies of the handedness of molecules. Some chemicals, like the amino acids of which proteins are made, exist in two mirror-image forms, much like the left and right hand. In most naturally occurring conditions they are found in roughly equal mixtures of the two forms. But in a living cell all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars and nucleotides are right-handed.
Prebiotic chemists have long been at a loss to explain how the first living systems could have extracted just one kind of the handed chemicals from the mixtures on the early Earth. Left-handed nucleotides are a poison because they prevent right-handed nucleotides linking up in a chain to form nucleic acids like RNA or DNA. Dr. Joyce refers to the problem as “original syn,” referring to the chemist’s terms syn and anti for the structures in the handed forms.
The chemists have now been granted an unexpected absolution from their original syn problem. Researchers like Donna Blackmond of Imperial College London have discovered that a mixture of left-handed and right-handed molecules can be converted to just one form by cycles of freezing and melting.
With these four recent advances — Dr. Szostak’s protocells, self-replicating RNA, the natural synthesis of nucleotides, and an explanation for handedness — those who study the origin of life have much to be pleased about, despite the distance yet to go. “At some point some of these threads will start joining together,” Dr. Sutherland said. “I think all of us are far more optimistic now than we were five or 10 years ago.”
One measure of the difficulties ahead, however, is that so far there is little agreement on the kind of environment in which life originated. Some chemists, like Günther Wächtershäuser, argue that life began in volcanic conditions, like those of the deep sea vents. These have the gases and metallic catalysts in which, he argues, the first metabolic processes were likely to have arisen.
But many biologists believe that in the oceans, the necessary constituents of life would always be too diluted. They favor a warm freshwater pond for the origin of life, as did Darwin, where cycles of wetting and evaporation around the edges could produce useful concentrations and chemical processes.
No one knows for sure when life began. The oldest generally accepted evidence for living cells are fossil bacteria 1.9 billion years old from the Gunflint Formation of Ontario. But rocks from two sites in Greenland, containing an unusual mix of carbon isotopes that could be evidence of biological processes, are 3.830 billion years old.
How could life have gotten off to such a quick start, given that the surface of the Earth was probably sterilized by the Late Heavy Bombardment, the rain of gigantic comets and asteroids that pelted the Earth and Moon around 3.9 billion years ago? Stephen Mojzsis, a geologist at the University of Colorado who analyzed one of the Greenland sites, argued in Nature last month that the Late Heavy Bombardment would not have killed everything, as is generally believed. In his view, life could have started much earlier and survived the bombardment in deep sea environments.
Recent evidence from very ancient rocks known as zircons suggests that stable oceans and continental crust had emerged as long as 4.404 billion years ago, a mere 150 million years after the Earth’s formation. So life might have had half a billion years to get started before the cataclysmic bombardment.
But geologists dispute whether the Greenland rocks really offer signs of biological processes, and geochemists have often revised their estimates of the composition of the primitive atmosphere. Leslie Orgel, a pioneer of prebiotic chemistry, used to say, “Just wait a few years, and conditions on the primitive Earth will change again,” said Dr. Joyce, a former student of his....
Health Care Follies - The Conversation Blog - Gail Collins - NYTimes.com
... The big problem is that the economy is sinking under the rising cost of medical treatment, one cause of which is doctors recommending unnecessary and overly costly procedures. (For which I do not blame the doctors. If we lived in a desirable world in which people were insured against not getting enough news, I can guarantee you that I would come up with some really excellent additional products.)...She really is a wonderful writer, and she's getting better.
Roert Reich's Blog: The Healthcare War is Now Official
Yesterday the American Medical Association came out against a public option for health care. And yesterday the President reaffirmed his support for it...
... All major lobbying firms in Washington -- many of them brimming with ex-members of Congress -- are now crawling all over the Hill. Lots of money is on the table. AMA's political action committee has contributed $9.8 million to congressional candidates since 2000, and its lobbying arm is one of the most formidable on the Hill. Meanwhile, Big Insurance and Big Pharma are increasing their firepower. The five largest private insurers and their trade group America's Health Insurance Plans spent a total of $6.4 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year, up more than $1 million from the first quarter last year, and are spending even more now. United Health Group spent $1.5 million in the first quarter, up 34 percent from the $1.1 million it spent in the first quarter last year. Aetna spent $809,793 between January and the end of March, up 41 percent from last year. Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, spent more than $6.1 million on lobbying between January and March, more than double what it spent last year. It also spent nearly $3.3 million lobbying in the fourth quarter of 2008. Every one of them is upping their spending....
... The President can't do this alone. You must weigh in and get everyone you know to weigh in, too. Bombard your senators and representatives. Organize and mobilize others. And let the White House know how strongly you feel...
Goodbye to cheap oil | SalonThey're much more pessimistic than they were about three years ago. They're not saying we'll run out of hydrocarbons, in fact they predict our 2030 oil production will be about 13% higher than it was 3 years ago. The catch is worldwide energy demand would normally rise by far more than 13% over the next 20 years.
Every summer, the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy issues its International Energy Outlook (IEO) — a jam-packed compendium of data and analysis on the evolving world energy equation...
... The IEO predicts a sharp drop in projected future world oil output (compared with previous expectations) and a corresponding increase in reliance on what are called "unconventional fuels" — oil sands, ultra-deep oil, shale oil and biofuels...
... 81.5 million barrels produced in 2006 ... projected 2030 figure to just 93.1 million barrels per day...
Does Military Sonar Kill Marine Wildlife?: Scientific American:Imagine the pain of being unable to escape this barrage.... generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels; the world’s loudest rock bands top out at only 130. These sound waves can travel for hundreds of miles under water, and can retain an intensity of 140 decibels as far as 300 miles from their source...... Navy documents which estimated that such testing would kill some 170,000 marine mammals and cause permanent injury to more than 500 whales, not to mention temporary deafness for at least 8,000 others...
No great surprise, but even I’m surprised how relatively little Obama’s budgets have contributed to the Federal deficit …
How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit – David Leonhardt - NYTimes.com
… The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it…
…You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.
The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.
About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.
Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.
About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.
So we’re talking 37% business cycle, 33% Bush, 20% Bush items extended by Obama (tax cuts, Iraq) and 10% Obama. It’s the last 10% that makes GOP budget “hawks” rabid.
Insofar that Obama’s spending is a stimulus package aimed at reducing the duration of the recession accounting for 37% of the deficit, it’s an excellent investment.
We know the iPhone isn't cheap, but Billshrink shows the numbers
... , the cheapest phone to own over a two-year period is the Palm Pre, which clocks in at $2,400. The cost calculated is based off of a service plan with two years of unlimited voice, data, and messaging services. The Android G1 follows with $3,240 and finally the iPhone 3G S at $3,600...I hope these are enough advantages to either make Palm viable or get a committed buyer for the company.
It’s been a few months since I’ve last written about the netbook chromestellation platform (Google Chrome + Netscape Constellation 1996). There’s been little of interest on the netbook side, except that Microsoft has successfully executed their only logical response – make XP effectively free on the Netbook. Price points have not yet fallen into the truly disruptive range.
On the software side though, we now have Google’s technology preview from their I/O conference: Google I/O - Google's HTML 5 Work: What's Next?.
One surprise is what a large role Apple has played. Clearly they made the right strategic choice when they split from Mozilla to create Safari/WebKit and introduced Canvas. Apple and Google are precisely aligned now, and both are pushing the vision of a browser as a technology platform. (From a very different direction, so is Palm.)
Another surprise is that the standards groups have abandoned the slow pace of seven years ago and resumed the 1990s model of adopting whatever the leaders are doing. HTML “5” today is nothing like HTML “5” of 2004.
It’s everyone against Microsoft now, rather than the 1990s Sun vs. Netscape vs. Microsoft battle (Microsoft hardly had to lift a finger in that one – Netscape and Sun killed one another). If you add the EU in then maybe it’s almost a fair fight, but Microsoft is immensely profitable and Windows 7 is due*.
So now we wait for the Google branded Cloud-powered $150 HTML 5 netbook …
* Windows 7 will sell so much hardware and software, it might inflate .com bubble 2.0.
Walrus Magazine Energy Crisis 2009: An Inconvenient TalkPresumably new technologies will improve EROEIs enough to truly bake the earth, but the article is worth a read. If peak hydrocarbon output is really only 11 years away then it's within the planning horizon of energy investors and national militaries.
... Energy return on energy invested, which geologists refer to interchangeably as EROEI or EROI. Canada’s exploration treadmill. Reserves-to-production ratios.
You pick one at random, fixate on it. The historical EROEI for conventional oil is 100:1... Invest a barrel’s worth of energy drilling and refining in a spot like Ghawar, then and forever the largest single crude oil deposit on the planet, and you used to get 100 barrels of energy-dense, easily transported fuel in return. These days, conventional EROEI for such places is closer to 25:1.
The EROEI on more recent “new conventional” deposits, which Dave cites mostly by their discovery and extraction methods (“deepwater oil, horizontal wells, 3-D seismic”) is also around 25:1. In Alberta’s tar sands, the surface-mined bitumen comes to market at an EROEI of 6:1. “In situ” bitumen — sludge buried too far under the boreal forest floor to excavate, which comprises the lion’s share of the most breathless estimates of Canada’s energy superpower–scale oil production — rings in at 3:1. Corn ethanol, that darling of America’s farm states, is somewhere between 1.3:1 and 0.75:1. Shale oil, another unconventional source held by its boosters to be capable of indefinitely extending the age of oil, has never been converted into fuel at a net energy profit, at least as far as Dave has been able to ascertain....
