Crumb Trail

File Sharpening

2006-06-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how to sharpen a file? Tiny little gnomes with even tinier little stones to sharpen all those little ridges? Nope, acid.

THE use of acids in the restoration of worn-out files is ancient; but in view of the immense number of these used up in this country, the following precise formula, translated from the Chemiaches Centralblatt, is worthy of record. A public report says upon this subject:
Some idea may be formed of the file business of the United States, when it is shown that from four to five millions of dollars worth of files are annually imported, and from five to six millions are manufactured here, and large as the supply is, it is not sufficient to supply the demand. From fifty to one hundred thousand dollars worth are used in some large iron-work shops, as well as government and railroad machine shops, yearly.
The files are first washed with a hot lye of soda, and all grease removed with brushes. They are then suspended in a mixture of concentrated nitric acid with eight parts by measure of water for 25 minutes; then well cleaned in water with brushes, and reimmersed for 25 minutes more in the acid mixture with addition of another eighth of strong acid. Brush again and reimmerse, after adding to. the bath a sixteenth part of concentrated sulphuric acid. This heats the bath, and the etching proper now commences, and is kept up for three minutes, with a vibratory motion of the bath. Wash and brush and reimmerse in a bath similar to the last with similar agitation for five minutes. Wash repeatedly with water, then with milk of lime, finally rinse again with water, dry quickly at a gentle heat and varnish, while still warm, with oil.
American Gas-Light Jour,sal.

Do-it-yourself methods you hear of include battery acid and pickling vinegars as the acid. There are companies that will do it for you - Boggs Tool is a name you hear. You ship them your files and they ship them back sharper. Some say that you can only do this 3 or 4 times before they are too worn to respond. They also say that they aren't as good as new, but are in fact much improved over a dull file. If they are rusted there's no hope.

Cheap Hydrogen

2006-06-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

A clever hack.

The basic process, electrolysis, is nothing new: Combine water with an electrolyte, and run current through the solution, forcing the water molecules to split into hydrogen and oxygen gases. But electrolysis-formed hydrogen has long been hampered by the high capital cost of the metals used in the process, around “thousands of dollars per kilowatt,” says Richard Bourgeois, GE’s electrolysis project leader. GE’s breakthrough comes from a proprietary material called Noryl, a highly chemical- and temperature-resistant plastic developed by the GE labs, that lowers the cost of hydrogen production to hundreds of dollars per kilowatt, according to Bourgeois.
Although GE has only built a prototype in their lab, Bourgeois believes that demonstrations can come as soon as the end of next year, and commercialization will follow that. The goal of the project, according to Bourgeois, is to bring down equipment costs enough to take the cost of hydrogen from $8 per kilogram to $3 per kilogram—comparable in energy and price to a gallon of gasoline.
Currently, Hydrogen production is also limited to industrial refineries and agricultural areas, where the gas is produced on-site using methane, says Bourgeois. GE’s system—which, at approximately 10’ x 20’, can fit in a small trailer—could be marketed to smaller-scale industries. And one day, Bourgeois sees a future when drivers fill their hydrogen-fuel-cell powered cars from pumps with built-in electrolyzers. If electricity needed to produce the hydrogen is wind- or solar-generated, the entire process is, essentially, emissions-free.

Thus hydrogen could be seen as an energy storage system for intermittent generation systems such as wind, solar, wave etc.

Nitrogen fertilizer is most often made using methane feedstock for the same reason used to make hydrogen - it's the hydrogen that is of value and methane, CH4, is a very good source. But if the hydrogen could be had from water at an economical price there would be no need for methane.

Attention Surplus

2006-06-04T16:57:00.000-07:00

Old Joe helps you be alert.

researchers from the University of Queensland found that with caffeine consumption we are more likely to attend to, and agree with, persuasive arguments.
The experiments involved asking people their attitudes about voluntary euthanasia before and after reading persuasive arguments against their initial beliefs. Prior to reading the arguments, the participants consumed orange juice with either caffeine (equivalent to two cups of coffee) or no caffeine (placebo).
The level of 'systematic processing of the message' was found to be increased by caffeine as shown by increased agreement with the arguments, greater message-related thinking and better argument recall.
Lead author Dr. Pearl Martin from the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland says,
"Given the numerous situations in which people are exposed to persuasive arguments, these results could have many applied implications.
Consider how caffeine containing products (such as, coffee, tea, cola or energy drinks) might affect how persuaded a person is when, for example, listening to advertisements or a political speech on the radio/TV, reading a film review or in a business meeting to discuss work-related issues."

Who knew! This is tragic. There are zillions of people paying attention to persuasive arguments, thinking about them, remembering details of the arguments and reaching conclusions. No good can come of this.

Links

2006-06-04T07:39:00.000-07:00

More Meta than thou

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data. For example, you can see which papers are currently being discussed by neurologists, or which web pages are being linked to by bioinformaticians.
It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community.
Sort of.

I got some hits for one of my blogs from Postgenomic and checked it out. Useful.

Stone Granny

2006-05-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

Buy her a beer and talk about old times.

Research involving more than 7,000 older women found that those who drink a moderate amount of alcohol have slightly higher levels of mental function than non-drinkers, particularly in verbal abilities . . .
understanding whether alcohol affects specific areas of cognition may shed light on the mechanisms that make it protective. Possible mechanisms include that alcohol increases levels of "good" cholesterol and lowers the risk of stroke, that it may decrease the formation of plaque that is associated with Alzheimer's disease and that it may increase the release of brain chemicals that affect learning and memory. . .
"Until we better understand the reasons why alcohol consumption is associated with better cognitive functioning, these results on their own are not a reason for people who don't drink to start or for those who drink to increase their intake."

Ok, don't buy her a beer if she doesn't drink or is already stoned.

River History

2006-05-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

The Colorado river than Powell saw when he explored it for the post-bellum US in 1869 may have been more representative than the river we've seen since the turn of the century.

A new tree-ring-based reconstruction of 508 years of Colorado River streamflow confirms that droughts more severe than the 2000-2004 drought occurred before stream gages were installed on the river.
The new research also confirms that using stream gage records alone may overestimate the average amount of water in the river because the last 100-year period was wetter than the average for the last five centuries. . .
"The updated reconstruction for Lee's Ferry indicates that as many as eight droughts similar in severity, in terms of average flow, to the 5-year 2000-2004 drought have occurred since 1500."

Well, that's interesting but so what?

Allocations of Colorado River water made in the 1922 Colorado River Compact between the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah therefore overestimate the amount of river water available. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson and Albuquerque are among the many cities dependent on Colorado River water. . .
The underlying message from these new reconstructions remains the same: that Colorado River Compact allocations were based on one of the wettest periods in the past five centuries, and that droughts more severe than any in the last 100 years occurred before stream gages were installed. The most severe sustained drought (based on the lowest 20-year average) in the Upper Colorado River basin occurred in the last part of the 16th century. This reconstruction also shows that average annual flows on the Upper Colorado regularly vary from one decade to the next by more than 1 million acre-feet.
According to Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District and an expert on Colorado River issues, "Water managers have always made critical water decisions based on a relatively short and often incomplete gaged record for the Colorado River. This study should be of keen interest because it shows that there were likely a number of long-term droughts more severe than what we experienced in the 1900s and during this century. The study should have enormous implications on how the river is managed."

This isn't new news. Previous studies decades ago said much the same, but this one is a bit more rigorous and largely confirms previous findings.

Brane Storm

2006-05-25T13:33:00.000-07:00

Cosmological membrane theory is an interesting speculation without evidence, or much evidence at any rate, and none of it unambiguous. Perhaps that will change in the next few years.

The framework Keeton and Petters developed predicts certain cosmological effects that, if observed, should help scientists validate the braneworld theory. The observations, they said, should be possible with satellites scheduled to launch in the next few years.
If the braneworld theory proves to be true, "this would upset the applecart," Petters said. "It would confirm that there is a fourth dimension to space, which would create a philosophical shift in our understanding of the natural world." . . .
The braneworld theory predicts that relatively small "black holes" created in the early universe have survived to the present. The black holes, with mass similar to a tiny asteroid, would be part of the "dark matter" in the universe. As the name suggests, dark matter does not emit or reflect light, but does exert a gravitational force.
The General Theory of Relativity, on the other hand, predicts that such primordial black holes no longer exist, as they would have evaporated by now.
"When we estimated how far braneworld black holes might be from Earth, we were surprised to find that the nearest ones would lie well inside Pluto's orbit," Keeton said.
Petters added, "If braneworld black holes form even 1 percent of the dark matter in our part of the galaxy -- a cautious assumption -- there should be several thousand braneworld black holes in our solar system."
But do braneworld black holes really exist -- and therefore stand as evidence for the 5-D braneworld theory?
The scientists showed that it should be possible to answer this question by observing the effects that braneworld black holes would exert on electromagnetic radiation traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Any such radiation passing near a black hole will be acted upon by the object's tremendous gravitational forces -- an effect called "gravitational lensing."
"A good place to look for gravitational lensing by braneworld black holes is in bursts of gamma rays coming to Earth," Keeton said. These gamma-ray bursts are thought to be produced by enormous explosions throughout the universe. Such bursts from outer space were discovered inadvertently by the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s.
Keeton and Petters calculated that braneworld black holes would impede the gamma rays in the same way a rock in a pond obstructs passing ripples. The rock produces an "interference pattern" in its wake in which some ripple peaks are higher, some troughs are deeper, and some peaks and troughs cancel each other out. The interference pattern bears the signature of the characteristics of both the rock and the water.
Similarly, a braneworld black hole would produce an interference pattern in a passing burst of gamma rays as they travel to Earth, said Keeton and Petters. The scientists predicted the resulting bright and dark "fringes" in the interference pattern, which they said provides a means of inferring characteristics of braneworld black holes and, in turn, of space and time.
"We discovered that the signature of a fourth dimension of space appears in the interference patterns," Petters said. "This extra spatial dimension creates a contraction between the fringes compared to what you'd get in General Relativity."
Petters and Keeton said it should be possible to measure the predicted gamma-ray fringe patterns using the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, which is scheduled to be launched on a spacecraft in August 2007.

I wonder how such a "philosophical shift in our understanding of the natural world" would affect society?

Beating the Big C

2006-05-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

Work them to death.

"Preliminary indications from follow-up work in the laboratory suggest that voluntary exercise enhances UVB-induced apoptosis in the skin, and that it also enhances apoptosis in UVB-induced tumours. So, although UVB is triggering the development of tumours, exercise is counteracting the effect by stimulating the death of the developing cancer cells.
"Our studies may be the first to suggest an apoptotic mechanism for the effect of voluntary exercise in the development of cancer. In addition, we found that voluntary exercise decreased body fat and that the number of tumours decreased with decreasing amounts of fat. This effect may also play an important role in the mechanism and warrants further investigation, bearing in mind the growing rates of obesity in the Western world, particularly in the USA and UK," he said. . .
For the bowel cancer study, Dr Colbert and her co-authors used mice (APC Min mice) that had a genetic mutation that predisposed them to develop intestinal polyps. "Our studies are relevant for humans in that these Min mice have a mutation in one of the same genes, APC, that is also mutated in human colon cancer," she explained. "The protective effect of exercise and lower body weight in our mice is consistent with epidemiological evidence in humans that suggests higher levels of activity and lower body weight reduces the risk of colon cancer." . . .
"The exercising mice ran an average of 3.8 km a day, and the further they ran the fewer polyps they had. Exercise significantly reduced total polyp number and polyp size, as well as prolonging survival," said Dr Colbert. "On average there were 16 polyps per mouse in the exercising mice compared to 22 polyps in the control mice – a decrease of 25%."

As I sit here satiated after having worked my fill today, like every day, outdoors, on my feet, covering miles and miles though at a brisk walk rather than a run, in full sun though I wear a hat, not able to "pinch an inch" of fat on my tum even when sitting, it's good to think that this may be a health advantage. I may look like a leathery bag of straps and bones, but I feel pretty good and may do so for some time still.

Nano-Nano

2006-05-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) Task Force is publishing some essays.

For their first major project, the CRN Task Force chose to generate a range of independent essays identifying and defining specific concerns about the possibilities of advanced nanotechnology. As shown below, some of those essays were published in the March 2006 issue of the journal Nanotechnology Perceptions. The rest of the essays will be published in May 2006 in the next issue of the journal.
We encourage everyone to respond to this work and to future publications of the CRN Task Force with your questions, comments, and criticism.

Some are available for online reading now under the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL), some will be available soon but a couple are not GFDL licensed.

Sharp Stuff

2006-05-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a sharpening nut. It's a habit I picked up in my youth one year when I worked with an old immigrant cabinet maker. He told stories of how he had been an apprentice as a boy in the day when the punishment for mistakes was a beating from the master.

He wasn't allowed to use power tools until he could make a perfect cabinet, starting with a log, with nothing but hand tools. Then he could use power tools when it was faster and easier, though not otherwise better. You can't do such things with dull tools and he retained his mania for sharpness into his old age. I got infected too.

When my buddy lost he knife, left it in my shop, I found it, sharpened it, and returned it to him with a cautionary remark. I knew that he wasn't used to sharp blades. When I house sat for Nannette and Chuck I sharpened their kitchen knives. Left a cautionary note. I even sharpen my shovels. Digging is much easier.

Today I sharpened the lawn mower blade, but not just a regular sharpening, a scary sharpening where the last pass it with a diamond strop. What a difference! It's as if I had doubled the engine power and speed. In thick, tall stands that used to bog it down and need two slow passes to cut evenly it hardly strained the engine when mowed at a normal pace.

I should have known that would happen. I had wondered about it for some time but never put a great edge on the blade. People already made fun of me for sharpening my blade so well and so often, as if it was a waste of time or a compulsive habit. I wish that old man was still around. He would have chided me about my dull blade and I'd have done this really useful upgrade long ago.

FAB

2006-05-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

A potential solution for all kinds of problems is computer driven fabricators. When mature these technologies may function at the nano scale and sip energy and materials. Current technologies build objects by whittling away excess mass from stocks. These technologies build objects up by depositing mass in the right places. An overview of current capabilities.

With new materials, more-efficient lasers, and faster computers, techniques such as selective laser sintering and direct metal deposition are producing parts, not just prototypes.
Since its introduction in the 1980s, rapid prototyping has evolved from a relatively simple modeling technique that allows design engineers to “test” their ideas in three dimensions to a sophisticated custom-manufacturing tool that may one day find its place alongside the copy machines at the local copy center or in the parts department at the local auto dealership.

I expect we will have home fabs. Have your fab make a fab for me. There are some interesting implications for intellectual property in a world where things are easily produced from CAD designs.

The same, but different

2006-04-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

Climate opportunists never miss an opportunity to mislead society.

On 15 April, the River Danube reached its highest level for some 111 years, forcing residents of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia to flee their homes. With weeks of snowmelt and rain swelling Europe's second-longest river, the waters haven't dipped below that level since. Meteorologists are warning that the flood represents yet more evidence that climate change is gearing up to play havoc with our weather. . .
Some might say the flooding was down to bad luck more than anything else. Spring hit Europe quite quickly this year, after a relatively long period of winter cold. Temperatures rose by some 15°C over the space of a week in some parts of the Alps, leading to massive snowmelts. This led to two large surges along the Danube itself and in one of its main tributaries, the Tisza. In a freak coincidence, both of these flood waves arrived in the lower Danube together, at the same time as a long period of persistent rain. . .
Single events are notoriously difficult to attribute to shifting climate rather than random chance. This is particularly the case for natural disasters involving precipitation — rain and snowfall — which tends to fluctuate more capriciously than temperature. Nevertheless, some experts say that this is a sign of what's in store. "While no single event can be attributed to climate change, the Danube scenario represents the kind of event that is likely to become more frequent according to climate-change predictions," says David Crichton, a climate expert based in Inchture, Scotland.

What a weasel. No, this wasn't caused by climate change. Using events like these as publicity for theories based on dodgy models is not just reprehensible, it is actively harmful to society. We would do well to discover ways to hold individuals like this responsible for the harm they do. In any case, this event is contrary to climate change theory.

But with warming climate comes a reduction in the amount of snow on mountaintops, which might mean that spring floods — such as this Danube event — might actually become less commonplace.

Might, might ... It's interesting to contrast the definite assertions of the climate hysterics with the tentative contradiction of those who read the book.

Hostile Environment

2006-04-26T00:59:00.000-07:00

One of the issues I've been paying more attention to is the large and increasing number of boys that fall off the formal education wagon, and so are often doomed to a life of poverty, insecurity and exclusion. Too many end up as social problems: our jails are filled and the percentage of men that do time, especially black men, is a scandal.

A number of thinkers, commenters and researchers have lately been noting that our educational system creates an increasingly hostile environment for boys. This paper is another in the group:

"We found very minor differences in overall intelligence. But if you look at the ability of someone to perform well in a timed situation, females have a big advantage," Camarata said. "It is very important for teachers to understand this difference in males and females when it comes to assigning work and structuring tests. To truly understand a person's overall ability, it is important to also look at performance in un-timed situations. For males, this means presenting them with material that is challenging and interesting, but is presented in smaller chunks without strict time limits."
The findings are particularly timely, with more attention being paid by parents, educators and the media to the troubling achievement gap between males and females in U.S. schools.
"Consider that many classroom activities, including testing, are directly or indirectly related to processing speed," the authors wrote. "The higher performance in females may contribute to a classroom culture that favors females, not because of teacher bias but because of inherent differences in sex processing speed." An additional question is whether this finding is linked to higher high school dropout rates for males and increased special education placement for males that do stay in school. . .
"'Processing speed' doesn't refer to reaction time or the ability to play video games," Camarata said. "It's the ability to effectively, efficiently and accurately complete work that is of moderate difficulty. Though males and females showed similar processing speed in kindergarten and pre-school, females became much more efficient than males in elementary, middle and high school."
The researchers found that males scored lower than females in all age groups in tests measuring processing speed, with the greatest discrepancy found among adolescents. However, the study also found that males consistently outperformed females in some verbal abilities, such as identifying objects, knowing antonyms and synonyms and completing verbal analogies, debunking the popular idea that girls develop all communication skills earlier than boys.
The researchers found no significant overall intelligence differences between males and females in any age groups.

The researchers hope to discover more about the physical basis of these differences. We are discovering ever more ways that brains vary by sex.

Moon Struck

2006-04-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

If you want to get noticed you must be controversial. You can do that by being more shrill than fellow travelers or by loudly beating your way through the bush to blaze a new trail. George Monbiot has tried the former and now seems to be trying the latter. [via Envirospin Watch]

. . . the British government is even more likely to recommend a new generation of nuclear generators in its energy review in the summer. It can now summon some heavyweight support: on Friday, the Financial Times revealed that the International Energy Agency has converted to the nuclear cause. My fellow environmentalists argue that the money would be better spent on wind turbines. I find myself at odds with almost everyone, by deciding, at the worst possible moment, that in one respect at least our battle against climate change depends on neither nuclear power nor renewables, but on a fossil fuel. . .
. . . a hydrogen network will be viable only if it is cheap. According to a report by the US National Academy of Engineering, the wholesale price of hydrogen made from natural gas with carbon capture will, in "the future", be $1.72 (96p) per kilogramme; from coal, $1.45; and from electrolysis $3.93. In other words, if a hydrogen economy is to be taken seriously, the fuel has to be made from gas or coal, rather than by either wind turbines or nuclear generators.
Even in my confessional mood, I cannot bring myself to support coal. I defy anyone who knows what open-cast mining looks like to say the words "clean coal" without blushing. This leaves only gas. If my calculations are correct, the retail price of hydrogen made from natural gas will be about 50% greater than the retail price of gas itself. But because fuel cells supplying both heat and electricity are more efficient than gas boilers, the total cost would be roughly the same.

And achieve nothing of value. It's another hide-the-pea scheme to avoid what seems to be an inevitable increase in the use of nuclear power, at least as an interim step to some future energy technology such as greatly enhanced solar PV cells. Though it may be that the future technology at the other end of the nuclear bridge is also nuclear since there are new designs that are claimed to be much cheaper to operate through their whole life cycle - from construction to decommissioning - as well as being far safer and less subject to monkey-wrenching. It's a family of technologies that have been scandalously neglected for a couple of decades due to mass psychosis, and I expect some interesting developments in the not too distant future now that interest and research funding is beginning again. One of the most attractive aspects of interest in nuclear energy in the developing world is that they have far fewer fussy inhibitions about thinking nuclear thoughts.

Das mobbing

2006-04-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

brutish behavior ratified by procedure

The purpose of a university, Mr. Westhues contends, is to maintain a spirit of openness, independence of mind, and civil debate. "A university cannot achieve its purpose as a tight ship," he says. When a mobbing occurs, that spirit of openness gets strangled by groupthink, bent on someone's elimination.
The Law of Group Polarization, formulated by Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that a bunch of people who agree with each other on some point will, given the chance to get together and talk, come away agreeing more strenuously on a more extreme point. If this tendency has a curdling effect on intellectual debates, it can have a downright menacing effect when the point of agreement is that a particular colleague is a repugnant nutjob. . .
anything that can be a basis for bickering can be a basis for mobbing: race, sex, political difference, cultural difference, intellectual style. Professors with foreign accents, he says, often get mobbed, as do professors who frequently file grievances and "make noise." But perhaps the most common single trait of mobbing targets, he says, is that they excel.

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Urban Evolution

2006-04-19T23:22:00.000-07:00

Brad Allenby explains that part of Phoenix Environmentalism: Part I and Part II is:

It means accepting that humans will continue to impact evolutionary biodiversity, while creating designed biodiversity in companies and laboratories; that the world's ecosystems will change profoundly as a result of human activity; that more technology, not less, will characterize the world.

This isn't just old species going extinct to be replaced by laboratory creations, it also means evolution to adapt to human environments.

Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with "evolutionary illusions".
An animal is said to be in an evolutionary illusion or trap when it does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place. The concept may help explain why so many squirrels get squashed on city streets, says Brown. For millions of years, squirrels have evolved to cross open spaces as quickly as possible, without wasting time watching for predators that they would not be able to escape anyway. "Ordinarily, that was a very sensible thing to do," he says. "But as an urban squirrel crossing four lanes of traffic, that's a bad idea."
Though ecologists used to dismiss urban areas as unworthy of study, they have recently begun to realise that cities provide an ideal theatre in which to see behaviour evolving at a pace rarely seen in the wild. City environments tend to be less variable than the countryside. Urban heat islands mean that insects can be active longer or throughout the year, and human activity provides urban wildlife with more stable, predictable sources of food and water.

It's a struggle but that's life. That has always been life. The field of adaptation is changing fast so evolution is in high gear. There is blood on the tracks, and road kill, but it also seems that there are survivors. There is a lot of worry that the pace is too fast, that many species will not be able to adjust so quickly. I suspect that this is true. Moreover, the reduced variability of developed environments seems that it would not reward great diversity, but I'm not sure how that works.

Know Nothings

2006-04-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

When it was recently discovered that plants emit methane I lamented that everything I know is wrong. One after another all my solid bits of knowledge turn out to be nonsense as new discoveries are made. The good scientist is happy when this happens, happy to have better information, comforted by the march of progress or something. I try, but it isn't comfortable, it's irritating. I have to take myself out behind the wood shed sometimes for a bracing lecture on the method and how this is all to the good. It happened again.

Until recently it was generally believed that the most important source of nitrogen for plants was inorganic nitrogen. However, researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) from the University of Lancaster and the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) have found that not only can organic nitrogen be directly taken up by plants it is also used differently by different species, enabling nitrogen sharing and biodiversity.
By tagging organic nitrogen with stable isotopes researchers have challenged the long held idea that organic nitrogen has to be first converted into an inorganic form before the plants can use it. Their findings have significant implications in unfertilised, low-productivity grasslands where organic nitrogen often appears in greater concentrations than inorganic forms.
Professor Richard Bardgett, lead researcher at the University of Lancaster explained: "This research provides important new information about what happens to organic nitrogen in real ecosystems in real time. Tagging amino acids also revealed that different plant species prefer different sources of organic nitrogen. These preferences may be a way for plants and microbes to avoid competition with their neighbours for nitrogen when it is in very short supply, effectively enabling them to share nitrogen and maintain biodiversity."

This is just a brief press release. There's no useful detail, and the focus at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) is on untilled swards, but it would seem that there are also implications for cropped lands that seek to amend soils using organic matter. If different plant species prefer different sources of organic nitrogen then a grower would want to match sources to crop species for best effects.

Update:

gaaahh! It seems that we also have anaerobic oxidation of methane.

Why did it take until now to identify this process? The main reason is probably that it proceeds at much lower rates than the anaerobic oxidation of other organic compounds or of hydrogen sulphide with nitrate. So the process is evident only in anoxic environments with low concentrations of oxidizable substrates other than methane, and with low levels of sulphate and high levels of nitrate. Such conditions prevail in anoxic freshwater habitats contaminated with agricultural run-off and in contaminated groundwater. The nitrate-dependent anaerobic oxidation of methane is predicted to occur mainly close to the oxic–anoxic interface, where in the oxic phase ammonia is oxidized to nitrate with oxygen by nitrifying (nitrate-forming) microorganisms. Nitrate then diffuses into the anoxic sediments saturated with methane, which is produced microbially from the degradation of cellulose and other plant material (Fig. 2). The interface is generally characterized by steep chemical gradients, which occur within millimetres and mask the process of the anaerobic oxidation of methane with nitrate.

Amateur Hour

2006-04-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

I sometimes think that degrees are prizes found in boxes of high fructose children's breakfast cereal. This paper makes me suspicious.

Plants apparently do much less than previously thought to counteract global warming, according to a paper to be published in next week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors, including Bruce Hungate of Northern Arizona University and lead author Kees-Jan van Groenigen of UC Davis, discovered that plants are limited in their impact on global warming because of their dependence on nitrogen and other trace elements. These elements are essential to photosynthesis, whereby plants remove carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from the air and transfer carbon back into the soil.
"What our paper shows is that in order for soils to lock away more carbon as carbon dioxide rises, there has to be quite a bit of extra nitrogen available--far more than what is normally available in most ecosystems," said Hungate of NAU's Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research.
The paper notes that various plants can pump nitrogen from the air into soils, and some researchers expected rising carbon dioxide to speed up this natural nitrogen pump, providing the nitrogen needed to store soil carbon. However, the research team found that this process, called nitrogen fixation, cannot keep up with increasing carbon dioxide unless other essential nutrients, such as potassium, phosphorus and molybdenum, are added as fertilizers.

Duh! And water too. There is always a limiting nutrient, usually water. This isn't news, it's gardening 101. No, wait, this is a prerequisite for gardening 101.

But, it's not that simple. Many previous studies have established that while there are limits that they change over time as ecologies adapt to increased CO2 levels.

One part of that is that as soil carbon increases less nutrients are needed for equivalent benefit beacuse soil chemistry is improved. More plants can grow with the exisitng nutrients.

Another factor is that soil organisms adapt as CO2 slowly increases to function in that new environment. To see this the experiments must be long term and mimic the slow rise. It's difficult since they don't have time to do it at a realistic pace, but they can get some idea of the process and do some guesswork.

Humans only account for about 5% of the carbon in the biosphere. It seems doubtful that this is enough to stress adaptive mechanisms. Still, there are always limits and probably not very many localities where CO2 is the limiting nutrient while all others are avaliable in abundance. There are some, but this isn't the general case.

This can be the case for arable land in production since nutrients are explicity added. Past practices were often insensitive to soil carbon - just tilling the soil causes the loss of huge amounts - so there is great potential for carbon sequestration in crop lands. Carbon lost in the past can be recaptured, and this will improve the soil too. It will grow more plants with less added nutrients.

Update:

More about the complexity of evaluating plant response to elevated CO2.

His research, which focused on the regrowth of the plant, reveals that alfalfa grows more with elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), in particular when this condition coincides with high temperatures. The effects can be affected by other variables, such as the availability of water in the soil, which would reduce its growth and can modify its response to CO2. In addition, in the study it was confirmed that the process of photosynthesis can be stimulated or reduced by CO2, depending on the growth phase of the plant.
As this study highlighted, one of the most interesting aspects of this type of plant is the increase in nutrient storage in the roots, especially of proteins, when the plant is periodically cut back. These nutrient reserves contribute to rapid regrowth and to maintaining the perenniality of this crop. Similarly, it has been shown that a moderately dry climate maintained over time favors the accumulation of these reserve proteins, which can stimulate the growth of the plants during the following regrowth.
The results show the great variability of plant response to increases in CO2. Thus, a greater availability of CO2, which in principle should stimulate growth through increase photosynthesis, when it interacts with other variables such as the temperature or availability of water, can modify significantly the response of the alfalfa, depending on its stage of growth.

Add stage of growth to the variables that affect plant response to CO2 levels.

Funny Farm

2006-04-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

Since Bush gave the green light to bio-fuels in the SOTU it has become increasingly common to hear looney commentary and bizarre pitches from opportunistic politicians. In The Forest Killers Peter Huber imagines a future where such things are practiced rather than just talked about. [via A&L Daily]

Now the green-energy crowd is touting cellulosic ethanol. This is a blunder, one they will regret more than any of their previous blunders. It will level forests, destroy wetlands and disrupt ecosystems all around the globe.
Or at least it will if the enabling technology ever becomes economical. And it might. . .
History has already taught us what a carbohydrate energy economy does to a rich, green landscape--it levels it. The carbon balance goes sharply negative, too, when stove or cow is fueled with anything but waste or crops from existing farmland. It's pleasant to imagine that humanity might get all its liquid fuels from stable, legacy farms or from debris that would otherwise end up as fungus food. But that just isn't how humans have historically fed whatever they could feed with cellulose.
From the perspective of all things green, cellulose-splitting enzymes are much the same as fire or cow, only worse. Fire and cow consume cellulose, but the process is generally messy and inconvenient, which is a big advantage, from the plant's perspective. To improve on wood-burning fires, or grass-eating cows, perfect the cellulose-splitting enzyme. Then watch what 7 billion people will do to your forests and your grasslands.

Old Eyes

2006-04-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

Yet another benefit of omega-3 fats

NPD1 inhibits genes causing inflammation and cell death that oxidative stress and other triggers turn on. RPE cells contain the omega-3 fatty acid family member, DHA, which Dr. Bazan and colleagues found is a precursor to NPD1. RPE cells regulate the uptake, conservation, and delivery of DHA to the photoreceptor cells. DHA, known to be in short supply in patients with retinitis pigmentosa and Usher's syndrome, promotes protective cell signaling by facilitating the expression of helpful rather than destructive proteins as well as stimulating the production of NPD1. DHA and NPD1 also decrease the production of damaging free radicals. DHA has been shown by Dr. Bazan to promote survival and inhibit cell death not only of photoreceptor cells, but also of neurons in an experimental model of Alzheimer's disease.

Cognitive Control

2006-04-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

Chance favors only the prepared mind.

the brain functions differently when a person arrives at "Aha!" solutions, compared to methodical solutions. The current study reveals that the distinct patterns of brain activity leading to "Aha!" moments of insight begin much earlier than the time a problem is solved. The research suggests that people can mentally prepare to have an "Aha!" solution even before a problem is presented. Specifically, as people prepare for problems that they solve with insight, their pattern of brain activity suggests that they are focusing attention inwardly, are ready to switch to new trains of thought, and perhaps are actively silencing irrelevant thoughts. These findings are important because they show that people can mentally prepare to solve problems with different thinking styles and that these different forms of preparation can be identified with specific patterns of brain activity. This study may eventually lead to an understanding of how to put people in the optimal "frame of mind" to deal with particular types of problems.
This research team's previous study revealed that just prior to an "Aha!" solution, after a person has been working on solving a problem, the brain momentarily reduces visual inputs, with an effect similar to a person shutting his or her eyes or looking away to facilitate the emergence into consciousness of the solution. The new study extends these findings by suggesting that mental preparation involving inward focus of attention promotes insight even prior to the presentation of a problem. Therefore, it may be that how a person is thinking before problem solving begins is just as important as the kind of thinking involved in reaching the solution, and perhaps even determines whether the solution will be derived with a sudden insight. . .
In two parallel experiments, participants solved these problems while brain activity was monitored either with electroencephalograms (EEG), which provide precise timing information and approximate anatomical information, or with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which gives a more precise location of active brain areas, but with less precise timing. The researchers focused on neural activity that occurred during the period just before each problem was displayed.
The two brain imaging techniques yielded highly similar results and showed a different pattern of brain activity prior to problems that they subsequently solved with an "Aha!", compared to the pattern of brain activity prior to problems they solved more methodically. . .
Mental preparation that led to insight solutions was generally characterized by increased brain activity in temporal lobe areas associated with conceptual processing, and with frontal lobe areas associated with cognitive control or "top-down" processing. Jung-Beeman noted that "Problem solvers could use cognitive control to switch their train of thought when stuck on a problem, or possibly to suppress irrelevant thoughts, such as those related to the previous problem." In contrast, preparation that led to more methodical solutions involved increased neural activity in the visual cortex at the back of the brain -- suggesting that preparation for deliberate problem solving simply involved external focus of attention on the video monitor on which the problem would be displayed.

Coupled Oscillators

2006-04-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Orderly behavior may need random stimuli.

While working on their model – a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" – the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected – shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?
But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder – forces were applied at random to each oscillator – the system became ordered and synchronized.
"The thing that is counterintuitive is that when you introduce disorder into the system – when the [forces on the pendulums] act at random – the chaos that was present before disappears and there is order," said Sebastian F. Brandt, physics graduate student and lead author of the study which appeared in the January 2006 edition of Physical Review Letters.
The physicists' research is not only hard to grasp for non-physicists, but puzzling for physicists, too. As supervisor Ralf Wessel, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences said, "Every physicist who hears this is surprised." . .
neurons can exhibit synchronous activity in response to a stimulus. To this point, she said, nobody has come up with an adequate explanation. And Wessel said, "Maybe the details of the neurons are completely irrelevant. Maybe it is only a property of oscillators."
A vital similarity between the model system and neurons is that they are both "nonlinear" – meaning that there is not a linear, or straight-ahead, correlation between the applied force and displacement. In other words, the oscillators in the model may be likened to a child on a swing. Within a mall range, the child will move in constant proportion to how hard you push them – if you push twice as hard, they will go twice as far. But nearly all complex systems in nature, like the physicists' model, are nonlinear. Once the child gets to a certain height, pushing twice as hard will not make the child go twice as far.
Neurons are composed of many elements and are typically nonlinear.
"When you hear your favorite music twice as loud you don't double the pleasure," mused Brandt, explaining how one aspect of the brain – hearing – is nonlinear.
While other research has shown that disorder can create order, these studies often involved manipulating parameters within the systems such as changing pendulum length. The researchers say that their work is novel because it involves changing externally applied forces. Thus, they believe, their findings might have potential in the real world, where it would be more difficult to change parameters within the system – neurons, for example – but relatively simple to apply an external forcing.
"This is of course basic research," said Brandt. "But what you can learn from this is that complex systems... sometimes behave in a very unexpected way, completely opposite to your intuition or expectation. … It will be interesting to see if the mechanism that we have found can actually be put to some use."

High Life

2006-04-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

More evidence that it isn't high cholesterol that kills your heart, it's high levels of bad LDL cholesterol that gets you.

Having a high level of HDL cholesterol – the good cholesterol – is more important than having a low level of LDL – the bad cholesterol – in protecting individuals from heart attack, according to a study published in the March issue of American Heart Journal by researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, Inc.
The researchers looked at the history of heart disease, age, sex, race, weight and other heart disease risk factors in almost 7,000 patients. The patients were predominately inner city residents and included a large number of African Americans, women, smokers and overweight people. The researchers found the strongest predictor of future heart attack was previous heart disease; age was the second strongest predictor and the third strongest predictor was HDL level.
"Most of the drugs that lower LDL also tend to raise HDL so until our study, when a person's health improved, you couldn't tell if that was due to lowering of the LDL or raising the HDL level," says study senior author William Tierney, M.D., IU Chancellor's Professor of Medicine and a Regenstrief Institute, Inc. research scientist. "We now know that more good cholesterol is more important than less bad cholesterol.

This has been claimed for a long time but some folks are slow I guess. The ealier post Eat Wild discussed the use of HDL as a medication. This has long been a claim of pastured beef and dairy products as well. Such products have less total fat than grain fed animals but more importantly it has higher levels of HDL cholesterol - less fat total but more good fat.

Anticipation

2006-04-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

Expecting fun is almost as good as having fun.

In a paper being presented in an American Physiological Society session at Experimental Biology 2006, Lee S. Berk of Loma Linda University, reports that . . . just the anticipation of the "mirthful laughter" involved in watching your favorite funny movie has some very surprising and significant neuroendocrine/hormone effects.
According to Berk: "The blood drawn from experimental subjects just before they watched the video had 27% more beta-endorphins and 87% more human growth hormone, compared to blood from the control group, which didn't anticipate the watching of a humorous video. . .
"Mirthful laughter diminishes the secretion of cortisol and epinephrine, while enhancing immune reactivity. In addition, mirthful laughter boosts secretion of growth hormone, an enhancer of these same key immune responses. The physiological effects of a single one-hour session viewing a humorous video has appeared to last up to 12 to 24 hours in some individuals," Berk noted, " while other studies of daily 30-minute exposure produces profound and long-lasting changes in these measures.

Though video watching doesn't appeal to everyone the effect may be more general. Anticipating having a fun time of any sort is likely good for you.

Inadvertent Domestication

2006-03-30T12:59:00.000-08:00

Habitual acts alter genomes.

The researchers were able to pinpoint and confirm that a single base pair mutation in DNA causing an amino acid change in a protein led to non-shattering rice varieties. This slight change in DNA prevented mature rice grains from easily falling from stalks to allow a more effective field harvest. In essence, humans several thousand years ago unknowingly practiced de facto gene selection by planting varieties with this trait.
Shattering in cereal crops refers to grains easily falling off of plants. The shattering trait of the wild forerunners of rice and cereals prevents effective field harvest and is undesirable for cultivation.

You get what you manage for . . . whether you understand what that will be or not.

Loose Equivalence

2006-03-30T12:55:00.000-08:00

Colder and smaller are much the same in at least one way.

"We found that pollen diversity tracks global temperature through time over millions of years. Diversity increases as the planet warms and decreases as it cools. The mystery is that even when global temperatures vary enormously, average temperatures in the tropics don't change much, so why do we see global temperature patterns reflected in tropical plant diversity?" Jaramillo proposes that changes in area drive speciation and extinction in the tropics.
"There is good correlation between area and number of species: more area implies more species. During global warming, tropical areas expand and diversity goes up, the opposite happens during global cooling. If this is the case, fragmentation of modern tropical forest could be equated to a global cooling period, because forested areas are shrinking dramatically, resulting in plummeting diversity in the forests that remain."

I wonder if models of past climate consider this relationship?

Model This

2006-03-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

Our bafflement increases

"The rapid surface warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and the enhanced global warming signal over the whole continent shows the complexity of climate change. Greenhouses gases could be having a bigger impact in Antarctica than across the rest of the world and we don't understand why. So far we haven't been able to determine the mechanisms behind the warming.

Clearly the air in that region is phlogisticated.

Counterstrike

2006-03-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Plant civil defense

A novel enzyme in corn helps the plants defend themselves from voracious caterpillars by disrupting the insects' ability to digest food, and ultimately killing them, according to researchers. The enzyme could be used in tandem with other biological pesticides such as the Bt toxin to prevent the pests from developing resistance and making the toxin more effective.
"The enzyme is found in insect-resistant strains of corn, and it breaks down proteins and peptides in the insects' gut. It is a unique active defense against herbivory," says Dawn Luthe, professor of plant stress biology at Penn State.
Luthe and researchers at Mississippi State University have since developed several lines of corn resistant to multiple pests, using conventional plant breeding and insect-resistant strains of corn from Antigua.

All farmers use pesticides no matter what agronomic system they practice. There has been an evolution of pesticides from more toxic and persistent early compounds based on arsenic, lead and other harsh poisons to more benign and selective ones. That's the story that those reasoning in good faith about pesticides should be telling rather than a false story of a dichotomy between those who use pesticides and those who don't. The issue is only which pesticides are used and over time that becomes an increasingly irrelevant distinction since they are all becoming safe as well as effective.

Farding The Pig

2006-03-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

Or barding, perhaps.

Researchers report they have created pigs that produce omega-3 fatty acids, which are known to improve heart function and help reduce the risks for heart disease, representing the first cloned transgenic livestock in the world that can make the beneficial compound. The research could be a boost to both farmers and health-conscious consumers seeking an alternative and safer source of omega-3 fatty acids. Currently, the only way for humans to realize the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids is by taking dietary supplements or by eating certain types of fish that may also contain high levels of mercury.

Well, no. Heavy metal fishes are not the only option for those seeking omega-3 fatty acids. Grass eating ruminants supply it too, and concentrates such as cheese made from their milk supply it in abundance.

To stimulate production of omega-3 fatty acids in pigs, a team led by Dr. Dai transferred a gene known as fat-1 to pig primary fetal fibroblasts, the cells that give rise to connective tissue. Dr. Prather's group then created the transgenic pigs from these cells using a method called nuclear transfer cloning. The transgenic pig tissues were then analyzed for omega-3 fatty acids in Dr. Kang's lab at MGH and by Drs. Dai and Evans at Pitt. The fat-1 gene is responsible for creating an enzyme that converts less desirable, but more abundant, omega-6 fatty acids in the animals to omega-3 fatty acids. The results could lead to a better understanding of cardiovascular function not only in pigs, but in humans as well.
"Pigs and humans have a similar physiology," said Dr. Prather, distinguished professor of reproductive biology in MU's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and a corresponding author with Dr. Dai. "We could use these animals as a model to see what happens to heart health if we increase the omega-3 levels in the body. It could allow us to see how that helps cardiovascular function. If these animals are put into the food chain, there could be other potential benefits. First, the pigs could have better cardiovascular function and therefore live longer, which would limit livestock loss for farmers. Second, they could be healthier animals for human consumption."

hmmm, convert omega-6 to omega-3. That would be a pretty good hack for the human genome too.

Update:

Study skew.

Diets rich in omega-6 fatty acids but poor in long-chain omega-3 fatty acids have been connected with heart, autoimmune, and neuropsychiatric disease, but two recent analyses have suggested that high levels of omega-3s may not always improve human health. A meta-analysis published last week in the British Medical Journal found no clear evidence that omega-3 fatty acids protect against cardiovascular disease or cancer. However, the authors acknowledged that their results were skewed by one large study that found no benefits of omega-3 fats. Without that study, their results fit with an earlier meta-analysis that showed that omega-3s can lower risk of death. Another recent review in the Journal of the American Medical Association found no clear anti-cancer benefits from omega-3 fatty acids.
Whether fat-1 pigs could ever offer an alternative to oily fish for consumers is a "difficult question," Van Eenennaam said. "What is going to be potentially problematic is getting through the regulatory process and then, of course, if we were to go all the way, consumer acceptance."

Well, unless something really odd happens the risk of death is 100% for all of us. The issues are when and how, and whether we enjoy the ride.

Update

A new study shows some cancer benefits.

Two new studies by a University of Pittsburgh research team suggest that omega-3 fatty acids . . . significantly inhibit the growth of liver cancer cells. The studies . . . suggest that omega-3 fatty acids may be an effective therapy for both the treatment and prevention of human liver cancers.

Mouse Prize

2006-03-21T19:27:00.000-08:00

Not just any old mouse will do.

Interested in getting in on some big cash prizes but don’t have the sequencing capacity or rocketry experience to compete in the more well known X-prize competitions If you’re good with mice, all you might need is time. In putting together the March feature on aging by S. Jay Olshansky and colleagues we came across the Methuselah Mouse Prize or M-prize. Funded by private donors, the M-prize is brainchild of Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge geneticist who contends that with proper maintenance (yet undiscovered), humans could live for hundreds or even thousands of years. The prize is awarded in two categories that have been variously named over the years but currently go by longevity and rejuvenation. . .
If you can double the current record of 1,819 days, you can capture half the available funds, currently $3.3 million.

It's not quick or sure but it is pretty easy money. . .if you like mouse wrangling.

Hot Kitty

2006-03-14T23:25:00.000-08:00

Does your cat's butt glow in the dark?

Apparently the clay in cat litter gives off enough radiation to set off a gamma detector. And its emission signature is very close to that of highly-enriched uranium. The current high-purity germanium (HPG) detectors can’t tell the difference.

The barn cats around here do their business in the rough, so there's no litter around. I'm often glad of that and now more so.

Not For External Use

2006-03-14T21:49:00.000-08:00

Burn the suckers to death.

Capsaicin, the stuff that turns up the heat in jalapeños, not only causes the tongue to burn, it also drives prostate cancer cells to kill themselves, according to studies published in the March 15 issue of Cancer Research. . .
Lehmann estimated that the dose of pepper extract fed orally to the mice was equivalent to giving 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week to a 200 pound man, roughly equivalent to between three and eight fresh habañera peppers – depending on the pepper's capsaicin content.

Hmmm, 400 milligrams of capsaicin, 3 times a week? I probably eat close to that as part of my normal diet, but at a steadier rate over all the days of the week. I could eat more.

Moronic Bureaucracy

2006-03-09T11:26:00.001-08:00

See this muddled beeb article about expected advances in genomics.

Dr Francis Collins, the scientist leading the Human Genome Project, says he expects important new gene sequences governing aspects of personality, such as intelligence and behaviour, to be known very shortly. . .
"We may be able to discover variations that correlate with intelligence, but to actually utilise that, to tinker with the human gene pool, is ethically a very difficult and challenging topic," he said.
"Scientifically, it's not something we know how to do."
And Dr Collins said that even if it were possible to augment intelligence - for example with a pill to raise it - it would potentially create a great divide between "who has access and who does not".
"If this is a particular approach which is very expensive and only available to people with lots of resources, then what have you done? You've created a divide in an already divided world.
"That is a very dangerous and troubling outcome, which I think we should guard against."

Collins is the bureaucrat who was presiding over a multi-decade project to decode the human genome until a maverick entrepreneur in a private company using new technologies ruined his plan to spend his whole career sleeping through the decoding. He's no leader.

And he's not very bright. If we do discover ways to boost intelligence then progress will accelerate. The "divide" he whinges about would move too. There would be those who had more, but those with less would still have an improved material existence, would have more than if the discoveries had not been made. This is not something that any thinking person would want to "guard against". Only a bureaucrat seeking a comfortable place to sit and serve his time would think so.

Stormy Weather

2006-03-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

We tend to think of our star, old Sol, as being a constant in our lives, just as day follows night. But the sun is no more stable than the earth. It has an atmosphere, sort of, and storms so intense that we have nothing comparable to allow analagous understanding. The solar weathermen are predicting heavy weather.

The next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Predicting the Sun's cycles accurately, years in advance, will help societies plan for active bouts of solar storms, which can slow satellite orbits, disrupt communications, and bring down power systems.
The scientists have confidence in the forecast because, in a series of test runs, the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy. The forecasts are generated, in part, by tracking the subsurface movements of the sunspot remnants of the previous two solar cycles. The team is publishing its forecast in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters. . .
The Sun goes through approximately 11-year cycles, from peak storm activity to quiet and back again. Solar scientists have tracked them for some time without being able to predict their relative intensity or timing.
Forecasting the cycle may help society anticipate solar storms, which can disrupt communications and power systems and affect the orbits of satellites. The storms are linked to twisted magnetic fields in the Sun that suddenly snap and release tremendous amounts of energy. They tend to occur near dark regions of concentrated magnetic fields, known as sunspots.

Solar storms affect earth weather too. They make the sun hotter and over the last 100 years have made a contribution to earth temperatures estimated to be between 4% and 20%. They affect climate in more subtle ways too. Sol also has a magnetosphere which affects the whole planetary system. It shields the system as a whole from cosmic rays and interacts with other magnetospheres, such as that of the earth. Sol's polarity reverses in an eleven year cycle, much faster than Earth, and magnetic storms - sun spots - fluctuate in number and intensity during the cycle. The effectiveness of Sol's field as a shield depends on polarity, a combined effect of polarity and direction of rotation. Sol is both a source and a shield of cosmic rays. There has been recent research on how cosmic rays affect climate. They create high level clouds which alter planetary albedo, reflecting more of Sol's energy and cooling the planet. So, the sun will be hotter but increased cosmic ray bombardment will create high level clouds that reflect more light. The relative intensity of these effects isn't clear.

Other researchers looking at solar cycles for the past 11,000 years have predicted that the the next 100 years will be less stormy than the past 100 years. Good. We could use a little solar dimming while we get our atmosphere spruced up a bit. This comming storm may not repeat again for quite a while.

Kitchen Science

2006-03-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

Phun things to do with a pressure cooker.

. . . an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat. . .
The team, helped by staff from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology near Tokyo, produced gasoline by adding several unspecified metal catalysts to the dung inside a container and applying a 30-atmosphere pressure and heat of up to 300 degrees Celsius (572 Fahrenheit), Shibusawa said. Details of the catalysts could not be disclosed, he added.

hmmm, I wonder if this has a net yield of energy when all inputs including the energy embodied in the equipment and catalysts is considered? If not there may be better uses for this discovered resource.

In a separate experiment revealing another unusual business potential for cow dung, another group of researchers has successfully extracted an aromatic ingredient of vanilla from cattle dung, said Miki Tsuruta, a Sekisui Chemical spokeswoman. The extracted ingredient, vanillin, can be used as fragrance in shampoo and candles, she said.
Tsuruta said the vanillin was extracted from a dung solution in a pressurized cooker in a project co-organized by a Japanese medical research institute.

Dung shampoo? We'll need some serious marketing brainstorming to find a way to turn the suspicious origins of the product into an asset.

I Feel Fine

2006-03-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

Food moods.

In a study of 106 healthy volunteers, researchers found that participants who had lower blood levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids were more likely to report mild or moderate symptoms of depression, a more negative outlook and be more impulsive. Conversely, those with higher blood levels of omega-3s were found to be more agreeable.
"A number of previous studies have linked low levels of omega-3 to clinically significant conditions such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse and attention deficit disorder," said Sarah Conklin, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar with the Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Program in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "However, few studies have shown that these relationships also occur in healthy adults. This study opens the door for future research looking at what effect increasing omega-3 intake, whether by eating omega-3 rich foods like salmon, or taking fish-oil supplements, has on people's mood."

Evidence for the benefits of omega-3 fats keeps rolling in, but the naive reserachers always fail to mention the most useful source - grass fed beef and dairy products. While fishes often give you a dose of heavy metals and other pollutants, and are a dwindling resource being hunted to extinction that you have to be a bit selfish to consume given the severity of over fishing, grass fed beef and dairy products have none of these drawbacks.

See this post, Something Fishy, that discusses mercury in fishes, omega-3, beef and dairy.

Drinking just half a pint a day of organic milk as part of a healthy balanced diet gives a useful additional source of this Omega 3 fatty acid, as it could provide approximately 10% of the UK’s Daily Reference Value3 of essential n-3 fatty acid, alpha-linolenic acid.
Organic cheese is an even better source, with a matchbox sized piece of organic cheese providing up to 88% of your RDI of this Omega 3 fatty acid.
Organic isn't the issue since you could have certified organic grain fed animals and thus low omega-3. The issue is grass fed since the omega-3 comes from greens. That's where the little fishes get it and eating the little fishes is where the big oily predator fishes get it. Somebody needs to eat their greens, though some nuts (such as walnuts) have good amounts too.
People can't eat and digest enough greens to get a significant amount, but fishes or ruminants can concentrate it for them. Ruminants do this directly from the foods they eat while most oily fishes are predators that concentrate previously concentrated oils. This is the problem with toxins since each level up the food chain concentrates toxins as well as omega-3. The older a fish is and the higher in the food chain the greater the chance of concentrated toxins.
It seems possible to get non-toxic fish if you are careful. It seems possible to get omega-3 rich meat and dairy if you are selective and specify grass fed. If you do then it's easy to get the RDI of omega-3 while eating a varied diet.

Law and Kleptocrats

2006-02-28T00:25:00.000-08:00

37 measures up.

"The people, in exercising their initiative power, were free to enact Measure 37 in furtherance of policy objectives such as compensating landowners for a diminution in property value resulting from certain land use regulations or otherwise relieving landowners from some of the financial burden of certain land use regulations," Oregon's high court wrote last week. "Neither policy is irrational; no one seriously can assert that Measure 37 is not reasonably related to those policy objectives.
"And, that determination is the only one that this court is empowered to make. Whether Measure 37 as a policy choice is wise or foolish, farsighted or blind, is beyond this court's purview. Our only function in any case involving a constitutional challenge to an initiative measure is to ensure that the measure does not contravene any pertinent, applicable constitutional provisions. Here, we conclude that no such provisions have been contravened."

So said the court. The editorial editorialized.

The measure does not prevent governments from "preserving" attractive scenery, wildlife habitat and the like. It merely prevents governments from shuffling the costs of those noble undertakings onto others. If a local Oregon town or county wants to bar the owners of a hilltop farm from selling off part of their property for a subdivision -- in order to maintain the "pretty view" for all the neighbors -- the municipality can either buy the land, or pay the land owner the amount he or she loses by not being allowed to use the property as the owner sees fit.
This is well in keeping with the letter and intent of the federal Fifth Amendment, which requires "just compensation" for any property taken for "public use."
Self-styled "preservationists" moan this will limit their ability to "preserve" all kinds of stuff which they either do not choose or cannot afford to actually buy.
Yes, and laws against bank robbery make it harder for gunmen to accrue the capital they need to live the Life of Riley.

We need to refocus preservation efforts on sensible measures consistent with a self-ruled society. We got side tracked for a few decades on cheap and easy solutions that trampled liberty and degraded society because power had been seized by poorly educated shallow thinkers who failed to grasp the harm they were doing with their unthinking zealotry.

We also need to realize that zealotry is not a sign of deep concern so much as an indicator of laziness, and in a real sense a lack of deep concern. Those who examine our problems and desires more closely easily see that the prescriptions of the zealous are thoughtless and will make matters worse; different and worse.

This isn't over. The zealots will not suddenly become wise and caring. Hopefully this example will be discussed widely so that a larger number can grapple with the implications and do the difficult work of reconciling our conflicting desires in a just way.

The Plant

2006-02-23T23:56:00.000-08:00

It's a dead common trope in SF to have biofactories that produce all sorts of wonders, but it is still an infant science despite being quite ancient. Beer, woad, and a variety of cultured foods have been around for along time. Progress seems to be accelerating.

The new strain of algae, known as C. reinhardtii, has truncated chlorophyll antennae within the chloroplasts of the cells, which serves to increase the organism's energy efficiency. In addition, it makes the algae a lighter shade of green, which in turn allows more sunlight deeper into an algal culture and therefore allows more cells to photosynthesize.
"An increase in solar conversion efficiency to 10 percent ... is thought to be enough to make the mass culture of algae viable," . . .
Currently, the algae cells cycle between photosynthesis and hydrogen production because the hydrogenase enzyme which makes the hydrogen can’t function in the presence of oxygen. Researchers hope to further boost hydrogen production by using genetic engineering to close up pores that oxygen seeps through.
Melis got involved in this research when he and Michael Seibert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, figured out how to get hydrogen out of green algae by restricting sulfur from their diet. The plant cells flicked a long-dormant genetic switch to produce hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide. But the quantities of hydrogen they produced were nowhere near enough to scale up the process commercially and profitably.
"When we discovered the sulfur switch, we increased hydrogen production by a factor of 100,000," says Seibert. "But to make it a commercial technology, we still had to increase the efficiency of the process by another factor of 100."
Melis’ truncated antennae mutants are a big step in that direction. Now Seibert and others (including James Lee at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and J. Craig Venter at the Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland) are trying to adjust the hydrogen-producing pathway so that it can produce hydrogen 100 percent of the time.

This is important I think since the key limitation of biofuels at present is that they are based on a 1% efficient process, which is about the median for plants. 99% of the solar energy that falls on them isn't used. But 10% efficiency rivals a low end solar cell.

Fire Down Below

2006-02-22T21:38:00.000-08:00

Hot-rock mining.

Two or more wells are drilled into hot bedrock, and the intervening bedrock is fractured with hydraulic blasts. Brine is then pumped into one or more injection wells, and it flows through the rock to one or more production wells, heating up as it travels. When the salty water reaches the surface of a production well, its heat is bled off to produce power or to be used for area heating, then returned to the injection wells.
Despite its simplicity, this concept has failed several times. In the 1970s, a pioneering project initiated by Los Alamos National Laboratory demonstrated that one could fracture rock and circulate brine to extract heat. But that project could never get enough brine in -- and therefore enough heat out -- to make the process competitive with conventional power plants burning fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas.
Gunnar Grecksch, a geophysicist and hot-rock fracturing expert at the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geosciences in Hanover, Germany, says follow-on efforts in the U.K. and Japan failed for the same reason: the fracturing of the rocks was never sufficient. "Flow resistance is still the key problem," he says. "In none of these projects were the flow rates in the range you need for a commercial system." . . .
The key to its success to date has been painstaking geological analysis, which ensures they position their wells to hit the right rocks. In 1997, after ten years of work, the project demonstrated impressive flow rates, moving brine heated to 140 degrees Centigrade at a rate of 25 liters per second and a depth of 3.6 kilometers. And the resistance was less than half that encountered at Los Alamos.
That positive result emboldened the project's leaders to push their wells deeper, into 200-degree Centigrade granite five kilometers deep -- and last fall they finally turned on the taps. Daniel Fritsch, project coordinator, says the system "could probably do 40 to 50 liters per second" with the addition of pumps that will be installed in the wells this summer -- another kind of technological challenge given the punishing temperatures involved, which few pumps are capable of withstanding. Then the plan is to build a pilot electrical plant by early 2007 to generate 1.5 megawatts, about the same output as one of today's towering wind turbines. But the hot-rock plant won't go idle every time the wind dies down, and should produce about three times more energy per year.
Fritsch says that to cover the cost of its equipment and to generate a profit, however, the project should produce closer to five megawatts. To produce more power, however, they must more than double the flow rate, to around 100 liters/second, which could be a challenge due to the large amount of shaking their blasts cause on the surface. Lawsuits from some disgruntled citizens claiming property damage have limited Fritsch's willingness to use stronger hydraulic blasts. To many local people, though, it seems like much ado about nothing. Local journalist Bernard Stéphan, who lives two kilometers from the project's ground zero, says his home has not been affected by the blasts. And Soultz-sous-Fôrets mayor Alfred Schmitt says "There is no problem."
Nevertheless, instead of using stronger hydraulic blasts to open the rocks further, Fritsch plans to complement the blasting with a new method: pouring acid in the wells. The idea is to dissolve salt deposits in the fractures immediately surrounding the wells. Fritsch says that tests in Italy with acid have improved the functioning of some geothermal wells by a factor of 10.

I wonder what the energy return on energy invested, including embodied energy, might be? It's in France where we couldn't find out even if everyone tried to help since everything is skewed beyond comprehension. Actually, that's always true, but less so elsewhere.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2006-02-22T17:30:00.000-08:00

In a quantum computation sort of way.

Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat has presented the first demonstration of "counterfactual computation," inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run. . .
Sometimes called interaction-free measurement, quantum interrogation is a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality (in this case, of photons) to search a region of space without actually entering that region of space.
Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."
Through clever use of beam splitters and both constructive and destructive interference, the researchers can put each photon in a superposition of taking two paths. Although a photon can occupy multiple places simultaneously, it can only make an actual appearance at one location. Its presence defines its path, and that can, in a very strange way, negate the need for the search algorithm to run.
"In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running . . .

Stay Hungry

2006-02-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

Some problems require your attention.

The neurohormone ghrelin, best known for its role in appetite and energy metabolism, also influences learning and memory, according to a new study in Nature Neuroscience. Specifically, Sabrina Diano of Yale University School of Medicine and her colleagues found that high levels of ghrelin in rodents can alter hippocampal morphology and improve performance on memory and learning tasks. This pattern may have provided an evolutionary advantage, the authors speculate, by boosting memory skills during food searches when animals are hungry. . .
Learning and memory may be enhanced by high levels of ghrelin during food deprivation because animals need increased cognitive skills to track down food sources, Diano told The Scientist.
However, Steiner cautioned that the researchers injected a concentration of ghrelin that’s several orders of magnitude above what would be found in the bloodstream, which means that normal fluctuations in ghrelin due to food deprivation may have nothing to do with learning or memory.
Ghrelin is also produced in the brain, suggesting that differences seen in ghrelin knockouts may be due to disrupted ghrelin expression there, rather than in the stomach, Christian Broberger of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, also not a co-author, told The Scientist in an Email.
It’s also a bit surprising that ghrelin would have positive effects on learning and memory, according to David E. Cummings of the University of Washington, because the hormone insulin has also been shown to improve learning and memory, and ghrelin and insulin usually have opposite effects.
Even if ghrelin fluctuations do not normally influence memory, Steiner said, high doses of ghrelin or an analog could still make good candidates for treatment of age-related memory problems. “I’m more enthusiastic about the pharmacologic and pharmacotherapeutic implications of the study than I am about whether or not the physiological arguments that they developed are true.”

Ignore the Impossible

2006-02-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

We don't always believe what our eyes tell us.

Computer-generated vision has shown that viewing a scene with two eyes, or walking around it, provides enough information to calculate its 3D structure. To find out how far away things are by this method, however, requires knowledge of the separation of the eyes or the distance walked. There is good evidence that the human visual system uses both these pieces of information when making judgments of 3D size, shape, and distance.
In the new work, performed at the University of Oxford, Dr. Andrew Glennerster and colleagues use an immersive virtual-reality display to show that the human visual system cannot be carrying out the same type of 3D reconstruction that is used in computer vision. People experiencing the virtual-reality display failed to notice when the virtual scene around them quadrupled in size as they walked around, and, as a result, they made gross errors in judging the size of objects. Intriguingly, these results imply that observers are more willing to adjust their estimate of the separation between the eyes or the distance walked than to accept that the scene around them has changed in size. More broadly, these findings mark a significant shift in the debate about the way in which the brain forms a stable representation of the world--that is, the world as it is perceived to exist independent of head and eye movements.

If things appeared to quadruple in size as I walked around I'd lay down and rest, assuming that my systems were out of whack since things like that don't happen. Often.

Filamentary propagation of high-power laser light

2006-02-19T23:48:00.000-08:00

Pulsed terawatt lasers create some surprising effects when shone through the air—including the channeling of light.

The fact that the Kerr effect can transform a high-power infrared laser into a remote source of white light opens the door to a number of exciting applications. For example, the tendency for some of the light to be reflected backward suggests that we could create an artificial "guide star" for use in adjusting astronomical telescopes equipped with adaptive optics. But there are other nonlinear optical effects of the Teramobile laser that can be exploited as well. One is something called multiphoton fluorescence.
In normal fluorescence, a substance, say the phosphor powder that coats the inside of a fluorescent lamp, absorbs high-energy photons (typically in the ultraviolet) and releases lower-energy photons (having, usually, visible-light wavelengths). In multiphoton fluorescence, two or more low-energy photons are absorbed simultaneously, raising an electron's energy level enough to allow a single high-energy photon to be given off when the electron returns to its original state. But because the chance of an atom absorbing two photons at once is quite low, light of very high intensity (that is, containing a very large number of photons) is needed. The pulsed Teramobile laser provides just such light, which proves a great boon for remotely sensing certain compounds using the phenomenon of multiphoton fluorescence.
In a 2002 experiment, my colleagues and I showed that the Teramobile beam and detection apparatus could sense biological aerosols at a distance. The motivation was to be able to map a cloud, say, of bacteria (perhaps given off during some industrial mishap or even a biological attack) and to identify potentially pathogenic agents among the various background atmospheric aerosols, among which may be more mundane organic particles such as soot or pollen.
Our test used water droplets sized to mimic bacteria and laced with the compound riboflavin, which fluoresces at visible wavelengths when it absorbs two infrared photons, producing a characteristic spectrum in the backscattered light. The experiment, carried out on a cloud located about 45 meters from the Teramobile laser, showed that it was easy to distinguish such a plume from a cloud of pure water droplets. With refinement, this technique could, potentially, be quite sensitive. We calculated that a laser tuned to excite two-photon fluorescence in the amino acid tryptophan would boost sensitivity by a factor of 10, allowing concentrations of as little as 10 bacteria per cubic centimeter to be detected 4 kilometers away. Although lidar systems based on normal fluorescence could also be used to probe for biological agents, the laser employed would have to operate at a shorter wavelength and thus be more prone to attenuation, limiting the distance over which it could function effectively.
The ability of laser filaments to deliver high-intensity light at substantial distances also opens the door to other very interesting applications. For example, it becomes possible to conduct elemental analyses of the surfaces of metals, plastics, minerals or liquids from an appreciable distance, using a variation of a technique called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy. For that, a powerful laser is focused on the material of interest, causing some of it to be transformed into plasma. The emission spectrum of the glowing plasma can then be analyzed, revealing the nature of the substrate, with a detection limit that can be as little as a few parts per million for some elements. This method is currently used for such applications as the identification of highly radioactive nuclear waste and for monitoring the composition of molten alloys, because the tests can be performed without having to touch the sample. Imagine being able to do such probing from a large distance away! Normally, diffraction limits the intensity of light that can be focused on a remote target. But laser filaments can deliver intensities that are higher than the ablation threshold of many types of materials, at distances of hundreds of meters or even kilometers.
Another application under investigation may prove more spectacular yet—the control of lightning strikes. Lightning has always fascinated people, in part because of its unpredictable nature and destructive power—qualities that make these electrical discharges very difficult to study. Investigators from Electricité de France and CEA partially overcame those obstacles in the 1970s, when they developed a technique to trigger lightning on command using small rockets trailing thin wires. If shot upward at the right moment, the rockets and the wires they unspooled behind them served to initiate and channel the flow of electric current.

This is the death ray to go with the cloaking device mentioned below.

Fungible Phun

2006-02-19T12:21:00.000-08:00

Energetic cartoon.

Half Matter, Half Light

2006-02-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

New transparent material created by entanglement.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, have pioneered the technique which could be used to see through rubble at earthquake sites, or look at parts of the body obscured by bone.
The effect is based on the development of a new material that exploits the way atoms in matter move, to make them interact with a laser beam in an entirely new way.
The work is based on a breakthrough which contradicts Einstein's theory that in order for a laser to work, the light-amplifying material it contains, usually a crystal or glass, must be brought to a state known as 'population inversion'. This refers to the condition of the atoms within the material, which must be excited with enough energy to make them emit rather than absorb light.
Quantum physicists, however, have long predicted that by interfering with the wave-patterns of atoms, light could be amplified without population inversion. This has previously been demonstrated in the atoms of gases but has not before been shown in solids.
In order to make this breakthrough, the team created specially patterned crystals only a few billionths of a metre in length that behaved like 'artificial atoms'. When light was shone into the crystals, it became entangled with the crystals at a molecular level rather than being absorbed, causing the material to become transparent. . .
The team also discovered that as light passes through this new material, it slows right down and could potentially be completely stopped and stored.

hmmm, there's a cloaking device in there somewhere.

Bio-char

2006-02-18T11:42:00.000-08:00

I don't think that this is definitive - that they really grok terra preta - but it's what we have so far.

Lehmann, who studies bio-char and is the first author of the 2003 book "Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management," the first comprehensive overview of the black soil, said that the super-fertile soil was produced thousands of years ago by indigenous populations using slash-and-char methods instead of slash-and-burn. Terra preta was studied for the first time in 1874 by Cornell Professor Charles Hartt.
Whereas slash-and-burn methods use open fires to reduce biomass to ash, slash-and-char uses low-intensity smoldering fires covered with dirt and straw, for example, which partially exclude oxygen.
Slash-and-burn, which is commonly used in many parts of the world to prepare fields for crops, releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Slash-and-char, on the other hand, actually reduces greenhouse gases, Lehmann said, by sequestering huge amounts of carbon for thousands of years and substantially reducing methane and nitrous oxide emissions from soils.
"The result is that about 50 percent of the biomass carbon is retained," Lehmann said. "By sequestering huge amounts of carbon, this technique constitutes a much longer and significant sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide than most other sequestration options, making it a powerful tool for long-term mitigation of climate change. In fact we have calculated that up to 12 percent of the carbon emissions produced by human activity could be offset annually if slash-and-burn were replaced by slash-and-char."
In addition, many biofuel production methods, such as generating bioenergy from agricultural, fish and forestry waste, produce bio-char as a byproduct. "The global importance of a bio-char sequestration as a byproduct of the conversion of biomass to bio-fuels is difficult to predict but is potentially very large," he added.
Applying the knowledge of terra preta to contemporary soil management also can reduce environmental pollution by decreasing the amount of fertilizer needed, because the bio-char helps retain nitrogen in the soil as well as higher levels of plant-available phosphorus, calcium, sulfur and organic matter. The black soil also does not get depleted, as do other soils, after repeated use.
"In other words, producing and applying bio-char to soil would not only dramatically improve soil and increase crop production, but also could provide a novel approach to establishing a significant, long-term sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide," said Lehmann. He noted that what is being learned from terra preta also can help farmers prevent agricultural runoff, promote sustained fertility and reduce input costs.

The char isn't all there is to terra preta, there's a microbial component too that is poorly understood. Still, the concept is valid: intentionally creating char sequesters carbon since it won't decompose and return to the atmosphere quickly. But it will enhance soil by providing a medium for soil chemistry, and improving tilth and water management: it drains when too wet but retains moisture.

Also see Science Brief gives a brief introduction to Terra Preta research at Cornell.

Stemming Alzheimer's Disease (AD)

2006-02-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

Good News!

Using tests conducted with transgenic mouse models of AD, the investigators have demonstrated that bone marrow-derived microglia infiltrate amyloid plaques and succeed in destroying them most efficiently. These newly-recruited immune cells are specifically attracted by the amyloid proteins that are the most toxic to nerve cells. . .
According to Dr. Rivest, anti-inflammatory drugs should not be administered in cases of Alzheimer's disease, as they interfere with this natural defence mechanism. On the contrary, he adds, a way must be found to stimulate the recruitment of a greater number of bone marrow-derived microglia. . .
Dr. Serge Rivest's team also had recourse to genetic engineering, in order to manufacture microglia that can anchor themselves more solidly to plaques and that are equipped with enzymes with more efficient plaque-destroying capability.
"Stem cells should be harvested from the patients themselves, thus limiting the risks of both rejection and adverse effects," says Dr. Rivest. "While this cellular therapy will not prevent Alzheimer's, by curbing plaque development, we believe that it will help patients prolong their autonomy and cognitive capacity. We believe that this is new and powerful weapon in the fight to conquer Alzheimer's."

Don, a friend's father, has AD. His memory is stuck in his youth, the WWII years. He can, and will, talk your ears off about those days and spends his days listening to really good swing music such as he loved in those days. He was a pilot in the war and has good stories. That and the music make him fun to be with for a while so long as I don't get too squicked out about the fact that he thinks that we just met or that I have never heard those stories before, and that he can't remember my name. He knows something is wrong, but he can't put his finger on what it is. Telling him doesn't help, it doesn't stick. His elder son became a pilot too, and retired after 20 years to Australia where he is a semi-geeky computer hacker. The younger son was a semi-pro baseball player and now a small beer cattle rancher.

Old Macintosh, the fellow that used to run a small feedlot in Frazier valley not too far from here, has it too. His stories are all about the feed business back in the day, and his patent methods for making money in the biz. He talks your ears off too but the stories are about mean spirited money grubbing, ways to swindle other people and "double your money". He says that after a pause, with great gravity, as if it was a profound truth. His son runs a "home finance" company, one of those outfits that charges 25% interest on loans to dirt poor people who happen to have an asset, such as a home, that can be seized if they default.

It's just anecdotes, but it seems to me that AD exposes you mind in ways you would never dream of revealing to all and sundry. Sometimes this is harmless enough, such as Don's joy in his youthful adventures and the wonderful sound track that accompanied his exploits, and sometimes it illuminates dark things that we know exist but prefer not to look at or think about too much.

Switch Hitter

2006-02-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

There's never one around when you need one.

Mazda said the RX-8 Hydrogen RE, based on its popular RX-8 sports car, gets around these problems by running on gasoline in the absence of a hydrogen fueling station, and using existing engine parts and production facilities to lower costs.
The car is powered by Mazda's iconic rotary engine and can switch between hydrogen and gasoline fuel with the flick of a switch. It can cruise for a maximum 62 miles on hydrogen and 341 miles on gasoline it said.
Fuel cell cars, meanwhile, use hydrogen to first generate electricity through a fuel cell stack for power, and require an electric motor.
A rotary engine is suitable for hydrogen fuel because the separate chambers for fuel intake, combustion and exhaust significantly reduce the danger of the fuel's backfiring compared with a conventional engine. . .
Japan has 13 state-owned hydrogen fueling stations, while energy-related companies such as Idemitsu and Iwatani also own their own fueling facilities.
Ford Motor Co. owns a controlling interest in Mazda.

They need to get the range up to about 150 miles or so. Electric cars have trouble with range too. People need to stop every 2 or 3 hours since the seat cushions will only hold so much.

RuBisCO

2006-02-15T09:31:00.000-08:00

Faster evolution.

During photosynthesis, plants and some bacteria convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into usable chemical energy. Scientists have long known that this process relies on the enzyme rubulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, also called RuBisCO. While RuBisCO is the most abundant enzyme in the world, it is also one of the least efficient. As Dr. Matsu-mura says, "All life pretty much depends on the function on this enzyme. It actually has had billions of years to improve, but remains about a thousand times slower than most other enzymes. Plants have to make tons of it just to stay alive." . .
For decades, scientists have struggled to engineer a variant of the enzyme that would more quickly convert carbon dioxide. Their attempts primarily focused on mutating specific amino acids within RuBisCO, and then seeing if the change affected carbon dioxide conver-sion. Because of RuBisCO's structural complexity, the mutations did not have the desired outcome.
For their own study, Dr. Matsumura and his colleagues decided to use a process called "di-rected evolution" which involved isolating and randomly mutating genes, and then inserting the mutated genes into bacteria (in this case Escherichia coli, or E. coli). They then screened the resulting mutant proteins for the fastest and most efficient enzymes. "We decided to do what nature does, but at a much faster pace." Dr. Matsumura says. "Essentially we're using evolu-tion as a tool to engineer the protein."
Because E. coli does not normally participate in photosynthesis or carbon dioxide conversion, it does not usually carry the RuBisCO enzyme. In this study, Matsumura's team added the genes encoding RuBisCO and a helper enzyme to E. coli, enabling it to change carbon dioxide into con-sumable energy. The scientists withheld other nutrients from this genetically modified organism so that it would need RuBisCO and carbon dioxide to survive under these stringent conditions.
They then randomly mutated the RuBisCO gene, and added these mutant genes to the modified E. coli. The fastest growing strains carried mutated RuBisCO genes that produced a larger quantity of the enzyme, leading to faster assimilation of carbon dioxide gas. "These mutations caused a 500 percent increase in RuBisCO expression" Dr. Matsumura says.

The spin is that plants using more CO2 will affect climate, but this seems silly since there are always other limits to growth. More realistically, it may help selected crops grow and yield.

d3o

2006-02-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

Flexible ballistic protection.

Skiwear company Spyder, based in Colorado, US, developed racing suits incorporating d3o along the shins and forearms and offered members of the US and Canadian Olympic alpine ski teams the chance to try them out several months ago. "Now they love it and won't ski without it," . . .
The resulting material exhibits a material property called "strain rate sensitivity". Under normal conditions the molecules within the material are weakly bound and can move past each with ease, making the material flexible. But the shock of sudden deformation causes the chemical bonds to strengthen and the moving molecules to lock, turning the material into a more solid, protective shield.
In laboratory testing, d3o-guards provided as much protection as most conventional protective materials, its makers claim. But Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself. . .
Another potential application may be sound-proofing. The propagation of sound waves should generate a similar strain to an impact . . .

Sort of like a lens that darkens as light intensity increases . . . but spookier.

CAP Crap

2006-02-09T23:15:00.000-08:00

More tweaking seems required. [via Biopolitical]

Agri-Environment Schemes (AES) in Europe appear to be largely ineffective as policy instruments. Research in five European countries has shown that common species of birds, insects and plants do not benefit very much from this kind of nature management and rare species benefit much less. There are virtually no benefits for threatened species (listed in the Red Data Books). These conclusions were drawn by researchers from six European research institutions during a conference on 30 and 31 January at Wageningen University. They proposed that much clearer and more measurable goals should be established in the future and that the policy should focus more on the protection of specific species.

AES were invented as part of the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to continue subsidizing agriculture while relieving some of the trade distortion and unintended consequences (butter mountains) of subsidies tied to production. The broad idea was to pay farmers for environmental stewardship on their own lands to supplement the incomes they could earn growing crops. But how is it measured? What is good environmental stewardship?

It is not, as these researchers argue, merely biodiversity and so cannot be usefully improved by more precise definition of target species. If you pay someone to promote those species they may do so, if possible, but they will still not do what is needed for good stewardship. Ever more precise regulation will not result in proper stewardship unless it is continued to the absurd extreme of assigning a fully competent regulator to each farm. Then what's the farmer for? The regulator should in that case simply replace the farmer as the head of the business and make all operational decisions.

European agriculture got into trouble because of subsidies and regulations. The solution isn't more and better controls, it is more freedom and responsibility. That will clarify the task for the farmer and engage his skills and intelligence for the unique task of making his property flourish. Though some will fail others will succeed and the aggregate performance of the agricultural sector will improve.

But will the environment improve? Not necessarily. The farmer is not paid for that work since there are no markets for environmental services. If politicians and bureaucrats want to help they can work to establish such markets.

Easier said than done.

Fun With Numbers

2006-02-09T20:48:00.000-08:00

Stop them before they do math again!

The huge profits reported by oil and gas companies would turn into losses if the social costs of their greenhouse gas emissions were taken into account.
That is the conclusion of research by the New Economics Foundation (Nef).
Nef found that the £10bn-plus profits just reported by Shell and BP are dwarfed by costs of emissions associated with their products.

Gee, you mean all those people who used the oil and gas don't share any responsibility and so shouldn't have to pay any of those social costs? That's dumb. But wait! What are the social costs of not having oil and gas? It seems that would be an even larger number given that the world's cities were knee deep in dung and breathing dung dust all summer before oil and gas became the dominant sources of power. The health issues alone would be a huge number. And what about coal?

A report prepared for Defra and the Treasury estimates that each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted costs about £20 ($35) in environmental damage.
"Combining the emissions that stem from BP's direct activities and the sale of its products leads to 1,458m tonnes of CO2-equivalent entering the atmosphere, with a damage bill of £29bn ($51bn)," writes Andrew Simms.
"Subtracting that from the £11bn ($19bn) annual profit it has just reported puts it £18bn ($31bn) in the red; effectively bankrupt.
"The same calculation puts Shell £4.5bn ($8bn) in the red, even as it reports an annual profit of £13bn ($23bn)."

They are obviously brain dead. Had the oil and gas not been used even more carbon would have been emitted from the use of less energy rich fuels such as coal and wood. Moving up the hydrogen ladder to gas was a cornerstone of the UK plan to reduce CO2 emissions before they discovered that the price of gas could rise.

It's a shame that environmentalism seems to attract such stupid people since their statements make it seem as if environmentalism is stupid, too stupid to have any sensible speakers who make rational assertions. This is false. There are lots of smart and sensible environmentalists, they just aren't newsworthy by the degraded standards of the main stream media, especially the beeb.

Folding Green

2006-02-08T19:50:00.000-08:00

Interesting rant against environmentally conscious "green" houses.

These houses aren't just ridiculous; they're monuments to sanctimony. If architecture is frozen music, these places are congealed piety, demonstrating with embarrassing concreteness the glaring hypocrisy of upper-class environmentalism. The sad thing is that, by pouring so much money into ostentatious eco-design, the people who built homes like this have purchased status at the cost of doing some real environmental good.

Empty gestures are all there is to much of current environmentalism: pious feel-good actions and policies displace effective environmentalism but can be easily sold by enviro-hustlers, politicians and grifters of all sorts; please donate now.

With many other issues we have developed some immunity, some sales resistance, and are able to do wiser consuming. That hasn't happened yet with environmentalism, it's still a wild-west free-for-all, the eco-bubble. This too shall pass.

Spinning the Beeb-o-Scope

2006-02-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'm worried about the UK. They seem to be sliding into another period of insanity, something similar to the pre-Thatcher "English-disease" period when the country flirted with collapse due to political excess. Consider this brief beeb comment.

Sweden says it aims to completely wean itself off oil within 15 years - without building new nuclear plants.

The beeb doesn't like nuclear plants and tries to counter their rising status as people more honestly face the implications of CO2 increases and rising natural gas prices. It's nukes or coal for the UK. . . or continued fantasies about wind farms and biomass etc. that don't pencil out.

So how is Sweden going to do it?

The Scandinavian country, which was hard hit by oil price rises in the 1970s, now gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power.

It's one of the few European countries to have reduced its emissions over the past couple of decades, and it did it by building nukes then, and so doesn't have so much need now. Wouldn't it be nice if more industrialized countries had done that in the 70s and 80s?

Evil Eye

2006-02-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

But they work well.

[Nike] has teamed up with contact lens maker Bausch and Lomb to create performance-enhancing contact lenses called MaxSight. They're a tinted version of daily disposal lenses for athletes that reduce glare and improve visual acuity.
They block nearly all the sun's damaging UVA and UVB rays just like sunglasses, but their optics can also give athletic performance a boost.
"I think they're spectacular," says optometrist David McBride, who sells Maxsight at his clinic in Portland. He wears the grey-green version to improve his golf game, and estimates he has fit a dozen of his patients with MaxSight, most of whom have never worn contact lenses before. "I expect they will become very popular come spring."
The lenses come in amber for sports like baseball and tennis where the wearer must separate fast moving objects from the background, and grey-green for sports like golf, where the background environment is what’s visually important. Both colors filter out a significant amount of overall light, but they also sharpen and improve contrast, so they have a brightening effect, says Alan Reichow, who invented the lenses and is a sports vision consultant for Nike.
The amber lenses also turn the wearer's eye's an unsettling shade of red. But when Nike asked players if they'd like to create a version that created less of an evil eye, the answer was an overwhelming "no."

I think I'd like the grey-green ones for my work.

Winter Microbes

2006-02-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

There are cold specialists as well as warm specialists.

The study was undertaken at the Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research site west of Boulder. The site is home to one of several dozen so-called AmeriFlux installations on the continent that measure CO2 activity. The Niwot Ridge AmeriFlux site features five towers studded with climate instruments that are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The researchers used the 100-foot-high towers -- which were erected at 10,000 feet in a forest of lodgepole pine, sub-alpine fir and Englemann spruce adjacent to CU-Boulder's Mountain Research Station -- to measure CO2, water and energy exchanges between the biosphere and atmosphere, said Monson. They used the instruments to zero in on the subtle, swirling winds drifting over the rugged terrain and took millions of individual CO2 data readings from 1998 to 2004.
"The deeper the snowpack, the more CO2 we observed leaving the forest," he said. "This forced us to look at the wintertime period more closely than before."
The researchers discovered a unique collection of microbes under the snow soils with life spans of only hours to days thriving at temperatures hovering around zero, Monson said. They used DNA fingerprinting techniques to show the winter microbe community was very different genetically from the summer microbe community.

It seems that if microbes adapt and differentiate for winter and summer life cycles that they can, and in time will, adapt to the new conditions. Trees take far longer to adapt. It isn't clear how this will affect them. Reduced winter soil temperatures and reduced late spring moisture might be something the can cope with unchanged, but it seems it would create an opportunity for genetic drift.

Fat Conscious

2006-02-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

Another one, or three, bites the dust.

Despite findings being announced this week that a low-fat diet introduced in the middle-age years didn't reduce the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke or colon cancer, one of the researchers says people still need to focus on the types of fat they eat. The national diet study of almost 50,000 healthy postmenopausal women was part of the massive Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study.
The hypothesis that low-fat diets could help reduce the risk of certain diseases had been assumed, but never tested. . .
Nationally, the WHI enrolled 157,000 women between 50 and 79 years old at 40 clinical centers, making it the largest clinical trial ever undertaken in the United States. . . Women were 50 to 79 years old when the study began and were followed for an average of 8.1 years.

Ok, so low fat doesn't help women 50-79 years old avoid breast cancer, heart disease, stroke or colon cancer. But there are still ways to dis fat. In addition to parsing the type of fat, it's possible that these women might have been more healthy had they started fat consciousness earlier in life.

Vitolins said one explanation for the results is that the low-fat diet was designed to reduce total fat and didn't make a distinction between good fats, such as those found in nuts, fish, and vegetables oils, and bad fats, such as the saturated fat in meats and the trans fat used in baked goods and potato chips.
"The study was testing the belief that lowering total fat would reduce the risk of cancer," said Vitolins. "Since the study began, we've learned a lot more about how the types of fats we consume make a difference." . .
"Our diets start when we are born and it makes sense that what you eat over a lifetime will make a difference," she said.

Make a difference. That seems likely, but will it make a measurable difference or is it like the untested belief that was disproved with this study?

There have been animal tests done that show that dietary fat amount and type matters, but the tests are usually amateurish in spite of being done by scientists because they often don't distinguish one type of fat from another or know what foods contain what. Consider the statement above: "good fats, such as those found in nuts, fish, and vegetables oils, and bad fats, such as the saturated fat in meats. . ." Some vegetable oils are full of nasty fats and some meats are full of good fats. Some fish have insignificant amounts of good fats and others give you a dose of heavy metals along with those good fats.

What matters is what the animal ate. If it ate junk food - nasty vegetable oils and grain starches - it will have junk food flesh. This is true for both fish and meat but the fish also have the toxic chemical problem from polluted water.

Maybe if enough studies show that the current advice is worthless the advice will improve? Maybe they will get to the point where they actually give good advice? Nah, never happen.

Food Fetishes

2006-02-07T08:53:00.000-08:00

They aren't precisely eating disorders but seem related. Seen from a distance they are somewhat humorous - like the situation in Mughal India where the Moslem wouldn't eat pork products and the Hindu wouldn't eat cattle products - but they can be deadly serious to those who have a fetish. In recent times Europe has been ground zero both for food supply contamination episodes and food fetishes. One seems to inspire the other. It's getting technical.

In the wake of successive outbreaks of food-borne disease in the past decade (think mad cow disease, E.coli, salmonella, etc) and the current fear over the possible spread of avian flu, public demand for tighter safeguards on the entire food production chain has never been greater.
"The certification of the origin of food products is a vital issue for Europe in the ongoing discussions with the World Trade Organisation," explains Michel Debord, project coordinator. "Americans in particular prefer to certify the quality of a product according to its brand and attach no real importance to its origin. European consumers, by contrast, want to know where the food that they eat has come from."
The concept behind GeoTraceAgri is to take advantage of advances in information and communication technology, satellite imaging and mapping to enable clear and precise tracking of food products that are accessible in real-time to relevant parties.
"The ultimate goal of GeoTraceAgri was to develop indicators of geotraceability that enable users to locate precisely the origin of agricultural products," he says. "The advantage of this type of system is that the geographical certification is objective and verifiable, and can be viewed on the Internet using secure geoportals that have been specifically developed for this purpose."

Europeans have always been obsessed with geography and national origin - French wine, Danish ham, Swiss chocolate etc. Most Americans don't seem to have that geographic obsession (some do!) - perhaps because they are less mired in the old blood and soil reality of Europe - but can be as adamant about brand labels as Europeans are about geographic labels.

Krill Puckey

2006-02-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

Things don't add up, we emit more gunk than can be found in the air or can be accounted for by known sinks. We found some.

New research on Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), a shrimp-like animal at the heart of the Southern Ocean food chain, reveals behaviour that shows that they absorb and transfer more carbon from the Earth's surface than was previously understood. The results are published this week in the journal Current Biology.
Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Scarborough Centre of Coastal Studies at the University of Hull discovered that rather than doing so once per 24 hours, Antarctic krill 'parachute' from the ocean surface to deeper layers several times during the night. In the process they inject more carbon into the deep sea when they excrete their waste than had previously been understood.
Lead Author Dr Geraint Tarling from BAS says, "We've known for a long time that krill are the main food source for whales, penguins and seals, but we had no idea that their tactics to avoid being eaten could have such added benefits to the environment. By parachuting down they transport carbon which sinks ultimately to the ocean floor – an amount equivalent to the annual emissions of 35 million cars – and this makes these tiny animals much more important than we thought."
Krill feed on phytoplankton near the ocean surface at night but sink deeper in the water column during the day to hide from predators. By knowing how these animals behave, we can understand better the contribution they make to removing carbon from the Earth's atmosphere and upper ocean.

Ha!

2006-02-05T21:35:00.000-08:00

Been there, got the T-shirt, wore it out. [via Structure+Strangeness]

There was this one time . . . ah, nevermind, that's not what this blog is for.

Short Sighted Whingeing

2006-02-05T11:57:00.000-08:00

Many of today's problems are a consequence of politicized confusion in the past few decades. Politics is far more short sighted than even private business interests widely criticized for "living by quarters", as well as far dumber since it is driven by the requirements of the next election. Only immediate issues are of interest and policies must appeal to majorities.

Energy and climate problems - same thing really - are in part a result of a confusion of nuclear bombs with nuclear energy. While the air grew increasingly foul and a world starved for energy sputtered and wheezed, nuclear confusion prevented progress . . . except in China.

While experts in the United States and Europe talk about reviving plans for nuclear power, China, as in so many other fields, is racing ahead. The so-called pebblebed technology behind the Beijing test plant originated in Germany more than three decades ago, and the U.S. nuclear-power industry also pursued it. But when public opposition to nuclear energy forced those countries to curtail nuclear research in the 1980s, Beijing took over. . .
All reactors, including the pebblebed, use uranium fuel to produce heat that is used to turn electrical turbines. In conventional so-called light-water reactors, the heat is generated by thousands of fixed metallic rods, which require elaborate cooling systems to keep them from overheating and backup cooling systems in case the primary ones fail. Furthermore, a conventional reactor must be housed in a concrete containment vessel to mitigate damage in case it overheats. In the pebblebed reactor,thousands of tennis-ball-size spheres coated in layers of silicon carbide, ceramic material and graphite each contain thousands of granules of the fuel, uranium dioxide. Because the pebbles dissipate heat so efficiently, say the designers, the fuel inside them couldn't possibly get hot enough to penetrate the graphite casing. The pebble-bed reactor, in fact, doesn't even have a containment vessel. Another advantage of pebblebeds is that it's easier to make small plants and put them up quickly, which lends itself to China's plan of spreading plants around the hinterlands. Extracting fuel from pebblebed reactors to use for weapons would be difficult and expensive. . .
. . . a growing domestic environmental movement could slow its nuclear-energy strategy. Twenty years after the disaster at Chernobyl and nearly 30 years since the Three Mile Island incident, leaders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and U.S. President George W. Bush have only recently begun to suggest the possibility of re-examining nuclear energy.

It is a mistake to equate any environmental movement with environmentalism, or assume that those in an environmental movement are environmentalists. It is usually not so, they are merely a political group with very little real environmental knowledge or concern. They exploit the natural environmental consciousness of society to gain power, and have been on balance one of the greatest environmental threats. It isn't useful to cite a regulation or two in defense of these environmental vandals, it is necessary to consider the whole spectrum of environmental concerns in socio-economic context. They are the problem, not the solution.

Update:

Mistaken solidarity

The question is whether . . . the environmental movement as a whole will be willing to abandon knee-jerk opposition to nuclear plants. Though there are good reasons to support them, rather than oppose them, on environmental grounds, I fear that too many environmentalists who, like Zachary, cut their teeth on antinuclear activism will be less willing to respond to changed circumstances with changed attitudes. Social movements are often more about beliefs than about reality, and ever since Tom Hayden et al. organized the antinuclear movement as a way of preserving some of the anti-Vietnam-war movement's infrastructure, it's been as much a political movement as an environmental one.
Will we be able to turn our back on outdated beliefs . . .?

Politics has been the bane of the environment for decades. It isn't just nukes and energy policy that have been ruined by politicized pseudo-environmentalists. Those who actually care about the environment would do well to investigate that sordid history and make an intellectually honest attempt to sort the political dogma from useful environmental concern.

Uncle Milt

2006-02-04T07:43:00.000-08:00

Free thinker. [via A&L Daily]

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences.

Trinkets of Frivolous Utility

2006-02-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

An early techno-critic.

The sole use of watches however, is to tell us what o'clock it is, and to hinder us from breaking any engagement, or suffering any other inconveniency by our ignorance in that particular point. But the person so nice with regard to this machine, will not always be found either more scrupulously punctual than other men, or more anxiously concerned upon any other account, to know precisely what time of day it is. What interests him is not so much the attainment of this piece of knowledge, as the perfection of the machine which serves to attain it.
How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number.
The trouble with anthropology and economics is that they meet only at an intersection, and then proceed, without a second thought or a fare thee well, in different directions. So it's charming when we may suggest, however dubiously, that this was not always so, that a founding economist saw us whole.

Nitro-Precision

2006-02-01T08:43:00.000-08:00

Philip Small has been doing a loose series of posts at Transect Points dealing with some of the nitty-gritty aspects of modern agriculutre, beginning with German science workshop news critical of precision agriculture performance and Science and nitrogen use efficiency and continuing through Precise common sense II. I have a couple of posts-in-progress that refer to them - and may finish them in future - but you can profit from just reading them now.

I found the most recent posts which investigated the net benefits of precision agriculture useful. Bottom line: it depends.

The technology is not affordable if there is little variability in the soil, or if a crop (corn, soybeans) does not respond as well to in-season management.

Brain Hack

2006-01-31T22:23:00.000-08:00

Why do you think that?

Most bioweapons research has focused on traditional biological agents, such as anthrax and smallpox. But that focus is dangerously narrow, the report says; emerging technologies in biotechnology and the life sciences could be hijacked to take control of genes, immune systems, and even brains. . .
Scientists who drafted the report were also particularly concerned about the potential of bioregulators -- small, biologically active organic compounds that can regulate different systems in the body. Newer technologies such as targeted delivery methods that zero in on the immune or neuroendocrine systems could make it easier to use bioregulators in insidious ways.
Terrorists could also co-opt relatively new technologies, such as synthetic biology, which aims to build organisms that can detect or produce chemicals or perform other functions; and RNA interference, a technique that allows scientists to easily control gene expression.

Terrorists are a drag and all, but they aren't the most likely users and abusers of these technologies. Governments top that list, since politicians already use every trick they can to delude voters, government institutions seek to control society, governments seek to control one another, and there is no shortage of rule-the-world nutters pointing to one doomsday scenario or another to justify draconian acts to save us from ourselves with tight global governance.

Business and entertainment will find the technologies tempting too. Kids will be prime targets from not just marketing attacks but also their parents and teachers. Everybody thinks they have a right and a duty to manipulate kids.

In a sense we have always had this threat from cults and ideologies. The 60s did happen after all. But it seems poised to accelerate. This is an old SF trope. You might find some of the novels interesting if this is a new concept for you.

Climate Kaleidoscope

2006-01-30T13:08:00.000-08:00

Prometheus notes that the IPCC has a fully functional cognitive kaleidoscope.

. . . the following passage from Dr. Pachauri’s chapter provides a telling indication of how a narrow focus on human-GHG-caused climate change tends to warp the thinking of otherwise smart people about issues that involve much more than just human caused climate change:
In Mauritius, a couple of weeks ago, there was the major UN conference involving the small island developing states. In discussions with several people there, I heard an expression of fear based on the question: suppose a tsunami such as that of December 26 were to take place in 2080 and suppose the sea level was a foot higher, can you estimate what the extent of damage would be under those circumstances? Hence, I think when we talk about dangerous it is not merely dangers that are posed by climate change per se, but the overlay of climate change impacts on the possibility of natural disasters that could take place in any event.
So by 2080 society is going to experience changes probably far greater than from 1930 to 2005 and he is talking about the difference in impacts between a 25 foot and 26 foot wall of water? In this case, he probably would have been on solid ground by saying that patterns of coastal development over the next 75 years are far, far more important than an extra 12 inches of sea level rise, rather than trying to link climate change to tsunami impacts. But as we've argued ad repeatium here, this is the kind of thinking that necessarily results from Article 2 of the FCCC.

"A narrow focus . . . tends to warp the thinking of otherwise smart people". Perhaps it isn't only a narrow focus, it is also ideological blindness and confirmation bias too. They twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until any bit of information can be made to fit into their preconception of how things are supposed to look.

This isn't just an intellectual or aesthetic failing, however human, it is also a character defect since the impulse is given free reign and exploited for political purposes, to the detriment of society.

Obesity Epidemic

2006-01-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

Really!

There is a lot of good advice to help us avoid becoming obese, such as "Eat less," and "Exercise." But here's a new and surprising piece of advice based on a promising area of obesity research: "Wash your hands."
There is accumulating evidence that certain viruses may cause obesity, in essence making obesity contagious . . .
The study, by Whigham, Barbara A. Israel and Richard L. Atkinson, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that the human adenovirus Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens. This finding builds on studies that two related viruses, Ad-36 and Ad-5, also cause obesity in animals.
Moreover, Ad-36 has been associated with human obesity, leading researchers to suspect that Ad-37 also may be implicated in human obesity. Whigham said more research is needed to find out if Ad-37 causes obesity in humans. One study was inconclusive, because only a handful of people showed evidence of infection with Ad-37 ? not enough people to draw any conclusions, she said. Ad-37, Ad-36 and Ad-5 are part of a family of approximately 50 viruses known as human adenoviruses. . .
The notion that viruses can cause obesity has been a contentious one among scientists, Whigham said. And yet, there is evidence that factors other than poor diet or lack of exercise may be at work in the obesity epidemic. "The prevalence of obesity has doubled in adults in the United States in the last 30 years and has tripled in children," the study noted. "With the exception of infectious diseases, no other chronic disease in history has spread so rapidly, and the etiological factors producing this epidemic have not been clearly identified."
"It makes people feel more comfortable to think that obesity stems from lack of control," Whigham said. "It's a big mental leap to think you can catch obesity." However, other diseases once thought to be the product of environmental factors are now known to stem from infectious agents. For example, ulcers were once thought to be the result of stress, but researchers eventually implicated bacteria, H. pylori, as a cause.
"The nearly simultaneous increase in the prevalence of obesity in most countries of the world is difficult to explain by changes in food intake and exercise alone, and suggest that adenoviruses could have contributed," the study said. . .
There is still much to learn about how these viruses work, Whigham said. "There are people and animals that get infected and don't get fat. We don't know why," she said. Among the possibilities: the virus hasn't been in the body long enough to produce the additional fat; or the virus creates a tendency to obesity that must be triggered by overeating, she said.

Obesity may be "triggered by overeating". I suspect this is true.

The Lights Are On

2006-01-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

And someone is home.

[L]ittle is known about the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. In a paper recently published in Conservation Biology (2006, Vol 20, pages 65-73), an international team of scientists, led by Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia, use satellite data to demonstrate, for the first time, that rainforest parks and indigenous territories halt deforestation and forest fires.
According to Nepstad, "Protecting indigenous and traditional peoples' lands and natural areas in the Amazon works to stop deforestation. The idea that many parks in the tropics only exist 'on paper' must be re-examined as must the notion that indigenous reserves are less effective than parks in protecting nature." . . .
The group used satellite-based maps of land cover and fire occurrence between 1997 and 2000 to compare parks and indigenous lands. Deforestation was 1.7 to 20 times higher along the outside versus the inside perimeter of reserves, while fires were 4 to 9 times higher. Indigenous lands clearly stopped clearing in high-deforestation frontier regions: 33 of 38 indigenous territories with annual deforestation greater than 1.5 percent outside their borders had inner deforestation rates of 0.75 percent or less. Few parks are located in active frontier areas (4 of 15 in the sample) than indigenous lands (33 of 38). But parks' and indigenous lands' ability to inhibit deforestation appear similar.
Indigenous lands occupy one-fifth of the Brazilian Amazon - five times the area under protection in parks ? and are currently the most important barrier to Amazon deforestation. Some conservationists argue that with acculturation to market society, indigenous peoples will cease to protect forests. But the authors found that virtually all indigenous lands substantially inhibit deforestation up to 400 years after contact with the national society. There was no correlation between population density in indigenous areas and inhibition of deforestation. In much of the Amazon, not only can protecting nature be reconciled with human habitation - it wouldn't happen without the people.

My emphasis. I think it's an important point, one that has implications for developed countries too. There is no better defense for resources than ownership and occupation, property rights if you insist, since those who depend on those resources for life and livelihood are motivated and ever vigilant.

Brain Reserves

2006-01-25T09:31:00.000-08:00

Mental exercise. It's not just for kids.

Research from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) provides the most convincing evidence to date that complex mental activity across people's lives significantly reduces the risk of dementia. The researchers found that such activity almost halves the incidence of dementia. . .
"Until now there have been mixed messages about the role of education, occupation, IQ and mentally stimulating leisure activities, in preventing cognitive decline. Now the results are much clearer," said the lead author, Dr Michael Valenzuela, from the School of Psychiatry at UNSW. "It is a case of 'use it or lose it'. If you increase your brain reserve over your lifetime, you lessen the risk of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases."
The key conclusion is that individuals with high brain reserve have a 46 percent decreased risk of dementia, compared to those with low brain reserve. All the studies assessed agreed that mentally stimulating leisure activities, even in late life, are associated with a protective effect.

We all need stimulating environments.

Solidarity

2006-01-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

Politics is stupid.

The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months prior to the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the researchers found was striking.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Westen and his colleagues will present their findings at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Jan. 28.
Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

"Twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope".

If The Shoe Fits . . .

2006-01-19T21:49:00.000-08:00

. . . that's very unusual, but it may be less so in near future.

By using a laser foot scanner to create a 3D computer model of a person’s feet, the ERGOSHOE system bridges the design gap between shoe manufacturers and customers, allowing shoe comfort to be improved efficiently and at relatively low cost in the mass market, and in niche markets such as healthcare and worker footwear. . .
“Traditional shoe manufacturing business models are not designed for personalised treatment but rather mass production,” notes ERGOSHOE coordinator Enrique Montiel at INESCOP in Spain. “With our system to create digital foot models, we have made personalised treatment more feasible.”
In the mass market, the system would primarily help manufacturers better adapt their designs to their customers at large while vendors could use the scanner and 3D model analysis to direct customers to shoes that best fit their feet. It would also allow customised shoes to be produced for individual clients, which Montiel estimates would only cost around 10 to 20 per cent more than a mass produced pair. The hardware and software costs between 6,000 and 15,000 euros to implement.

I wear out several pairs of boots a year in my field work. I'm amazed that I still have feet after all the miles I've put on them, especially since boots never actually fit, you just break them in - a process that uses my poor feet to subtly reshape the boot. If these were available I'd buy several pair at once and hopefully get a volume discount. I often get two pair at a time since two pairs wear like three when you alternate them, allowing more time for the boots to properly rest and dry out.

It's Nature's Way - Part II

2006-01-19T21:01:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of confusion about fertilizer.

Then, in 1909, German physical chemist Fritz Haber developed a high-temperature, high-pressure process to fix atmospheric nitrogen in his lab. Another German chemist, Carl Bosch, soon expanded Haber's process to a factory scale. Known as the Haber-Bosch process, industrial fixation of nitrogen combines atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia, the basis for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Natural gas is most often the source of the hydrogen.
Imagine the power now vested in humankind. With the ability to fix our own nitrogen we could free ourselves from dependence upon lightning and microbial masses and ramp up agricultural productivity to feed a hungry world. Perhaps the human species could yet outwit the Malthusian math that predicted that population growth would always outstrip our ability to increase food production. Indeed, so marvelous was this alchemy that both Haber and Bosch were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Human kind had already outwitted Malthusian math before Malthus did his work, but Malthus was unaware of it. Huge deposits of sea bird and bat dung were mined and shipped around the world, and huge deposits of Chilean nitrate, a.k.a saltpeter, were used for everything from fertilizer to gunpowder.

It may help to remember that natural gas is methane, plus a few contaminants, and that methane is not just a fossil fuel, it is continuously produced.

Imagine now, just a little less than 100 years later and as world hunger continues to rise, asking farmers to stop using industrially fixed nitrogen. It's a wonder that the organic movement ever got off the ground.
The National Organics Program, which regulates the use of the organic label in the United States, prohibits the use of synthetic substances unless their use is specifically allowed via exemption, an exemption not granted for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
The reasons why are of such import that they alone should set off a stampede to the nearest organic farmer's market.
Reason No. 1 is that synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are not sustainable. Building an agricultural system based upon industrially fixed nitrogen makes our ability to feed ourselves dependent upon a non-renewable fossil fuel and upon the wisdom, benevolence and cooperation of heads of state and multinational petroleum companies.

No, it doesn't. Every farmer can make his own methane and could have home made nitrogen fertilizer if he also had a solar powered Haber-Bosch type system. That fertilizer is currently made from fossil methane as a centralized industrial practice is due to economics and habit. Both can change.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers also fail to pass muster because of the environmental damage done when we pump enormous quantities of nitrates into the natural atmospheric and biological cycling of nitrogen. Overuse of nitrogen fertilizers are a primary cause of "dead zones" in coastal waters because nitrates are highly soluble; any nitrates not taken up by plant roots move quickly down through the root zone and enter ground water. When nitrate-laden rivers enter bays and estuaries, the excess nitrogen can cause larger than normal algae blooms.

This is a symptom of agronomic practice, one that is rapidly being resolved. Nitrogen is expensive and farmers can't afford to waste it. Applying nitrogen fertilizer to fields is expensive too. It usually takes labor and machinery though there are "fertigation" systems that mix fertilizer with irrigation water. The trade off is nitrogen loss before uptake by plants vs. extra costs to apply it in small quantities as plants need it. When many small applications are made there is no leeching from the field.

Nitrates may create a dead zone of sorts on the land as well.

Well, so does water when there is too much for too long. This is a nonsense claim made for instrumental reasons. When nitrogen is applied properly there are no dead zones, it's the exact opposite, everything flourishes.

Finally, nitrogen oxides also contribute to acid rain, reacting with water in the atmosphere to form acidic compounds. When the compounds rain on or wash into lakes and rivers, they jeopardize fish, plant and bacteria populations that are sensitive to changes in water pH. As it percolates through the soil, acid rain leaches nutrients such as calcium, magnesium and potassium out of the root zone and mobilizes aluminum, which inhibits root growth.

Most things you do to soil make acids. Plants themselves make acid as they take up cations such as calcium through their roots and exude anions (acidic) to maintain internal electroneutrality. Sometimes all of this is wonderful, such as on farms with calcareous soils that need acids to become more neutral, and sometimes the soil is neutral or acidic naturally, such as with granitic soils weathered from rock, so farmers add lime, calcium carbonate from limestone, to both lower acidity and provide calcium to plants.

Organic agriculture is based on ignorance, and that's a shame because an informed agriculture that avoids truly dangerous chemicals and cultivation techniques that degrade land is not that difficult or expensive. With population expected to reach half again as many people as there are today we don't have enough land to humor quasi-religious superstitions about agriculture. If some of the energies and resources being squandered on organic systems were spent instead to develop solar powered farm scale fertilizer production systems then something closer to a closed system could be used. Crops wastes and dung could be turned into methane and compost in bioreactors by anaerobic bacteria, and the methane could be turned into nitrogen fertilizer by the heat of the sun in solar furnaces that can produce the heat and pressure needed for the Haber process.

Still, it may be cheaper to have centralized facilities with larger solar furnaces so long as the methane is available. The problem is transporting the feedstocks, the organic materials, to a central site. Feedlots, mills and urban waste disposal sites are natural candidates since they already have lots of organics available to decompose into methane. Farm scale systems might be limited to just making methane to power machinery, and generate heat and electricity. And compost, of course.

It's Nature's Way

2006-01-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

You can run but . . .

Antibiotic resistance has become an increasing public health concern because the organisms that cause infections in humans and animals are becoming less receptive to the healing aspect of antibiotic drugs. . .
Approximately two-thirds of all known antibiotics are produced by bacteria called actinomycetes, commonly found in soils, compost, and other environmental sources.
"By evolving in an environment of antibiotic production, incredibly resilient bacteria must develop diverse ways to survive or resist the toxic antimicrobial compounds produced by their neighbors," said Wright. "Their coping tactics may be able to give us a glimpse into the future of clinical resistance to antibiotics." . .
Researchers screened 480 strains of soil bacteria isolated from diverse locations for resistance to 21 clinically relevant antibiotics. At high drug concentrations, the soil-dwelling bacteria displayed a stunning level of resistance. Not only were the bacteria resistant to an average of seven to eight antibiotics, but every strain was found to be multi-drug resistant.
The bacteria showed resistance to all major classes of antibiotics, regardless of whether the compounds were naturally produced, semi-synthetic, or completely synthetic.
Researchers also found that the way bacteria was resistant to vancomycin, one of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics for drug resistant staphylococcal infections, was identical to resistance found in clinics.
Furthermore, the researchers' uncovered bacteria that produced enzymes capable of breaking down or modifying or rendering inactive two recently U.S. FDA-approved antibiotics, a situation which has yet to emerge clinically for these drugs.
"The link between clinical and soil-associated resistance to vancomycin illustrates the value of studying resistance in the soil to rationally anticipate future clinical resistance," said Wright. "It suggests that the soil serves as an under-recognized source of resistance, resistance that has the potential to reach clinics.
"This work could prove to be extremely valuable to the drug development process, complementing traditional laboratory studies of clinical situations. By screening newly developed drugs for resistance in soil bacteria, not only can pharmaceutical companies can gain a better understanding of what may emerge in the future as clinical problems, but sufficient warning can be given to hospital microbiology laboratories, physicians and the drug discovery sector to allow for the development of diagnostic techniques and alternative therapies.
"Furthermore, studying enzymes that inactivate antibiotics can serve as a foundation for the development of new combination therapies for resistant bacterial strains. Studying antibiotic resistance from an evolutionary perspective is one way that researchers are attempting to stay one step ahead of resistant bacteria."

. . . you can't hide. It's interesting that soil bacteria seem even more antibiotic resistant than those infecting people, but it makes sense as they live in an environment where antibiotics are produced as part of the ancient struggle for survival, the weapons of choice.

Timely Maturity

2006-01-19T09:08:00.000-08:00

One of the key issues in ag is growing locally adapted cultivars, those that grow well in local conditions with local agronomic practices. The timing of maturity - switching from vegetative growth to flowering and setting seed - is an important part of that. It needs to happen at the right time to match temperature and moisture conditions, and it needs to happen uniformly across the field in most cases to facilitate efficient harvest.

Local adaptation is primarily genetic. New capabilities for identifying desired genes speeds up the development of cultivars since new crosses can be evaluated without needing to grow them out. Researchers have found the "maturity gene" for barley.

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have identified the gene in barley that controls how the plant responds to seasonal changes in the length of the day. This is key to understanding how plants have adapted their flowering behaviour to different environments.
The John Innes Centre researchers have discovered that the Ppd-H1 gene in barley controls the timing of the activity of another gene called CO. When the length of the day is long enough CO activates one of the key genes that triggers flowering. Naturally occurring variation in Ppd-H1 affects the time of day when CO is activated. This shifts the time of year that the plant flowers.

The most interesting and useful consequence of deep knowledge about the genetics of crop plants is an improved ability to develop cultivars for different parts of the world that combine good yield, disease resistance and uniform development with maturity timing suited to localities. The developing world with its growing population and consequent need for increased production using fewer inputs and less land needs these cultivars. But that's not the spin we hear these days.

Dr David Laurie, the research leader at the John Innes Centre, said, "Growing crops will become more difficult as the global climate changes. The varieties of crops grown in the UK are suited to the soil, seasons and traditional cool, wet summers. Later flowering in barley means it has a longer growing period to amass yield. If British summers get hotter and drier we will need types of wheat, barley and other crops that flower earlier, like Mediterranean varieties, to beat summer droughts. However, new varieties will need to be adapted in all other ways to UK conditions. "
With the new knowledge about the workings of barley researchers and plant breeders will find it easier to select variations that will thrive in the UK environment but will also flower earlier, coping with hotter summers.

The climate change bogey seems to have dulled the social mind.

Cooking Inlet

2006-01-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

The Alaska Volcano Observatory page tracking the recent activity of the Augustine volcano is fascinating. Observations are updated hourly and there is a webcam. Text includes current information, background and history, and informed guesses about the likelihood of an eruption. The "useful links" section includes everything from How to collect an ash sample for AVO to the tsunami warning center.

Bush Hunting

2006-01-14T23:29:00.000-08:00

No, not that Bush, the bush.

Animal-rights activists and many environmentalists are up in arms about the bushmeat business. As part of their propaganda war against the hunters, they send out gruesome images of gorilla corpses and monkeys strung from poles, illustrating literature on “the slaughter of the apes.” A particularly unsettling image caught by the anti-bushmeat campaigner Karl Ammann shows a fresh-cut gorilla head in a kitchen bowl on a sideboard next to a bunch of bananas. Such reports concentrate entirely on the burgeoning bushmeat business as a crisis for wildlife and Africa’s biodiversity. And there is no question that some of the world’s most endangered wild animals are, quite literally, being eaten to death.
But, asks Fa, is our Western squeamishness getting in the way of a sensible appraisal of the importance of bushmeat? Are we in danger of caring more about the survival of a few rare rain forest species than the survival of their hunters? If we condemn all hunting for bushmeat, then how do we propose that Africans eat? And equally, if we do not take the trouble to find out why bushmeat hunting is still so prevalent in Africa, how can we hope to stop it? . . .
Fa’s research has led him to come out against the conventional environmental response to the slaughter of wildlife—demands for bans on hunting and trade. He says that environmentalists are in danger of behaving like Marie Antoinette, who, on being told the French peasants had no bread, replied, “Let them eat cake.” Pork and chicken are no more available in Central African supermarkets than cake was in prerevolutionary Paris. Right now, the majority of poor Africans have no alternative to hunting and eating bushmeat. Many countries across the continent are going backward economically. They have deteriorating infrastructures, near-constant civil wars, and virtually no governments. Food production on farms in Central Africa has not risen since the 1960s, and in many areas it has fallen back sharply. Their economies are going “back to the bush.” How can their diets do other than follow? And of course, the one thing that the civil wars do provide them with is guns and other weapons with which to go hunting.
“We are understandably horrified by wild animals, especially primates, being killed for food,” Fa says. “But we must remember that bushmeat is a cheap source of protein for many malnourished people in Africa.” Until now, the bushmeat crisis has been portrayed as an animal-rights and environmental issue. But it is also a human rights issue. To solve it, he says, biologists must turn into social scientists. Rather than concentrating on the biology of the animals, Fa says, the outside world has to first understand the social and economic problems of the hunters. Only that way, he believes, can the animals of the African forests—and the people—be saved. And only by saving both can the forest be saved.

No fair. He's being a sensible and honest humanitarian. Clearly he doesn't understand what environmental activism is all about, especially the sort that goes on in developing countries.

How about . . .

2006-01-14T22:43:00.000-08:00

. . . them Uzbek Kochia (pronounced KO-chuh).

K. prostrata is native to central Eurasian countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, where Waldron has journeyed on plant-collecting expeditions. He has brought back hundreds of superior specimens from these treks and is now testing them in greenhouse and outdoor experiments. . .
K. prostrata is a distant relative of an annual weed, K. scoparia, that can be poisonous to cattle and sheep. This annual kochia is popular with home gardeners who know it as “firebush” because of its red fall foliage. Fortunately, the annual weed and the promising perennial can’t interbreed, according to ARS plant geneticist Richard R.-C. Wang at Logan.
Understandably, forage kochia is sometimes confused with the garden ornamental. “This mix-up sometimes makes it hard to convince people that forage kochia is really a good-guy plant,” says Waldron.
But a good guy it certainly is. Forage kochia tolerates drought, flourishes on salty or alkaline soils that make life hard for many other plants, and survives with as little as 5 inches of rain or other precipitation a year. It also offers shelter and tasty seeds for upland songbirds and game birds such as sage grouse; helps control erosion; serves as a greenstrip or firebreak in fire-prone ecosystems; and seems to thrive on poor-quality sites that have been damaged by overgrazing, wildfire, or off-road vehicles. . .
“From these observations, we determined that forage kochia does not crowd out native perennials,” Waldron notes. “It thrives in elevations from 1,600 to 7,000 feet and can actually grow better on inhospitable sites, such as dry areas with gravelly soils, than many other rangeland plants.”

I suppose it makes sense that plants from the "stans" might fit well in the American west. It's interesting that this cross fertilization - so to speak - is happening now. I suppose it would have been awkward in the soviet days.

How about . . .

2006-01-14T22:29:00.000-08:00

. . . them Kazak apples.

Forsline explains that central Asia—Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in particular—is likely the ancestral home of familiar domestic apples (Malus x domestica) such as Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and McIntosh.
“We tapped millions of years of adaptations to improve today’s apple,” he says.
Forsline went on seven of the trips, including four to central Asia, to collect apple material, conserve it, and, after evaluation, distribute it to breeders and geneticists worldwide. Other trips were to Sichuan, Russian, and Turkish sectors of the Caucasus region, and Germany. . .
He says the trips resulted in “at least a doubling of the known genetic diversity of apples. It turns out that this gene pool is much more diverse than we had originally thought. And what we’ve found may help make the trees stand up better to diseases.”
Among all this material, it is the Kazak samples that have become the apple of Forsline’s eye, so to speak. Especially noteworthy are accessions collected there of M. sieversii, an important forerunner of the domestic apple. (See Forum in this issue of the magazine.) . .
“Silk Road traders and their predecessors started the spread of apples from there to other parts of the world,” he says. “But the seeds they carried likely represented a narrow genetic sampling. That’s probably why today’s American domestic apples have a fairly narrow genetic base that makes them susceptible to many diseases.”
Forsline says that many of the Kazak apples lack the size and flavor needed for commercial success. “But it’s the trees’ ability to resist diseases that sets them apart. Breeders will be able to cross them with palatable varieties.” . .
Forsline says the Kazak trees showed significant resistance to apple scab, the most important fungal disease of apples, whose outbreaks blemish fruit and defoliate trees. “Twenty-seven percent of the Kazak accessions were resistant to it,” he says. “This makes sense, because the tree co-evolved with the disease, through natural selection.”
In addition, he led a project in which the popular Gala apple variety was crossbred with seven Kazak accessions. “This produced 7 populations of 250 seedlings each,” he says. “In one of these populations, we achieved a 67-percent resistance rate against apple scab. . .
“Also, about 30 percent of samples inoculated with fire blight resisted that disease,” he adds. Fire blight destroys apples, pears, and woody ornamentals in the Rosaceae family. . .
And it is in rootstocks that Fazio, director of PGRU’s apple rootstock breeding project, also sees great potential—especially with crosses between Kazak apples and elite American material. “This is the future of the apple industry,” he says. “Give it 5 to 7 years.”

hmmm, I guess Johnny Appleseed didn't have a lot of variety, but he continued a very old tradition.

Pointing the Bone

2006-01-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

Fear. People die from it sometimes and have ruined lives even when they don't die.

But most troubling of all, according to the UN report in 2005, is that "the largest public health problem created by the accident" is the "damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state."
In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event.
But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.
In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

Kinda makes you want to stab an environmentalist. Bad idea, but the thought lingers.

Infinite Regress

2006-01-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

Or, the loneliness of the honest skeptic. Philip points to this essay by Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and offers some tea - Earl Grey, hot - to enjoy while we consider this thoughtful meditation on the problems of being skeptical and the necessity of doing so.

Tennekes seems to be what Cosma Shalizi calls a Left Popperian in that he requires some rigor in predictions and simulations. As Tennekes puts it:

His [Popper] claim that scientists should be held accountable for the accuracy of their predictions boils down to the requirement that they have to compute in advance the reliability of their computations. For complex models, Popper wrote, this demand leads to "infinite regress": computations of forecast skill are much harder than the forecasts themselves, and the next level, forecasting the skill of the skill forecast, is insurmountable when a complex system such as the climate is involved. Popper concluded that the positivist claims of science are in general unwarranted.

This is similar to the assertions of Trout & Bishop.

It is time for epistemology to take its rightful place alongside ethics as a discipline that offers practical, real-world recommendations for living. In our society, the powerful are at least sometimes asked to provide a moral justification for their actions. And there is at least sometimes a heavy price to be paid when a person, particularly an elected official, is caught engaging in immoral actions or defending clearly immoral policies. But our society hands out few sanctions to those who promote and defend policies supported by appallingly weak reasoning. Too often, condemnation is meted out only after the policies have been implemented and have led to horrible results: irresponsible war and spilt blood or the needless ruin of people’s prospects and opportunities. Epistemology is a serious business for at least two reasons. First, epistemology guides reasoning, and we reason about everything. If one embraces a defective morality, one’s ability to act ethically is compromised. But if one embraces a defective epistemology, one’s ability to act effectively in all areas of life is compromised. Second, people don’t fully appreciate the risks and dangers of poor reasoning. Everyone knows the danger of intentional evil; but few fully appreciate the real risks and untold damage wrought by apparently upstanding folk who embrace and act on bad epistemological principles. Such people don’t look dangerous. But they are.

Tennekes applies this kind of thinking to climate models and finds them to be dodgy in the extreme, even when they are bolstered by "Ensemble Forecasting, which in fact is a poor man's version of producing a guess at the probability density function of a deterministic forecast."

. . . ensemble forecasting and multi-model forecasting have become common in climate research, too. But fundamental questions concerning the prediction horizon are being avoided like the plague. There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies. As a turbulence specialist, I am aware that such a framework would require the development of a statistical-dynamic theory of the general circulation, a theory that deals with eddy fluxes and the like. But the very thought is anathema to the mainstream of dynamical meteorology.
Climate models are quasi-deterministic and have to simulate daily circulation patterns for tens of years on end before average values can be found. The much more challenging problem of producing a theory of climate forecast skill is left by the wayside. In IPCC-documents one finds phrases like "climate surprises", showing that the IPCC-staff is unaware of the ignorance it reveals by that choice of words, or unwilling to state forcefully that climate predictability research deserves much more attention than it has received so far.
This is no minor matter. . .
I protest against overwhelming pressure to adhere to the climate change dogma promoted by the adherents of IPCC. I was brought up in a fundamentalist protestant environment, and have become very sensitive to everything that smells like an orthodox belief system.
The advantages of accepting a dogma or paradigm are only too clear. One no longer has to query the foundations of one's convictions, one enjoys the many advantages of belonging to a group that enjoys political power, one can participate in the benefits that the group provides, and one can delegate questions of responsibility and accountability to the leadership. In brief, the moment one accepts a dogma, one stops being an independent scientist.

The issues here aren't just the arcane calculations of climate scientists, they are also how those results bear on policy. That's what brings to mind Shalizi's ideas about Popper.

Popper was a democrat, an egalitarian and a humanitarian, but with a decided and very characteristic twist. Usually democracy is justified on some such grounds as "the sovereignty of the people" or the like, but Popper rejected that altogether. The problem of politics is not Who should rule? but How can we correct mistakes of policy without violence?; not How can we make people good or happy? but How can we minimize avoidable suffering?; not What is the best state? but What can we do now to make things better? The virtues of democracy is that, of all known systems, it is the one where policy can be reformed most peacefully and most rationally, and the one which is least likely to inflict or condone needless or unequal suffering. As for the virtues of piece-meal social engineering and reform over the construction of Utopias and revolutions, one would think they'd speak for themselves after the twentieth century; but no. Popper is often, with Hayek, associated with a return to classical liberalism, or rather a certain caricature of it which sees no role for any social institutions but markets and a minimal nightwatchman state to enforce property rights. I think this is a gross misunderstanding, and that his actual, sound, political theory is quite compatible with the best traditions of social democracy; I would be happy to call myself a Left Popperian, if I thought anyone would get it.

Tennekes applies this style to climate modelling issues.

I cannot bring myself to accept any type of prediction paradigm, and choose a adaptation paradigm instead. This brings me in the vicinity of Roger Pielke Sr.'s emphasis on land-use changes and Ronald Brunner's modest bottom-up alternatives. It goes without saying that I abhor such dogmas as various claims to Manage The Planet or Greenpeace's belief in Saving the Earth. These ideologies presuppose that the intelligence of Homo sapiens is capable of such feats. However, I know of no evidence to support such claims.

What makes this more than a fussy debate among specialists, more than an academic noogie war, is that the true believers propose massive socio-economic change in response to the threats they see from those predictions. And if they are wrong, as seems quite possible when we examine the scientific details? Worse, they can't even promise that their draconian alterations of society will avoid the threatened melt down. At best the inevitable may be delayed by a very small amount of time. We would be far wiser to choose a democratic, piece-meal approach that seeks to minimize harm and is sufficiently responsive and agile to usefully react to improved assessments of the situation as events unfold.

Marcelino Fuentes: Biopolitical: Rural ecosystems in Europe

2006-01-06T22:26:00.000-08:00

Discussion of an article in Ecology and Society

Some rural areas are depopulating and going fallow. Consequences for ecosystem services are imagined in a couple of scenarios.

Marcelino sees no problem.

Too bad that my lack of concern for the environment may lead to more native forests and cleaner rivers.

Hiatus

2005-08-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that Crunbtrail and Muck & Mystery have gone dark. I'm moving house, offline mostly, summertime, changes etc. etc. and will be back in the fall with a different host for those domains, different software etc. etc. It's difficult to do other than state vague intentions right now since I'm betwixt and between.

Home Sweet Home

2003-09-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

Crumb Trail has a new home now.

Excessive Head Can Lower IQ

2003-09-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

Heading into difficulty?

Dr. Frank Webbe has spent more than a dozen years of his life as a soccer [football] referee and coach. He's also a professor of psychology at Florida Tech, with an emphasis on sports psychology. These two worlds came together with his research into the neurocognitive effects of heading in the sport of soccer.
...
Webbe found that recent heading by players who headed with "moderate-to-high frequency" led in some cases to weaker neurocognitive performance. This lessened performance includes a decline in cognitive function, difficulty in verbal learning, in planning and maintaining attention and a reduced information processing speed.

First Things First

2003-09-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

Social insects point to non-genetic origins of societies

From her work studying social insects, Arizona State University biologist Jennifer Fewell believes that these remarkable animals suggest a an alternate cause behind the development of complex societies. In a viewpoint essay in the September 26 issue of the journal Science, Fewell argues that complex social structures like those seen in social insect communities can arise initially from the nature of group interactions -- the inherent dynamics of networks.
...
Though social networks are commonly thought of as evolutionary adaptations, Fewell turns this idea on its head by proposing that the network forms first, following the logic and pattern of group connections, then adaptation follows to strengthen the pattern. Social organization, seen in this light, is essentially an emergent property that comes from the network's geometry - a natural pattern to which organisms adapt.

Some of the more interesting ideas I've encountered regarding humans come from Herbert Gintis. This paper published by the Santa Fe Institute presents a concept of gene-culture co-evolution that has similarities to Fewell's ideas about social insects.

Abstract
The internalization of norms refers to the tendency of human beings to adopt social norms from parents (vertical transmission) or socializing institutions (oblique transmission). Authority rather than contribution to fitness accounts for the adoption of internalized norms. Suppose there is one genetic locus that controls whether or not an individual is capable of internalizing norms. We extend classical models (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson 1985) to show that if adopting a norm is fitness enhancing, fixation of the allele for internalization is locally stable, and with a small amount of oblique transmission, fixation is globally stable. We use this framework to model Herbert Simon’s (1990) explanation of altruism. Simon suggested that altruistic norms could ‘hitchhike’ on the general tendency of the internalization of norms to be fitness-enhancing. We show that the altruistic phenotype evolves if and only if there is a sufficient level of oblique transmission of internalizable norms. This result holds even when there is a strong horizontal transmission process biased against the altruistic norm. We then use a geneculture coevolutionary group selection argument to explain why internalized traits are likely to be pro- as opposed to anti-social.

Where There's Fuel There's Fire

2003-09-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

Rural Technology Initiative - Forest Management Software

An interesting report on studies done by the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington on forest management strategies. A free piece of software is made available to evaluate management strategies. The bad fires we have had in recent years will continue and grow worse with no action to reduce fuel loads. It's an expensive proposition but appears not to be optional since the costs of fire suppression and environmental degradation are as high or higher than thinning and removal.

Abstract
Forest fuel reduction treatments are needed, as demonstrated by the increased number of devastating crown fires and annual increases in National Forest acres categorized as high risk. This report develops analysis components for effective fire risk reduction strategies to help professionals, publics, and policy-makers gain a better understanding of the current circumstances and alternatives. A range of thinning strategies were simulated and evaluated for the Okanogan and Freemont National Forests providing a set of results for comparative climatic and infrastructure conditions. Measures of fire risk reduction, economic cost, habitat protection, and carbon sequestration were evaluated, to develop the basis for characterizing both market and non-market values resulting from forest fires and fire risk reduction activities. The market cost of removing enough small diameter material to reduce fire risk sometimes exceeds the market value for the material removed. However, non-market benefits of reduced fire fighting and rehabilitation costs, facility losses and fatalities, protected habitats, sequestered carbon, saved water and other public values appear to more than offset treatment costs. Contracting alternatives and infrastructure needs are also evaluated. Treatment strategies can be customized to local forest and market conditions, providing the basis for management training as well as public education.

Anticipating Tomorrow... and Changing It

2003-09-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

Closer to Truth: Is Science Fiction Science?

This mildly interesting set of three interviews with science fiction writers David Brin, Octavia Butler and Michael Crichton done by Robert Kuhn for the PBS Closer To Truth series includes an interesting thought by Brin:

Talk about anti-globalization -- is it a democratic movement?
Karl Marx was the greatest of all science fiction authors because in the East, where he was taken seriously and followed as a prescription, his effects were actually fairly ineffective at changing humanity in positive directions. It was in the West where his work was read as a plausible scenario for a failure mode, but something happened that he never imagined could happen because he felt contempt for the masses. He never imagined that the masses would read his work and then say, 'Ah, interesting, let's reform this scenario away.' And he never imagined that elites like Franklin Delano Roosevelt would say the same thing. That's the point. The young anti-globalization fellows out there, they are assuming that international law will be controlled by these elites, but their own countries are counterexamples. They should be out there in the streets demanding a place at the table, demanding institutions, doing what the Jeffersonians did when Madison and Monroe were writing 'The Federalist Papers,' acting as the counterbalance, demanding that the people have a say. This is a good role they could be playing. They're not doing it.
What's going to be our failure mode, if we have one?
Failure modes are a fascinating topic. Of course, they attract a lot of science fiction because if you can expose a failure mode very vividly as in On the Beach, Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove, Soylent Green, 1984 and Das Kapital, then you can create the greatest of all science fiction stories, the self-preventing prophecy, the prophecy that does not come true because people actually paid attention to you because people were smarter than you expected.

There seems to be a method here:

Underestimate humanity

Feel superior to and contemptuous of them

Prophesy doom with precision, clarity and compelling methods of expression

Those who are in fact dumb will embrace doom and wallow in confusion, but others will work to alter trajectory and so evade that particular problem. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Transcript (PDF)

Also see Ken MacLeod's blog The Early Days of a Better Nation where he has recently posted about SF:

But what SF is fundamentally about is not the Individual versus Society, or Society versus Society, but humanity in the universe.
SF needn't thereby lose in human relevance and universality, because the situation it posits is both objectively true and universal to the human being, as a knowing subject confronting a knowable object. If SF about that is despised and rejected, rather than criticised and improved in terms of its own project, then both the Individual and Society are, in the long run, in deeper shit than any dystopia.
And that, comrades, is the real social relevance of SF.

More Cave Bones

2003-09-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

Earliest modern humans in Europe found

A research team co-directed by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, has dated a human jawbone from a Romanian bear hibernation cave to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago. That makes it the earliest known modern human fossil in Europe.
...
To determine the fossils' implications for human evolution, Trinkaus and colleagues performed radiocarbon dating of the jawbone (dating of the other remains is in progress) and a comparative anatomical analysis of the sample. The jawbone dates from between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago, placing the specimens in the period during which early modern humans overlapped with late surviving Neandertals in Europe.
Most of their anatomical characteristics are similar to those of other early modern humans found at sites in Africa, in the Middle East and later in Europe, but certain features, such as the unusual molar size and proportions, indicate their archaic human origins and a possible Neandertal connection.
The researchers document that these early modern humans retained some archaic characteristics, possibly through interbreeding with Neandertals. Nevertheless, because few well-dated remains from this period have been found, the fossil remains help to fill in an important phase in modern human emergence.

hmmm, see Clan of the Cave Bear for some seemingly related stories.

UPDATE: The PBS Nova special Neanderthals on Trial was rebroadcast today. There was some interesting discussion about the difficulty of interpretation, the struggle to separate what researchers wish to prove from what the evidence supports. From the transcript:

NARRATOR: So it appears that Fontéchevade [a falsely interpreted dig] was an elaborate illusion and not a human habitation site at all.
What made it look real to the archaeologists was an overwhelming desire to see the past in a certain way.
The urge to distance ourselves from Neanderthals or to pull them closer to us is a surprisingly powerful force.
Archaeologists Jean Philippe Rigaud and Jan Simek are well aware of the problem.
JAN SIMEK: I think that we're as guilty of it today, of that kind of preconceived approach to our data, as anybody has been in the history of archaeology or anthropology. It's almost inevitable that our own views of the world will be brought to bear.

Dirt Mudge

2003-09-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

Wendell Berry - The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Numero dei Avogadro.

2003-09-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

Chemists' constant hangs in the balance: New silicon tally may change Avogadro's number.

Chemists may be forced to change their value for one of nature's fundamental numbers - Avogadro's constant - following more accurate measurements made using a crystal of pure silicon.

CSI - Environment

2003-09-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

No, it's not a new TV series, it's a new degree program in environmental forensics.

The course's five students will study chemistry, geology, biology and statistics, but also how to stand up to legal cross-examination.
...
Vast amounts of money ride on showing where, when and from whom contaminants have come. Mudge, for example, is working on whether oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill is still damaging the environment. If it is, and was not covered in the original court settlement, Exxon could be liable for another US$100 million.

Moon power

2003-09-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

The first commercial tidal power station goes online

The rise and fall of the sea, caused by the moon's gravitational tug on the Earth, could be generating electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes within five years if the new Norwegian power station proves successful.
The power station, which resembles an underwater windmill, began generating electricity for the town of Hammerfest. Although still largely a prototype, the generator is the first in the world to harness the power of the sea and be connected to an electricity grid.
The tidal mill produces 300-kilowatts of electricity - enough to power 30 Norwegian houses or 60-80 British homes. Its designers hope to begin mass producing the devices within two years.
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'There's still a lot of hard engineering required before the costs will come down but we are going to need all of the renewables and nuclear power we can get our hands on if we are going to meet our Kyoto commitments,' he told New Scientist.
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Tidal energy has one key advantage over other renewable forms of power - it has the potential to provide a near continuous source of power 24 hours a day. Wave, wind and solar power all fluctuate throughout the day. By contrast, the tide flows continuously in one direction for just over 12 hours before pausing briefly and then reversing.

Another sort of moon power.

If a physicist in Houston has his way you'll be able to say good-bye to pollution-causing energy production from fossil fuels. In the April/May issue of The Industrial Physicist, Dr. David Criswell suggests that the Earth could be getting all of the electricity it needs using solar cells - on the moon.

The Need to Connect

2003-09-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

good behavior is at least as much the result of relationships as of rules.

Putting his Microsoft-generated money where his mouth is, he announced last week a $51.2 million effort to create 67 small high schools in New York City. These smaller schools, he said on National Public Radio, will improve both learning and graduation rates, because they will be more focused, more responsive and will provide more personal and emotional connections between students and faculty.

It seems that we have long understood the value of this sort of learning environment and have a number of small liberal arts universities that explicitly seek to create such environments.

Hot Buttons

2003-09-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

New Help for Low-input Agriculture

The snippet below is all the information available without a subscription to Agronomy Journal but it manages to press all sorts of buttons in a brief space. Also see American Society of Agronomy.

Small farmers in developing countries, unlike their counterparts in the industrialized world, cannot afford to apply much chemical fertilizer. Instead, they use 'low-input' agricultural systems, which draw nutrients for crop growth mostly from the decomposition of soil organic matter and plant residues. In the 2002 May-June issue of the Agronomy Journal, scientists report the development of a computer-based simulation model that greatly simplify the evaluation of such systems in an article titled, 'Modifying DSSAT Crop Models for Low-Input Agricultural Systems Using a Soil Organic Matter-Residue Module from CENTURY.' This is good news for scientists working to improve low-input agriculture and thus increase food security, raise farm incomes, and halt the rampant decline of soil fertility in the tropics.
Field studies of low-input agriculture are being conducted at many locations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but these studies cannot cover all the possible combinations of soil, crops, weather, and management factors that merit evaluation. Simulation models, because they can include innumerable combinations, have powerful potential for aiding the evaluation of different low-input systems at specific sites.
Various agricultural simulation models are available, but they are tailored mainly to the requirements of industrialized-country agriculture. Scientists with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia asked whether these same models could be applied to low-input systems. In seeking an answer, they applied a simulation model called the 'Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer,' or DSSAT, to hillside agriculture in Honduras and Nicaragua. Developed by a consortium of North American universities and research institutes, DSSAT is the most widely used agricultural model in the world. But since it assumes heavy use of chemical fertilizers, the model's soil organic matter section is weak. To overcome this limitation, scientists linked DSSAT to CENTURY, one of the leading models for soil organic matter.
The combined DSSAT-CENTURY model was tested with 40 years of data from a typical field under low-input agriculture. The field had not been under mechanized cropping, and no fertilizer had been applied for a long time. "While the original DSSAT model did a poor job of simulating the strong decline of soil organic matter, said Arjan Gijsman, senior author of the paper, "the new DSSAT-CENTURY model performed very well in this respect. And that means it probably also simulated quite well the release of nutrients from the organic matter."
"As a result," add coauthors Gerrit Hoogenboom of the University of Georgia, William J. Parton of Colorado State University, and CIAT's Peter C. Kerridge, "the DSSAT-CENTURY should prove to be of great practical value for studying small-scale agriculture in developing countries. Moreover, the model's improved section on soil organic matter makes it more suitable for long-term simulations. For example, the model could be used to estimate carbon sequestration in soil organic matter under different systems, which is one approach scientists are exploring to mitigate the effects of global warming on agriculture."
The combined DSSAT-CENTURY model will be part of the new version of DSSAT, to be released later this year.

Clan of the Cave Bear

2003-09-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Bones from French cave show Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon hunted same prey

'This study suggests Cro-Magnon were not superior in getting food from the landscape,' said lead author Donald Grayson, a University of Washington professor of archaeology. 'We could detect no difference in diet, the animals they were hunting and the way they were hunting across this period of time, aside from those caused by climate change.
'So the takeover by Cro-Magnon does not seem to be related to hunting capability. There is no significant difference in large mammal use from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnon in this part of the world. The idea that Neanderthals were big, dumb brutes is hard for some people to drop. Cro-Magnon created the first cave art, but late Neanderthals made body ornaments, so the depth of cognitive difference between the two just is not clear.'
The study also resurrects a nearly 50-year-old theory first proposed by Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén that modern humans played a role in the extinction of giant cave bears in Europe. Cro-Magnon may have been the original 'apartment hunters' and displaced the bears by competing with them for the same caves the animals used for winter den sites.

If you too wonder what became of the Neanderthals you could do worse than visit this site dedicated to the issue.

Here you will find up-to-date information on the prehistoric people of Eurasia known as Neanderthals, and on the early modern humans who succeeded them.
Who were these two groups of people? (see below). How were they related? How did they interact? Where did the first modern humans come from? And what eventually became of the Neanderthals? Final answers to these questions have yet to be found, but this web site allows you to share in the quest for knowledge about this fascinating period of prehistory.

Things May Be Heating Up

2003-09-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

Largest Arctic ice shelf breaks up, draining freshwater lake

"Warwick Vincent and Derek Mueller of Laval University in Quebec City, Quebec, and Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska Fairbanks have studied the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on site and through RADARSAT imagery and helicopter overflights. They report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that a three decade long decline in the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf culminated in its sudden break-up between 2000 and 2002. It fragmented into two main parts with many additional fissures. It also calved a number of ice islands, some of which are large enough to pose a danger to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea.
An immediate consequence of the ice shelf's rupture was the loss of almost all of the freshwater from the northern hemisphere's largest epishelf lake, which had been dammed behind it in 30 kilometer [20 mile] long Disraeli Fiord. An epishelf lake is a body of mostly freshwater trapped behind an ice shelf. The freshwater layer in the Disraeli Fiord measured 43 meters [140 feet] in depth and lay atop 360 meters [1,200 feet] of denser ocean water. The loss of fresh and brackish water has affected a previously reported unique biological community, consisting of both freshwater and marine species of plankton. The breakup of the ice shelf has also reduced the habitat available for cold-tolerant communities of microscopic animals and algae that live on the upper ice surface."
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Mueller, Vincent, and Jeffries attribute the disintegration of the Ellesmere Ice Shelf and the breakup of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf to the cumulative effects of long-term warming since the 19th century. The precise timing and pattern of fracturing of the climate-weakened ice shelf may have been influenced by freeze-thaw cycles, wind, and tides, they say. Other factors may include changes in Arctic Ocean temperature, salinity, and flow patterns, they add.

Though the process has been going on since the 1800s recent data collection indicates that it may be accelerating in the region. Other regions have different histories and as noted above water temperature, salinity, currents, winds and tides are all part of this complex system, but the suspicion that there are human influences on this process lingers.

The Limits of Agroecosystems

2003-09-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

This feature story from the World Resources Institute follows the style of relentlessly negative reporting typical of donor supported institutions.

"The unprecedented scale of agricultural expansion and intensification in the past 30 years has raised concerns about the state of the world's agroecosystems. Can they withstand stresses like soil erosion and salinization and meet the food needs of an additional 1.7 billion people over the next 20 years?"

The report does grudgingly admit that the situation is far better than it was 30 years ago and grudgingly mentions the possibilities of modern agricultural technologies for answering the growing needs for food. The report is worth reading for the data but it will be helpful to also read the article linked in the post below about emerging argo-ecological technologies.

Amazonian Civilization

2003-09-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

Amazon was settled before Columbus' time: Excavations and maps confirm forest housed advanced society.

"The Amazon was densely populated before Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World, confirms new evidence unearthed in Brazil1. The finds lay to rest the notion that the region was pristine forest when the explorer landed in 1492."
...
The area's indigenous people are still around today, but in much smaller numbers - one reason for the misconceptions about their past. "Cultural anthropologists were extrapolating backwards," explains archaeologist Jim Petersen of the University of Vermont in Burlington. "Heckenberger's work helps us understand, virtually for the first time, that there was a higher degree of cultural complexity than today."
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Although there was probably some untouched forest in the region, Heckenberger reckons that most was managed by the inhabitants and kept for cultural and symbolic, rather than economic, reasons. "It was probably very important to them just as Central Park is important to New Yorkers," he says.

It's good to have the archeological evidence of these pre-Colombian civilizations in the Americas and dispel the corrosive idea of depeopled 'pristine wilderness'. Perhaps we can now make better progress in establishing appropriate systems of management for tropical ecosystems that are not anti-humanist. See Ethnoecology for a Conservation Ecology issue that focuses on the integration of anthropology and ecosystem sciences.

An Appetite for Beauty

2003-09-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

Neil Greenberg reviews The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind by Elkhonon Goldberg.

I hope I'm not the only one who finds a connection between the ideas of evolutionary aesthetics discussed in the previous post and the practice of science as described in this review.

"The creative scientist (like the artist) must walk a narrow ridge. On one side there is the need to accommodate the traditions of the profession in order to survive as a professional, and on the other, there is the need to be free of such social constraints in order to make creative contributions and prosper as a professional (4). William Wordsworth understood: “Never forget,” he wrote, “. . . that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished”(5).
Going beyond the obvious. In the spirit of Wordsworth, Goldberg’s book seeks to create an appreciation for his insight. As often the case, data has emerged that makes his task easier. He begins by seeking to reframe the perennial (and parochial) either-or quarrel about modularity of mind. He notes that while a modularity persists in many ancient parts of the brain, more recently evolved structures -those that collate and integrate the information provided by these modules- possess a density of intrinsic connections that creates a functional “gradiental” continuum. These more recently evolved structures are the frontal lobes, the “organ of civilization” according to some of the founding fathers of neuropsychology such as Ward Halstead (6) and the author’s mentor, the great A. R. Luria. The book arrives at a time which for many of us is what teachers sometimes call “the teachable moment.” Many of us are ready for Goldberg’s ideas."

Beautiful Thoughts

2003-09-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

Adele Tomlin reviews Evolutionary Aesthetics edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer in Human Nature Review.

We rely on our aesthetic senses and the feelings they provoke in matters great and small but don't often question the basis of these judgements. It is difficult to ground them without reference to biological reality yet diverse and culturally inflected opinion makes this hard to do.

The meaning of the experience plays no part in the scientific experience. In our increasingly science-worshipping world, the meaning comes to be viewed as a fiction. Many people accept this conclusion and lapse into a state of cynical hedonism, scorning the old fogeys or romantics who believe there is more to sex than biology. The scientific attempt to explore the ‘depth’ of human things, therefore, is accompanied by a significant danger - it threatens to destroy our response to the surface. Yet it is on the surface of the world that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. A reckless desire to scrape this surface away - a desire which has inspired the ‘sciences of man’ - deprives us of our consolation, for it is the surface on which human happiness and relations are dependent. The classifications which inform and permit our actions, cannot be replaced with anything better than themselves, for they have evolved precisely under the pressure of human circumstance, and in answer to human needs: in particular our need for meaning. Philosophical analysis of the surface can uphold and makes sense of those more elusive classifications which form the background to personal life: classifications relative to emotions (the fearful, the lovable, the disgusting) and to aesthetic interest (the ornamental, the serene, the graceful); it gives sense to our interpersonal attitudes and it explores the meaning of the world, in moral and religious experience.
"Despite this weakness, Evolutionary Aesthetics certainly made me reassess my own thoughts about human aesthetic experience and response. Furthermore, in my opinion, the evolutionary analysis has the potential to add another layer of meaning or value to our aesthetic experiences. As Thornhill eloquently states: “We can conclude with great confidence that beauty and ugliness were important feelings in the lives of the evolutionary ancestors of humans...A beautiful idea of evolutionary psychology is that the discipline allows discovery of how human ancestors felt about various aspects of their environments; the discipline allows discovery of our emotional roots”. A beautiful idea indeed, and one which I also found to be extremely moving."