Stories tagged Scientific Enterprise

A bin of spares: for future-babies.
Courtesy Max SparberIn many respects, the people of my country—we call it “Futureland” or “Futureworld,” depending on the state—are much like Lego men (minifigs). We have round, cheerful faces, chunky, clunky legs, and square, tapering shoulders. And the women… oh, the women of Futureland are the most beautiful in the world, with their round, cheerful faces, chunky, clunky legs, and square, tapering shoulders. Some might argue that they’re only distinguishable from us men by painted on lipstick and eyelashes… but I don’t see why that has to be a bad thing.

And, like Lego people, our arms are removable and replaceable. We can mix and match! Unfortunately, the process of arm removal is often extremely painful and bloody, and arm replacement involves extensive surgery, an anti-rejection drug regimen, and years of physical therapy. Still… replaceable arms! Yes, life in the future is fine indeed.

Oh? You don’t believe me? Well, put on your chronohats and futurnaut undies and join me up here for a moment, so that we might consider the case of one Karl Merk.

Karl was a German dairy farmer until six years ago, when he elected to have his arms removed. Although… Maybe “elected” isn’t totally accurate. Mr. Merk’s arms were detached just below the shoulders by a combine harvester, and he was screaming “Kill me, kill me!” when he was later discovered by a colleague. So it seems possible that the arm-removal could have been an accident.

Regardless, it wasn’t until just recently that a suitable set of new arms could be found to click back into Karl’s shoulders.

It took a team of 40 surgeons, specialists, and support staff 15 hours to reattach the arms of a donor who had died only hours earlier. The arms were filled with “a cooled preservation solution,” and then detached from the donor’s shoulders at the exact point Mr. Merk’s arms were severed. Merk’s arm stumps were then cut open to expose the bone, muscle, nerve tissue, and blood vessels.

The bones were joined first, followed quickly by arteries and veins, to ensure blood flow. Muscles and tendons were then attached, followed by the nerves, and then the skin was finally sewn together.

Click. Click.

I recommend checking out the video in the page linked to above (under “the case of one Karl Merk”). It has a video of Karl with his new arms. The arms are paler than the rest of Karl, and they look kind of muscley. They’re also kind of wet and shiny looking, which is gross. But they work, and over the next couple years Karl should be able to regain full use of the hands and everything. Because so much of his arms were cut off in the accident, there’s a greater risk that Karl’s body won’t accept the new limbs, but so far there doesn’t signs of rejection.

And that’s life in the future. Tons of painful surgery. And maybe some slightly disproportionally large arms.

Buzz has plenty on organ transplants and the like. Check in out here.

Tags : transplant, the future, surgery, medicine, health, arms

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Picture this with more balls: Nice, huh?
Courtesy Echo_29Southern California is ball-crazy! Sure, everyone loves balls, from babies to seniors, but SoCal has brought it to a whole new level.

Los Angeles, in particular, is doing things with balls I’d never even thought of. They’re putting them in the water… by the millions! Millions of balls in the water, I guess, will make it better to drink.

The issue here is cancer. Or carcinogens—materials that can cause cancer. So the issue here is cancer.

Bromide, a naturally occurring ion of the element bromine, happens to be found in Los Angeles’ reservoirs. Bromine isn’t much to worry about on its own, but it turns out that the ion interacts with chlorine and sunlight (both of which are also found in the LA reservoirs) to form bromates, a group of chemicals that contain carcinogens. I couldn’t find a reference that explains it fully, but it looks like this is how it (basically) works: chlorine dioxide, the form of chlorine we use to treat drinking water, breaks down in sunlight into chlorine and oxygen. The bromide ions end up grabbing on to some oxygen to form BrO3, the bromate anion (“anion” just means that it’s a molecule with a negative charge). When that negatively charged bromate anion combines with a positively charged ion, a bromate is formed. And those are, as we’ve established, often bad. The combination of sunlight, bromide, and chlorine in LA’s reservoirs means that their water sources are becoming contaminated with bromates.

So thank goodness for balls, lots of balls. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power means to solve the problem by removing sunlight from the situation. In about five years a huge underground reservoir should be finished, but until then LA has decided that the best way to block sunlight from the water is to cover it with millions and millions of black, plastic balls. They’ll float, and allow most things, but not sunlight, to pass through them. And they’ll look super crazy.

As we all know, however, you don’t just fill up a couple 10-acre reservoirs with balls in a weekend. Plus, the ball-making company can only produce about 100,000 balls a day, and there’s no doubt a great demand for balls beyond LADWP’s 6.5 million ball order. So this going to be a lengthy project. Over the next four years the Ivanhoe and Elysian reservoirs will be filled with about 3 million balls each. And then the underground reservoir will be ready. I expect there may be some spare balls around LA at that point.

Here’s more on the trouble with Bromates in drinking water.

And here’s more on balls.

Tags : balls, reservoir, carcinogen, sunlight, chemistry, water

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Deadly milk formula: Melamine added to Chinese baby milk is deadly.
Courtesy kirikiri

Babies are dying

Four babies have died after drinking milk powder contaminated with melamine. Melamine is a cheap plastic made from oil, and when added to powdered milk, looks like protein in tests. Melamine was in the news over a year ago when pet food from China containing melamine was killing people's pets. In an attempt to regain public confidence, China executed a top drug regulator who was taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths.

So far 19 people have been arrested while 78 others have been interrogated, according to Yang Zongyong, vice governor of the northern province of Hebei where Sanlu is based.

"We will severely punish and discipline those people and workers who have acted illegally," Health Minister Gao said Saturday. Beijing AFP

Parents are furious

After a month of pride in China's national achievements with hosting the olympics, the food scandal has angry citizens posting quotes like:

"Drink a glass of milk a day, wipe out a country!"

"Foreign milk costs money, domestic milk costs lives" The Independent

Inspection free and government approved

Until a week ago, Sanlu's baby milk formula came with a seal stating "no inspection needed": their 1100 tests met the highest possible standards of government approval.
"So the question should really be whether the victims can sue the Chinese government."

Somebody should have to pay

"In an unprecedented stand yesterday that will test the Communist Party's limits on civil society, more than 70 human rights lawyers from 23 provinces and municipalities announced they will help parents whose babies are sick or have developed kidney stones from drinking tainted infant formula" (read more in the Sunday Herald)

Tags : China, health, baby formula, food safety, melamine, milk

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You'll never guess what's in the can: This isn't Sable Sheets, by the way. Just some other pro-sniffer.
Courtesy Thomas HawkOops. I forgot y’all are too cool to read the word “poopy” now and again. Maybe next time I’ll drop an S-bomb on y’all. Or I could write “sulfurous compounds,” or skatole, or indole. But where would that get us? Nowhere very graphic, certainly.

So, how would you like it if it was your job to sniff out human feces?

Well, I’m sorry, but the job has already been taken. Taken, no less, by a member of a group whose mission in this country seems to be to take jobs from honest, upstanding Americans. That’s right: dogs.

This particular dog is named Sable Sheets, and he hails from Lansing, Michigan. (He doesn’t actually have a last name, being a dog, so I gave him one.) Sable is a professional sniffer of crap. If sniffing human feces were an Olympic sport, Sable would be a gold medalist, if it were a martial art, Sable would be a ninja. It is a serious pursuit—Sable sniffs for the government.

Since he was a puppy, Sable has been trained to recognize certain smells: the odors of water contaminants. Earlier this week, we went over just how great at smelling dogs are. Sable needs to be a great smeller, because not only does he have to recognize chemical contaminants, like those that come from household detergents, but he also has to be able to distinguish animal feces from human feces. A little animal feces in the water is gross, but if Sable can detect human feces it’s a sign that there could be a failed and leaking septic system nearby. Aside from the other obvious issues involved with poop in your water, leaking septic systems can lead to E. coli contaminating rivers and streams. And we don’t want that.

Municipal governments hire Sable and his handler, a former K-9 officer, to check out catch basins, outflows, and manhole covers. If Sable gets a hint of duke, he barks and looks at his handler.

E. coli bacteria can, of course, be detected without the help of a dog, but only with the help of laboratory equipment. To find and test all possible sources of E. coli contamination in a water system would take a tremendous amount of time and effort. A dog like Sable—who, at the moment, might be one of a kind—can speed up the effort greatly. He’s like a miniature, mobile, furry lab. Based on the sample’s that have been sent to the lab on account of Sable’s barks, the dog is about 87 percent accurate.

His handler adds that Sable is “getting better; getting more refined.” Sort of like a connoisseur of fine wines, really, but with… you know.

Tags : dogs, water, health, infectious disease, E. coli

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Sorry, sir: You may not understand it, but it understands you.
Courtesy aNantaBI think there’s a pretty good chance that the robots that control the Internet will censor this, so read fast, Buzzketeers.

Web 3.0, or as I like to call it, “Skynet,” is looming closer than ever today. It’s like a big old thunderhead, gray-black, full of lightning, and bearing down on us from above. Except when Skynet 3.0 gets here we aren’t getting wet, we’re getting turned into the freakin’ Borg. (Although we might also get wet, if there are real clouds around too.) And as cool as it would be to have a drill hand and a laser pointer taped to my head, I don’t think I could stand being any more pale. And so we must fight. For my sake.

This week the blossoming threat is taking the form of cleverer computers. Computers with huge, muscular, brick-breaking vocabularies. Computers that don’t just know all the words—they know what all the words mean. Computers like robotic English majors, except they can also do math and get jobs.

See, a “semantic map” has been developed for computers—a program that would allow a computer to “understand” words based on their tenses and contexts. A direct application of this technology would be in search engines; instead of being limited to searching for exact word matches, the program could look for something based on the meaning of your words. For instance, if I were to type “The terminator learns some bodacious new phrases” into Google’s search engine right now, I’d get a bunch of worthless nonsense returned to me. But with an engine that used a semantic map, I like to think that such a search would return to me with some clips from Terminator 2, in which John Connor is teaching the T101 some useful new phrases like “Hasta la vista,” and “hands off the merch, bro,” and “Cheese it! It’s the fuzz!” I could then post these clips on a science blog.

And that, incidentally, is the only positive scenario I could imagine coming from this technology. If I’m searching for, say, “sexy Easter bunny,” I just wants me some pictures of the Easter bunny in a speedo—I don’t want my computer to actually understand what’s wrong with me. And there’ll be no escaping their powerful understanding. Even this early semantic map is said to have a vocabulary 10 times the size of the average college graduate. That’s, like, super… not good.

There is still hope, however, so relax your little fret glands for a moment. I have a plan, and you already know my plan if you read the heading of this post: invent new words. But keep them to yourself—I wouldn’t underestimate Web 3.0 so much to think that it couldn’t figure out what was going on after a while. Also, be sure to change the definitions of already existing words, and change them often. It will be like linguistic guerilla warfare; a definition could pop up in one spot (word) fire off a couple shots, and then it would be gone, already looking for a new hiding place. Web 3.0 might send an air strike against this whole paragraph, but it won’t matter—by the time the missiles get here, the passage will mean something else entirely. My meaning will be setting up a new camp, hopefully in a stand of old swear words.

Are you with me, folks? I knew I could count on you! Progress won’t get us that easily!

Tags : web 3.0, the future, language, fight for the future, computers

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A big pyramid: Of pathetic, antiquated, and useless thought.
Courtesy PygoY’all know what a scientific paradigm is? Me neither. But I took a class about it once, and I seem to remember that it has something to do with the whole mindset with which we approach scientific questions. A paradigm frames how we might look at the whole of a scientific question—indeed, it doesn’t just determine how we ask questions, but what questions we ask in the first place.

When a paradigm shifts, something has occurred or been uncovered that completely changes the approach to the problem. With a new scientific paradigm, we don’t just ask questions that couldn’t be answered before, we ask questions that we never even considered before.

Let’s examine... oh, say, toilet paper. Thin. Usually white, or whitish. Used for wiping stuff. Two ply (sometimes one-ply, depending on the venue). What more can be done with it? Oh, I suppose we could make it softer somehow. Or make it rougher, maybe. Could we make it whiter? Larger squares? No, the discipline is dry; there is nothing new to be discovered in toilet paper now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

Wrong answer, chumps! How about… 3-ply toilet paper!

3-ply? 3-ply? There’s no such… Aaaaaaaaaahhhaaaaaaaaaaaahh!!!!

No, pull it together… I can get my head around this… 3-ply…Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!

Okay… Let’s just not think directly at that for a little bit.

So, “toilet paper researchers” in Wisconsin have created toilet paper that has… three layered… They’ve made two-ply toilet paper with one more ply.

It’s like the axis of the world has shifted so that it’s running right through my brain.

The new generation of toilet paper is being touted as “extra-soft,” although, industry analysts are skeptical, pointing out that an extra ply should only make TP tougher, not softer. Not to mention that it just plain seems impossible.

Nonetheless, the Wisconsin futurnauts fully intend to pursue this new three-layered science. The target market is reported to be women 45 and older who view their bathroom as a "sanctuary for quality time."

And so I salute you, 45+ female demographic. You dare what the rest of us can hardly imagine.

Tags : toilets, paradigm shift, paper

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Do as we say, or we'll kill your family: Some animal activists are attacking researchers' homes.
Courtesy charmingly_busy

(With the Republican National Convention literally across the street, the Science Museum of Minnesota will be closed starting Friday, August 29. But Science Buzz marches on! To honor our convention guests, I’ll be posting entries focusing on issues where science and politics overlap. Hopefully this will spur some discussion. Or at least tick some people off. Previous entries here, here and here.)

5:30 Saturday morning. The pre-dawn quiet is shattered by firebombs exploding almost simultaneously in different parts of the town. One is set under a car in a driveway, apparently trying to ignite the fuel tank. The others ignite on the porch of a family home, setting it on fire, forcing a husband, wife and their two children to climb out of a second-floor window to escape. All this follows a pattern of death threats, break-ins, harassment and intimidation.

A movie, perhaps? A war-torn foreign country beset by extremists?

Nope. Santa Cruz, California. The target: scientists.

Some groups of activist have long protested the use of animals in experiments. Most of these protests have been peaceful social and political action, and they’ve had results—the care of lab animals has improved, and many cosmetic companies no longer test their products on animals.

But some activists crossed the line into crime and violence, breaking into labs and destroying equipment. And now they have escalated to attacking researchers and their families in their homes. In one instance, masked intruders broke into a professor’s home and disrupted his daughter’s birthday party. Classy.

The scientists being targeted are biomedical researchers, trying to find cures for diseases like cancer and AIDS. If they are successful in shutting down medical research, then as a result millions upon millions of people will die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, thanks to their efforts.

(And it’s not just medical research—in one instance, activists wanted to stop a university from testing the safety of…pet food. That’s right—these lunatics who claim to be advocating on behalf of animals, want to make it harder for companies to ensure the safety of pet food. Brilliant.)

While some groups focus their activity on labs that conduct tests on happy little monkeys or cute fluffy bunnies, others draw no such distinctions. Some have targeted researchers using fruit flies.

Worried that this terrorism might persuade researchers to leave the field, or dissuade young scientists from entering it, the US Congress in 2006 passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act to protect researchers. However, there have not yet been any prosecutions under this legislation.

(Meanwhile, in response to the recent attacks, the California state legislature is pushing through its own ordinance. UCLA has gone on the offensive and is suing people involved in intimidating researchers,)

This is not how we do things in this country. If you think an activity should be limited or outlawed, speak up. Petition the government. Elect officials who agree with you. But do not take the law into your own hands, resort to terrorism, or try to blow up little children.

When I was a kid, I used to do stupid kid things. And my saintly Mother in frustration would cry out, “What’s the matter with you? Do you sit on your brains?” I would ask the same question of these losers—except that would imply they had brains to begin with. And that would seem to give them entirely too much credit.

Tags : terrorism, medical research, animals, politics

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Women in science: Should government-funded labs make a point of hiring an equal number of men and women?
Courtesy NIOSH—Nat’l Inst. For Occupational Safety & Health

(With the Republican National Convention literally across the street, the Science Museum of Minnesota will be closed starting Friday, August 29. But Science Buzz marches on! To honor our convention guests, I’ll be posting entries focusing on issues where science and politics overlap. Hopefully this will spur some discussion. Or at least tick some people off. Previous entry here.)

Affirmative action. Another nice, safe topic that we have talked about before, though in a different context.

In 1972, Congress passed an education bill which included, among its amendments, the following language:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Certainly sounds fair. But this amendment, known as “Title IX,” has caused its share of headaches. The law states that men and women should have equal opportunity in educational activities. But “opportunity” is often hard to measure. If few women partake in a given activity, is it because of discrimination? Because of lack of interest? Or, in the case of athletics, because of physical limitations?

Hard to say sometimes. So instead, the courts look at outcomes. If significantly more men than women are participating in a activity, the courts tell the schools they need to get the numbers in line. Usually this means trying to increase women’s participation. Too often, however, it has meant cutting support for men – a surreal Harrison Bergeron result if ever there was one.

This same “logic” is now to be applied to academic science departments. Under pressure from Congress, several federal science agencies are now looking for discrimination in college science departments. And, since motive is hard to prove, there are fears that courts will again fall back to looking solely at results, and force schools to hire equal numbers of male and female scientists, regardless of their qualifications. Which is fairly antithetical to the pure meritocracy science is supposed to be.

No one wants discrimination. But it would be a national tragedy if the pursuit of political correctness ended up hindering American science, just as science has become more important than at any moment in human history.

New York Times reporter John Tierney has reviewed the National Academy of Science’s report on discrimination, and has found very little evidence of bias. And, as we discussed earlier, many women do not pursue math careers, not because of discrimination, but simply because of individual choice.

This appears to be a solution in search of a problem.

Tags : gender, women, affirmative action

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Like this: But way better. And stuff.
Courtesy Library of CongressProtect your grills, everybody, because the future is looking to get all up in them again!

Over the next two years, the oldest known copies of biblical documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, will be digitally scanned and placed online for all the world to examine at their leisure.

Well, not all the world. Just the parts with computers and access to the Internet, and just those people who know and care that the Dead Sea Scrolls are available for public study. So not all the world at all.

The first of the scrolls were discovered accidentally in a cave in the West Bank by a goatherd in 1947. Over the next thirty years, more scrolls—about 1000 documents in total—were found in 11 caves in the area. The documents include texts from the Hebrew Bible, dating to before 100 AD. The scrolls are also reported to contain an astonishing number of recipes and very dirty jokes.

The thousands of fragments of the scrolls were photographed in their entirety (up to that point) only once, in the 1950s. Many of those photographs are now crumbling, and so, despite the arguments of some Luddites who are no doubt on the way out themselves, scholars are taking advantage of this amazing time we live in (the future), and are subjecting the whole of the scroll collection to some fancy pants scanning.

The images of the texts will be taken in very high resolution and with varying wavelengths of light, highlighting details not readily visible to the naked eye.

The physical scrolls will be beginning a tour of the United States next month at the Jewish Museum of New York.

Tags : archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls, digital photography, religion

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The original Minifig: mocked horribly by later generations of minifigures, but, fortunately, incapable of feeling emotion of any kind.
Courtesy WakuranI'm a couple days late here, but it's time we recognized the Lego minifigure's 30th birthday.

That's right—on August 25th, 1978, Lego introduced the little yellow Lego guy. Lego had been manufacturing plastic interlocking bricks since 1949, allowing children across the world to practice engineering without realizing that they shouldn't be having fun, but it wasn't until 78 that they sold a little human like thing to enjoy our Lego creations.

Technically there were minifigures available in 1974, but the were faceless, armless pylon-men, and they couldn't enjoy anything. 1978 brought the lovable little man we know today.

Wired's piece on the birthday features this epic video embed:

And, yes, that does make me want to buy a bunch of Lego friends, and have a party for the 20th century, but I thought I'd leave you with a different, though no less triumphant, Lego celebration. Enjoy.

Tags : engineering, lego, building

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