So educated - so dumb

Low vaccination rates in Silicon Valley. [Link]

The scientists, technologists, and engineers who populate Silicon Valley and the California Bay Area deserve their reputation as innovators, building entire new economies on the strength of brains and imagination. But some of these people don’t seem to be vaccinating their children.

A WIRED investigation shows that some children attending day care facilities affiliated with prominent Silicon Valley companies have not been completely vaccinated against preventable infectious diseases. At least, that’s according to a giant database from the California Department of Public Health, which tracks the vaccination rates at day care facilities and preschools in the state. We selected more than 20 large technology and health companies in the Bay Area and researched their day care offerings. Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates, according to the state’s data.

Found! First Earth-Size Planet That Could Support Life

Neat! [Link]

Potentially habitable planet

Scientists think that Kepler-186f — the outermost of five planets found to be orbiting the star Kepler-186 — orbits at a distance of 32.5 million miles (52.4 million kilometers), theoretically within the habitable zone for a red dwarf.

Earth orbits the sun from an average distance of about 93 million miles (150 million km), but the sun is larger and brighter than the Kepler-186 star, meaning that the sun's habitable zone begins farther out from the star by comparison to Kepler-186.

"This is the first definitive Earth-sized planet found in the habitable zone around another star," Elisa Quintana, of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author of a new study detailing the findings, said in a statement.

Other planets of various sizes have been found in thehabitable zones of their stars. However, Kepler-186f is the first alien planet this close to Earth in size found orbiting in that potentially life-supporting area of an extrasolar system, according to exoplanet scientists.

'An historic discovery'

"This is an historic discovery of the first truly Earth-size planet found in the habitable zone around its star," Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is unaffiliated with the research, told Space.com via email. "This is the best case for a habitable planet yet found. The results are absolutely rock-solid. The planet itself may not be, but I'd bet my house on it. In any case, it's a gem."

The newly discovered planet measures about 1.1 Earth radii, making it slightly larger than Earth, but researchers still think the alien world may be rocky like Earth. Researchers still aren't sure what Kepler-186f's atmosphere is made of, a key element that could help scientists understand if the planet is hospitable to life.  [Kepler-186f: Earth-Size World Could Support Oceans, Maybe Life (Infographic)]

"What we've learned, just over the past few years, is that there is a definite transition which occurs around about 1.5 Earth radii," Quintana said in a statement. "What happens there is that for radii between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, the planet becomes massive enough that it starts to accumulate a very thick hydrogen and helium atmosphere, so it starts to resemble the gas giants of our solar system rather than anything else that we see as terrestrial."

A Lost War

The War on Poverty. [Link]

Now here is something you may not know. Early on ? in the first decade of our 50-year experiment with an expanded welfare state ? carefully controlled experiments funded by the federal government established without question that welfare changes behavior. It leads to the very behavioral changes that keep people in a state of poverty and dependency. Think about that. Any serious social science debate about the effects of welfare on the behavior of the recipients was resolved four decades ago!

We now know a lot about how behavior affects poverty. In fact, if you do these four things, it’s almost impossible to remain poor:

1. Finish high school,

2. Get a job,

3. Get married, and

4. Don’t have children until you get married.

So how does welfare affect behavior? In the late 1960s the federal government sought to find that out in what Charles Murray calls “the most ambitious social science experiment in history.”

The experiments were all conducted by social scientists who believed in the welfare state and had no doubt about its capacity to be successful. In other words, they were confident of the answers before the experiments ever began. Their goal was to prove that popular wisdom was all wrong ? that welfare would not cause people to reduce their work effort, to get married less often, divorce more quickly or engage in other dysfunctional behavior.

The experiments were all controlled. Randomly selected people were assigned to a “control group” and an “experimental group.” The latter received a guaranteed income, and the program even used Milton Friedman’s term for it: a negative income tax. The largest, longest and best-evaluated of these experiments was SIME/DIME (Seattle Income Maintenance Experiment/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment) in Seattle and Denver. And the results were not pretty. To the dismay of the researchers, they largely confirmed what conventional wisdom had thought all along. As I reported in “Privatizing the Welfare State”:

• The number of hours worked dropped 9% for husbands and 20% for wives, relative to the control group. For young male adults it dropped 43% more.
• The length of unemployment increased 27% among husbands and 42% for wives, relative to the control group. For single female heads of households it increased 60% more.
• Divorce increased 36% more among whites and 42% more among blacks. (In a New Jersey experiment, the divorce rate was 84% higher among Hispanics.)

BTW, these results have been studied and studied over and over again and there is a large literature on them ? almost all of it written by researchers who detested the outcomes. Good summaries are provided byCharles Murray and Martin Anderson.

Both authors point out that the results are even worse than they at first appear. For one thing, the “control group” had access to conventional welfare available in the 60s and 70s. So this was by no means a pure (welfare free) control group. Also the enrollees were given different instructions about how long they could expect their guaranteed income to last. It turns out that the longer the guarantee, the worse the negative effects.

So far as I can tell there was no marriage penalty in these experiments ? certainly nothing like we have today ? and little or no penalty for earning a higher income. With the passage of time all these incentives have become increasingly more perverse. For example, over the past 50 years we have added one marriage penalty after another to welfare benefits. There is a very strong marriage penalty in ObamaCare, for example. And even Paul Krugman concedes that the marginal tax rate faced by low-income families is in excess of 80% today. (It actually goes above 100% in many cases.) And ObamaCare will make the penalty for working and earning even higher.

So here is the important public policy question: If it is well established that self-sufficiency is closely related to working and being married why are we “fighting poverty” by doing things that social scientists have known for decades lead to less work and fewer marriages?

Time travelers and smart phones

The New Yorker on whether we are getting smarter or stupider. [Link]

Are we getting smarter or stupider? In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” from 2010, Nicholas Carr blames the Web for growing cognitive problems, while Clive Thompson, in his recent book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better,” argues that our technologies are boosting our abilities. To settle the matter, consider the following hypothetical experiment:

A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky. She is also proficient at connecting seemingly random concepts, and when the traveller asks her a question like “How can God be both good and omnipotent?” she can provide complex theoretical answers.

Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. Using lingo unavailable in 1914, (it was coined later by John von Neumann) he might conclude that the human race had reached a “singularity”—a point where it had gained an intelligence beyond the understanding of the 1914 mind.

The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora. To us, she is unremarkable, but to the man she is astonishing. With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods, though we’re remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we’re used to. Take away our tools, the argument goes, and we’re likely stupider than our friend from the early twentieth century, who has a longer attention span, may read and write Latin, and does arithmetic faster.

The time-traveller scenario demonstrates that how you answer the question of whether we are getting smarter depends on how you classify “we.” This is why Thompson and Carr reach different results: Thompson is judging the cyborg, while Carr is judging the man underneath.

Gemini Planet Imager

Very neat. [Link]

After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world’s most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized for imaging faint planets next to bright stars and probing their atmospheres. It will also be a powerful tool for studying dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars. It is the most advanced such instrument to be deployed on one of the world’s biggest telescopes – the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile.

“Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect,” says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the team that built the instrument.

GPI detects infrared (heat) radiation from young Jupiter-like planets in wide orbits around other stars, those equivalent to the giant planets in our own Solar System not long after their formation. Every planet GPI sees can be studied in detail.

“Most planets that we know about to date are only known because of indirect methods that tell us a planet is there, a bit about its orbit and mass, but not much else,” says Macintosh. “With GPI we directly image planets around stars – it’s a bit like being able to dissect the system and really dive into the planet’s atmospheric makeup and characteristics.”

GPI carried out its first observations last November – during an extremely trouble-free debut for an extraordinarily complex astronomical instrument the size of a small car. “This was one of the smoothest first-light runs Gemini has ever seen” says Stephen Goodsell, who manages the project for the observatory.

For GPI’s first observations, the team targeted previously known planetary systems, including the well-known Beta Pictoris system; in it GPI obtained the first-ever spectrum of the very young planet Beta Pictoris b. The first-light team also used the instrument’s polarization mode – which can detect starlight scattered by tiny particles – to study a faint ring of dust orbiting the very young star HR4796A. With previous instruments, only the edges of this dust ring, (which may be the debris remaining from planet formation), could be seen, but with GPI astronomers can follow the entire circumference of the ring.

Although GPI was designed to look at distant planets, it can also observe objects in our Solar System. The accompanying test images of Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example, can allow scientists to map changes in the satellite’s surface composition. The images were released today at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC.

“Seeing a planet close to a star after just one minute, was a thrill, and we saw this on only the first week after the instrument was put on the telescope!” says Fredrik Rantakyro a Gemini staff scientist working on the instrument. “Imagine what it will be able to do once we tweak and completely tune its performance.”

“Exoplanets are extraordinarily faint and difficult to see next to a bright star,” notes GPI chief scientist Professor James R. Graham of the University of California who has worked with Macintosh on the project since its inception. GPI can see planets a million times fainter than their parent stars. Often described, ‘like trying to see a firefly circling a streetlight thousands of kilometers away,’ instruments used to image exoplanets must be designed and built to “excruciating tolerances,” points out Leslie Saddlemyer of NRC Herzberg (part of the National Research Council of Canada), who served as GPI’s systems engineer. “Each individual mirror inside GPI has to be smooth to within a few times the size of an atom,” Saddlemyer adds.

Don't worry about the Zombie Apocalypse

The carrion eaters have it covered. [Link]

National Wildlife Federation naturalist David Mizejewski explains how nature would deal with a zombie outbreak: brutally, and without quarter.

With The Walking Dead's fourth season premiere and Halloween upon us, the living dead are back in full-force.

Zombies are scary. We humans are evolutionarily pre-programmed to abhor the dead bodies of our own species. It's a natural reaction, helping healthy individuals avoid fatal pathogens.

The thought of being eaten alive is a natural fear, and when it's your own species doing the eating, it's even more terrifying.

Relax. Next time you're lying in bed, unable to fall asleep thanks to the vague anxiety of half-rotten corpses munching on you in the dark, remember this: if there was ever a zombie uprising, wildlife would kick its ass.

To enjoy zombie horror, you suspend disbelief and put aside some of science's rules. That said, if we assume zombies can't spread whatever is causing them to reanimate to other species, and that they are relatively slow moving—both true (so far! — Ed.) of Walking Dead zombies—there are more than enough wild animals out there to dispatch the undead.

That's because zombies are essentially walking carrion, and Mother Nature doesn't letanything go to waste.

Carrion is on the menu for a vast number of species, from tiny micro-organisms to the largest carnivores.

Here's just some of the North American wildlife that would make short work of a zombie horde.

Making food safer with viruses

Fighting fire with fire. [Link]

Over the years, Satzow has adopted a variety of antimicrobial products and processes to try and close that window. In 2011, he added a new weapon to his bacteria-fighting arsenal, a spray that contains billions of virus particles called bacteriophages—“phages” for short—which target and destroy bacteria, but not human or animal cells. “We try to be on the cutting edge of everything,” Satzow says. So now each package of chorizo or smoky maple links that rolls down the smokehouse’s spotless conveyor belt gets a squirt of a bacteriophage product called Listex before being sealed.

Inside that liquid are billions of phages that bind to bacteria and inject their genetic material. These molecular instructions direct the cells to make more phages that produce an enzyme that “breaks open the cell wall from the inside out,” says Olivia McAuliffe, a senior researcher at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Ireland. The bacterium bursts and dies, and the phages escape and infect other bacteria.

Doctors began using phages to treat bacterial infections nearly a century ago, but the idea that phages could protect against food-borne pathogens came about in the past decade. “The food industry isn’t known for its quick adaptation for new innovations,” says Dirk DeMeester, director of business development for Micreos Food Safety, the Dutch company that developed Listex. Yet the idea seems to be slowly gaining traction. DeMeester declined to provide sales figures, but he hinted that business is booming. “Our growth is exponential,” he says. “People are starting to understand that it’s more than just a good idea. It’s going to be an industry standard.”

Bears in Space!

Hibernation for astronauts. [Link]

Bradford's team is trying to leverage and extend medical advances in therapeutic hypothermia, which seeks to prevent tissue damage during periods of low blood flow by lowering core body temperature.

For every drop of 1 degree Fahrenheit in body temperature, metabolic rate decreases by 5 to 7 percent, Bradford said. The researchers are aiming for a 10-degree drop during manned Mars missions, or a 50 to 70 percent reduction in metabolic rate.

That's a big drop, but it's still a far cry from the suspended animation featured in sci-fi films such as the 1979 classic "Alien," which takes body processes all the way down to zero. [6 New Sci-Fi Movies to Watch in 2013]

"We're not freezing anybody. It's not cryopreservation; it's closer tohibernation," Bradford said. "So they're still breathing, and they still need sustenance." (Food and water would be delivered intravenously, he added.)

Ideally, the body-temperature drop would induce an unconscious state by itself, he added, so sedatives would not have to be administered to voyaging astronauts.

The team is investigating the best ways to cool an astronaut's core. The front-runner idea at the moment may be the gel pads that doctors use during hypothermia therapy, Bradford said. Injecting fluids into the bloodstream could also get the job done, but the researchers are hoping to avoid such invasive methods.

It's also possible to take another tack, Bradford said: Let the Mars-bound spacecraft cool down in the frigid depths of space, but work to warm the astronauts up to the desired temperature.

The longest anyone has remained in a medically induced hypothermic torpor to date is about 10 days, Bradford said. But that's likely not an upper limit, he stressed; rather, it's a reflection of the low medical need to keep people in such states for prolonged periods of time.

"We're trying to give [the medical community] a need, or a rationale" to push the 10-day record out to 30 days and beyond, and to look for any possible attendant complications, Bradford said.

Vitamins Don't

Studies continue to prove that vitamin supplements do no good, and in many cases do harm. But that will not stop anyone who is already convinced taking them is good for you. [Link]

In 1994, the National Cancer Institute, in collaboration with Finland's National Public Health Institute, studied 29,000 Finnish men, all long-term smokers more than fifty years old. This group was chosen because they were at high risk for cancer and heart disease. Subjects were given vitamin E, beta-carotene, both, or neither. The results were clear: those taking vitamins and supplements weremore likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease than those who didn't take them -- the opposite of what researchers had anticipated.

In 1996, investigators from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, studied 18,000 people who, because they had been exposed to asbestos, were at increased risk of lung cancer. Again, subjects received vitamin A, beta-carotene, both, or neither. Investigators ended the study abruptly when they realized that those who took vitamins and supplements were dying from cancer and heart disease at rates 28 and 17 percent higher, respectively, than those who didn't.

In 2004, researchers from the University of Copenhagen reviewed fourteen randomized trials involving more than 170,000 people who took vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene to see whether antioxidants could prevent intestinal cancers. Again, antioxidants didn't live up to the hype. The authors concluded, "We could not find evidence that antioxidant supplements can prevent gastrointestinal cancers; on the contrary, they seem to increase overall mortality." When these same researchers evaluated the seven best studies, they found that death rates were 6 percent higher in those taking vitamins.

In 2005, researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine evaluated nineteen studies involving more than 136,000people and found an increased risk of death associated with supplemental vitamin E. Dr. Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, "This reaffirms what others have said. The evidence for supplementing with any vitamin, particularly vitamin E, is just not there. This idea that people have that [vitamins] will not hurt them may not be that simple." That same year, a study published in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association evaluated more than 9,000 people who took high-dose vitamin E to prevent cancer; those who took vitamin E were more likely to develop heart failure than those who didn't.

In 2007, researchers from the National Cancer Institute examined 11,000 men who did or didn't take multivitamins. Those who took multivitamins were twice as likely to die from advanced prostate cancer.

In 2008, a review of all existing studies involving more than 230,000 people who did or did not receive supplemental antioxidants found that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease.

On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota evaluated 39,000 older women and found that those who took supplemental multivitamins, magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron died at rates higher than those who didn't. They concluded, "Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements."

Two days later, on October 12, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic published the results of a study of 36,000 men who took vitamin E, selenium, both, or neither. They found that those receiving vitamin E had a 17 percent greater risk of prostate cancer. In response to the study, Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, said, "The concept of multivitamins was sold to Americans by an eager nutraceutical industry to generate profits. There was never any scientific data supporting their usage." On October 25, a headline in the Wall Street Journal asked, "Is This the End of Popping Vitamins?" Studies haven't hurt sales. In 2010, the vitamin industry grossed $28 billion, up 4.4 percent from the year before. "The thing to do with [these reports] is just ride them out," said Joseph Fortunato, chief executive of General Nutrition Centers."We see no impact on our business."

How could this be? Given that free radicals clearly damage cells -- and given that people who eat diets rich in substances that neutralize free radicals are healthier -- why did studies of supplemental antioxidants show they were harmful? The most likely explanation is that free radicals aren't as evil as advertised. Although it's clear that free radicals can damage DNA and disrupt cell membranes, that's not always a bad thing. People need free radicals to kill bacteria and eliminate new cancer cells. But when people take large doses of antioxidants, the balance between free radical production and destruction might tip too much in one direction, causing an unnatural state in which the immune system is less able to kill harmful invaders. Researchers have called this "the antioxidant paradox." Whatever the reason, the data are clear: high doses of vitamins and supplements increase the risk of heart disease and cancer; for this reason, not a single national or international organization responsible for the public's health recommends them.

World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air

This could be very big if the need for fertilizer is drastically reduced. [Link]

Speaking about the technology, which is known as 'N-Fix', Professor Cocking said: "Helping plants to naturally obtain the nitrogen they need is a key aspect of World Food Security. The world needs to unhook itself from its ever increasing reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers produced from fossil fuels with its high economic costs, its pollution of the environment and its high energy costs."

N-Fix is neither genetic modification nor bio-engineering. It is a naturally occurring nitrogen fixing bacteria which takes up and uses nitrogen from the air. Applied to the cells of plants (intra-cellular) via the seed, it provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix nitrogen. Plant seeds are coated with these bacteria in order to create a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship and naturally produce nitrogen.

N-Fix is a natural nitrogen seed coating that provides a sustainable solution to fertiliser overuse and Nitrogen pollution. It is environmentally friendly and can be applied to all crops. Over the last 10 years, The University of Nottingham has conducted a series of extensive research programmes which have established proof of principal of the technology in the laboratory, growth rooms and glasshouses.

The University of Nottingham's Plant and Crop Sciences Division is internationally acclaimed as a centre for fundamental and applied research, underpinning its understanding of agriculture, food production and quality, and the natural environment. It also has one of the largest communities of plant scientists in the UK.

Dr Susan Huxtable, Director of Intellectual Property Commercialisation at The University of Nottingham, believes that the N-Fix technology has significant implications for agriculture, she said: "There is a substantial global market for the N-Fix technology, as it can be applied globally to all crops. N-Fix has the power to transform agriculture, while at the same time offering a significant cost benefit to the grower through the savings that they will make in the reduced costs of fertilisers. It is a great example of how University research can have a world-changing impact."

The N-Fix technology has been licensed by The University of Nottingham to Azotic Technologies Ltd to develop and commercialise N-Fix globally on its behalf for all crop species.

Peter Blezard, CEO of Azotic Technologies added: "Agriculture has to change and N-Fix can make a real and positive contribution to that change. It has enormous potential to help feed more people in many of the poorer parts of the world, while at the same time, dramatically reducing the amount of synthetic nitrogen produced in the world."

The proof of concept has already been demonstrated. The uptake and fixation of nitrogen in a range of crop species has been proven to work in the laboratory and Azotic is now working on field trials in order to produce robust efficacy data. This will be followed by seeking regulatory approval for N-Fix initially in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada and Brazil, with more countries to follow.

Are Humans Hybrids?

Interesting idea. [Link]

For example, one widespread, but erroneous, belief is that all hybrids are sterile. This idea keeps a lot of people from even considering the possibility that humans might be of hybrid origin. This assertion is absolutely false — though I have in fact heard lots of people make it. For instance, in reviewing the reports I collected for my book on hybridization in birds (Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World, Oxford University Press, 2006), which documents some 5,000 different kinds of hybrid crosses among birds, I found that those crosses producing partially fertile hybrids are about eight times as common as crosses known to produce sterile ones. The usual result is a reduction in fertility, not absolute sterility. My current work documenting hybridization among mammals shows that partially fertile natural hybrids are common, too, in Class Mammalia. And yet, it seems most people base their ideas of hybrids on the common mule (horse x ass), which is an exceptionally sterile hybrid, and not at all representative of hybrids as a whole.

I should, perhaps, also mention that differences in parental chromosome counts, even rather large ones, do not preclude the production of fertile hybrids. While differences of this sort do bode ill for the fertility of the resulting progeny, it is only a rule of thumb. For example, female geeps, the products of hybridization between sheep (2n=54) and goats (2n=60), can produce offspring in backcrosses. Likewise, female zeedonks (Burchell's Zebra, 2n=44 x Ass, 2n=62) have also been fertile in backcrosses. There are many other examples of this sort among mammalian hybrids. Therefore, such differences between the parents in a cross do not in any way guarantee an absolute sterility in the hybrid offspring. (For those readers who do not know, backcross hybrids are produced when hybrids from a first cross mate with either of the two types of parents that produced them. When the resulting progeny mate again with the same parental type, the result is the second backcross generation, and so forth.)

A second so-called fact, which might make it seem impossible for humans to have had a hybrid origin, is the equally erroneous notion that hybrids, especially successful hybrids, do not occur in a state of nature. A third is the mistaken idea that only plants hybridize, and never animals. In fact, however, natural, viable, fertile animal hybrids are abundant. A wide variety of such hybrids occur on an ongoing basis (read a detailed discussion documenting these facts). For example, of the 5,000 different types of hybrid crosses listed in my book on hybridization in birds, approximately half are known to occur in a natural setting (download a PowerPoint presentation summarizing data on hybridization in birds). My current research indicates a comparable rate for mammals.

Sequence data. And I must now emphasize a fact that I, as a geneticist, find somewhat disappointing: With nucleotide sequence data, it can be very difficult to identify later-generation backcross hybrids derived from several repeated generations of backcrossing (for a full explanation of this fact, see the green sidebar at far right). Instead, as is the case with other later-generation backcross hybrids, the most revealing data is of an anatomical and/or physiological nature. And this is exactly the kind of hybrid that it looks like we are -- that is, it appears that humans are the result of multiple generations of backcrossing to the chimpanzee.

Human infertility. Another observation that appears significant in connection with the hypothesis under consideration is that it has been well known for decades that human sperm is abnormal in comparison with that of the typical mammal. Human spermatozoa are not of one uniform type as in the vast majority of all other types of animals. Moreover, human sperm is not merely abnormal in appearance — a high percentage of human spermatozoa are actually dysfunctional. These and other facts demonstrate that human fertility is low in comparison with that of other mammals (for detailed documentation of this fact see the article Evidence of Human Infertility). Infertility and sperm abnormalities are characteristic of hybrids. So this finding suggests that it's reasonable to suppose, at least for the sake of argument, that humans might be of hybrid origin. It is also consistent with the idea that the hybridization in question was between two rather distinct and genetically incompatible types of animals, that is, it was a distant cross.

As the reader might imagine, if the assumption is correct that one of our parents is the chimpanzee, then it should be possible actually to identify the other parent as well. A hybrid combines traits otherwise seen only separately in the two parental forms from which it is derived, and it is typically intermediate to those parents with respect to a wide range of characters. Naturalists routinely use these facts to identify the parents of hybrids of unknown origin, even backcross hybrids.Methodology. The chimpanzee is plausible in the role of one of the parents that crossed to produce the human race because they are generally recognized as being closest to humans in terms of their genetics (here, I use the term chimpanzeeloosely to refer to either the common chimpanzee or to the bonobo, also known as the pygmy chimpanzee; the specific roles of these two rather similar apes within the context of the present hypothesis will be explained in a subsequent section). But then the question arises: If an ancient cross between the chimpanzee and some parental form "X" produced the first humans, then what was that parent? Does it still exist? What was it like?

First they posit a particular type of organism as similar to the putative hybrid (in the present case, this organism is the chimpanzee). They then list traits distinguishing the hybrid from the hypothesized parent, and this list of distinguishing traits will describe the second parent. A detailed analysis of such a triad will often establish the parentage of the hybrid. The traits in question in such studies are generally anatomical, not genetic. DNA evidence is used in only a very small percentage of such identifications (and even then, rarely in efforts to identify backcross hybrids), and yet firm conclusions can generally be reached.

So in the specific case of humans, if the two assumptions made thus far are correct (i.e., (1) that humans actually are hybrids, and (2) that the chimpanzee actually is one of our two parents), then a list of traits distinguishing human beings from chimpanzees should describe the other parent involved in the cross. And by applying this sort of methodology, I have in fact succeeded in narrowing things down to a particular candidate. That is, I looked up every human distinction that I could find and, so long as it was cited by an expert (physical anthropologist, anatomist, etc), I put it on a list. And that list, which includes many, many traits (see the lengthy table on the right-hand side of the next page), consistently describes a particular animal. Keep reading and I'll explain.

(Short answer: pigs)

Actual 'Green' energy

Electricity from plants. [Link]

[T]hey've discovered a way to generate electricity from plants through hijacking the photosynthesis process. By altering the proteins inside a plant cell's thylakoids, which store solar energy, scientists can intercept electrons through a carbon nanotube backing that draws them away before they're used to make sugar. While the resulting power isn't phenomenal, it's still two orders of magnitude better than previous methods, according to the university. The protein modification method may have a rosier future, as well: the team believes that it could eventually compete with solar cells

Americans are WEIRD; Science proves it!

We are WEIRD: "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic". Westerners score different on tests that were once thought to be universal; Americans doubly so. [Link]

It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

How did religion affect the Psychology of cultures?

When Norenzayan became a student of psychology in 1994, four years after his family had moved from Lebanon to America, he was excited to study the effect of religion on human psychology. “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”

Norenzayan became interested in how certain religious beliefs, handed down through generations, may have shaped human psychology to make possible the creation of large-scale societies. He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations. To be cooperative in large groups of relative strangers, in other words, might have required the shared belief that an all-powerful being was forever watching over your shoulder.

If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.

Why, I asked Norenzayan, if religion might have been so central to human psychology, have researchers not delved into the topic? “Experimental psychologists are the weirdest of the weird,” said Norenzayan. “They are almost the least religious academics, next to biologists. And because academics mostly talk amongst themselves, they could look around and say, ‘No one who is important to me is religious, so this must not be very important.’” Indeed, almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.

Bipartisan anti-science from Congress

Vaccines save lives and DO NOT cause Autism. Science has proven this, but we still had to have hearings on it. [Link]

Let me be clear right off the bat: Vaccines don’t cause autism.

It’s really that simple. We know they don’t. There have been extensive studies comparing groups of children who have been vaccinated with, say, the measles, mumps, and rublella (MMR) vaccine versus those who have not, and it’s very clear that there is no elevated rate of autism in the vaccinated children.

This simple truth is denied vigorously and vociferously by antivaxxers (those who oppose, usually rabidly, the use of vaccinations that prevent diseases), but they may as well deny the Earth is round and the sky is blue. It’s rock solid fact. They try to blame mercury in vaccines, but we knowthat mercury has nothing to do with autism; whenthimerosal (a mercury compound) was removed from  vaccines there was absolutely no change in the increase in autism rates.

I could go on and on. Virtually every claim made by antivaxxers is wrong. And this is a critically important issue; vaccines have literally saved hundreds of millions of lives. They save infants from potentially fatal but preventable diseases like pertussis and the flu.

So why did Congress hold hearings this week promoting crackpot antivax views?

Interactive Drake Equation

The Drake Equation is used to try to figure out why we have not seen any evidence of other intelligent life other than what is on Earth. Here is an interactive one from the BBC where you can change the numbers and recalculate how many civilizations in the Galaxy and in the Universe. [Link]

What has NASA done for you and your life?

A whole lot. (Reload for more) [Link]

Living With Voices

Fascinating article about a novel way to treat schizophrenia: negotiate with the voices. [Link]

So Hans found himself in an inpatient psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for more than a year. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given Clozaril, one of the new “miracle” drugs for schizophrenia—miracle for a small handful of patients, a desperate stopgap for the rest. Nothing really changed for Hans on Clozaril, neither his voices nor his delusions, but he became calm. He became so calm that he slept all day. His panicked mother argued with the doctors, telling them this was no kind of life. They told her sleeping was normal “at this stage.” Hans’s skin itched. He gained 90 pounds, and now he could not think clearly or move comfortably, a Michelin man with tubby limbs. Over the course of the year, little changed.

Then Hans joined a group of people like him who met once a week. They talked about their voices, and they were encouraged to talk back to them. They were even encouraged to negotiate with their voices. One of Hans’s voices thought he would be better off if he devoted his life to Buddhist prayer. Hans is not a Buddhist—like many Dutch, he grew up as a secular Protestant—and he did not want to follow the voice’s command. The group persuaded him to cut a deal with his voices. He told his voices that he would read a book on Buddhism every day for one hour—but no more. He would say one Buddhist prayer every day—but no more. And if he did this, he told them, they had to leave him alone.

They did, more or less. He began to feel better. His psychiatrists began to lower his Clozaril from its high of 500 mg per day down eventually to a dose of 50 mg. He lost weight. He became more alert. He moved out of the hospital. The voices didn’t disappear immediately, but they got nicer. When he was moving into an apartment by himself—and petrified by the prospect—he heard a voice say, “Buck up, we know you can do it.” By the time I met him in 2009, he hadn’t heard a voice in more than a year.

The important questions that need answering

Could you build a minifig scale Death Star? [Link]

Just when you thought everything was over, it keeps going. What if this Lego set were indeed in orbit around the Earth? Low Earth orbit (with an altitude of 300 km). What would it look like? Well, first let me say that the angular size of the the moon is about 0.53 degrees. If this 3.52 km diameter radius object was in orbit, it would have an angular size of:

So, it would appear bigger than the actual real moon. You know I am going to make a diagram showing that. Here it is.

How cool would that be? People would mistake it for a moon, just like Han Solo did.  Well, it look just like the moon except that it would just take a couple of minutes to pass across the sky where the moon doesn’t really seem to change its position.

That's no moon. It's bigger.

New Blood Types Found

It's not just A, B, AB, or O anymore. [Link]

Transfusion troubles

Beyond the ABO blood type and the Rhesus (Rh) blood type, the International Blood Transfusion Society recognizes twenty-eight additional blood types with names like Duffy, Kidd, Diego and Lutheran. But Langereis and Junior have not been on this list. Although the antigens for the Junior and Langereis (or Lan) blood types were identified decades ago in pregnant women having difficulties carrying babies with incompatible blood types, the genetic basis of these antigens has been unknown until now.

Therefore, "very few people learn if they are Langereis or Junior positive or negative," Ballif says.

"Transfusion support of individuals with an anti-Lan antibody is highly challenging," the research team wrote in Nature Genetics, "partly because of the scarcity of compatible blood donors but mainly because of the lack of reliable reagents for blood screening." And Junior-negative blood donors are extremely rare too. That may soon change.

With the findings from this new research, health care professionals will now be able to more rapidly and confidently screen for these novel blood group proteins, Ballif wrote in a recent news article. "This will leave them better prepared to have blood ready when blood transfusions or other tissue donations are required," he notes.

"Now that we know these proteins, it will become a routine test," he says.

A better match

This science may be especially important to organ transplant patients. "As we get better and better at transplants, we do everything we can to make a good match," Ballif says. But sometimes a tissue or organ transplant, that looked like a good match, doesn't work -- and the donated tissue is rejected, which can lead to many problems or death.

"We don't always know why there is rejection," Ballif says, "but it may have to do with these proteins."

The rejection of donated tissue or blood is caused by the way the immune system distinguishes self from not-self. "If our own blood cells don't have these proteins, they're not familiar to our immune system," Ballif says, so the new blood doesn't "look like self" to the complex cellular defenses of the immune system. "They'll develop antibodies against it," Ballif says, and try to kill off the perceived invaders. In short, the body starts to attack itself.

"Then you may be out of luck," says Ballif, who notes that in addition to certain Japanese populations, European Gypsies are also at higher risk for not carrying the Langereis and Junior blood type proteins.

"There are people in the United States who have these challenges too," he says, "but it's more rare."

Other proteins

Ballif and his international colleagues are not done with their search. "We're following up on more unknown blood types," he says. "There are probably on the order of 10 to 15 more of these unknown blood type systems -- where we know there is a problem but we don't know what the protein is that is causing the problem."

Although these other blood systems are very rare, "if you're that one individual, and you need a transfusion," Ballif says, "there's nothing more important for you to know."

Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution

The man who saved tens of millions from starving. [Link]

The need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain, and in his later years, Borlaug turned his efforts to ensuring the success of this century’s equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or “genetic modification” (GM), to agriculture. As Borlaug and other plant scientists realized, the use of the term “genetic modification” to apply only to the newest genetic techniques is an unfortunate misnomer because plant scientists had been using crude and laborious techniques to obtain new genetic variants of wheat, corn, and innumerable other crops for decades, if not centuries. Products now in development with gene-splicing techniques offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines.

However, small numbers of dedicated extremists in the environmental movement have been doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks, and their allies in national and United Nations-based regulatory agencies are more than eager to help. Activists have trotted out the same kinds of rumors to frighten rural illiterates that confronted Borlaug a half-century earlier—that gene-spliced plants cause impotence or sterility, or that they harm farm animals, for example. As Borlaug observed about opposition to modernizing agricultural practices in India in 1966, “The situation was tailor-made for demagogues, fear-mongers, second-guessers and hate groups. We heard from them all.” In the twenty-first century, they continue to spew their lethal venom.

Occasionally, spurious reports about modern genetic engineering manage to enter even the peer-reviewed literature; a recent example is an absurd, nearly psychotic rant about the supposed negative impacts of gene-spliced soybeans in Argentina. As my colleagues Kent Bradford and Bruce Chassy wrote about that article, “The text is largely a rambling discourse of unfounded and subjective opinion. It contains inadequate and erroneous documentation. Many of the claims made are either not supported by references, or are based on non-peer reviewed references, including press articles.”

Borlaug was concerned that these kinds of attacks were examples of history repeating itself: 

At the time [of the Green Revolution], Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, “Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Hill was right. His prediction anticipated the gene-splicing era that would arrive decades later. . . . The naysayers and bureaucrats have now come into their own. If our new varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available” [emphasis in original].

Borlaug observed that the enemies of innovation might create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.” After slowing the progress of gene-splicing technology by advocating excessive regulation and after filing lawsuits to prevent the testing and commercialization of gene-spliced plants and even vandalizing field trials, activists have had the audacity to accuse the scientists and agribusiness companies of having overpromised technological advances.

This reminds me of a relevant Heinlein quote:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck.".”

- Robert A. Heinlein