Category Archives: Science and Technology

The New Frontier

Posted on by ninjanurse
Earthrise from Apollo 8

Earthrise from Apollo 8

It’s hard to believe fifty years have passed…

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) – Astronaut John Glenn, marking the 50th anniversary on Monday of his historic flight as the first American to orbit the Earth, remembered it as the best day of his life.

Glenn, 90, told an audience in Columbus, Ohio that the flight was the result of “more than two years of training and working with a marvelous team.”

“That is why the craft was called Friendship 7, because of the team,” he said.

Glenn’s groundbreaking flight on February 20, 1962 put the United States into a heated space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit 10 months earlier.

Astronaut Glenn returned to space at age 77 for science experiments on the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Where is the next New Frontier? I see a Green Energy Race. Optimistic? Yes. When you know that we put a man on the moon you’re not afraid to think big.

And let’s hear it for science. When you’re sitting in a tin can orbiting earth you trust the ground crew to work on fact, not opinion. Especially when they are calculating how to get the Friendship back without burning up in the atmosphere. Faith has its place, but not in math.

Blessed Solstice

Posted on by ninjanurse

Winter Begins

Winter solstice takes place on Thursday, Dec. 22 at 12:30 a.m. EST. This lovely image is your tax dollars at work, from NASA.gov.

The cool astronomical diagram is from the BBC. If you are even a little bit nerdy you will enjoy the explanation of how the seasons are measured. I never knew that winter is the shortest season, I always thought February was three months long.

Circuit of the Sun

My minister, quoting science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

That’s why I like Solstice as a winter holiday. You don’t have to believe in it, it doesn’t demand faith, it just happens as it has since long before life began on this planet.

Don’t put too much credence in the ‘shortest day’ hype, though. The days do not begin to lengthen appreciably until early February, when we celebrate Candlemas, the halfway point to spring.

New App Measures News Bias

Posted on by ninjanurse

I wonder how Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network news would rate on this? A new app takes the labor out of counting word use on network news. From Reuters, today…

Ever wanted to know how biased Fox News and CNN really are? A new OS X app called News Mapper helps you to find out by making the program of both cable news networks real-time searchable. Users can, for example, search for uses of politically charged vocabulary like Obamacare or mentions of embattled media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the app displays the frequency with which each word was mentioned in a graph that gets updated in real time as the news coverage continues.

Users can then click on the time line and browse small snippets of transcripts from each network, revealing the context in which a word was used. News Mapper even generates tag clouds for the most commonly mentioned words on CNN and Fox News.

Bias is quantifiable, this app will appeal to news junkies and generate many colorful charts and graphs to illuminate blogs. Cool.

But where is it? I found News Map which is colorful and looks like fun. I’ll have to find a kid to explain all this to me.

You Go, Girl!

Posted on by ninjanurse

A lot of great discoveries in physics were made by young scientists, this one is really cool…

SYDNEY (AFP) – A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called “missing mass” of the universe during her summer break.

Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University’s School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called “filaments of galaxies”.

In space no one can hear you argue politics. That’s why I read science to relax.

A Candidate for the Ig Nobel Prize?

Posted on by ninjanurse

I was stuck in traffic once behind a car with a bumper sticker that read, ‘God said it, I believe it, that settles it’. That driver did not seem like someone I’d want to have a beer with, or sit down with at break time. What would you say to someone who broadcast their belligerent certainty that way?

My loved ones continue to tell me that the Rapture is imminent– look at the signs. Weather and politics, people behaving badly, new problems emerging all the time. When in human history have we seen such days? That settles it.

The problem with growing up among believers, and having to sharpen your skepticism in self-defense, is that you can’t turn it off.

So when I saw this headline on Yahoo News I did not take the bait and go off on a tirade of internet snark…

‘Being ‘Born-Again’ Linked to More Brain Atrophy: Study’

WEDNESDAY, May 25 (HealthDay News) — Older adults who say they’ve had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.

According to the study, people who said they were a “born-again” Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or “atrophy”) compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again.

Okay, so what about Jews? And did they study any coffee-drinking Unitarians? Coffee is supposed to make you smart, and Unitarians have coffee hour after service. Unitarians aren’t exactly Protestants, I’ve been told. (I’m not sure about Protestants generally. I was born Catholic. You only had to know about 2 kinds of people, Catholics and non-Catholics.) I’m a born-again Pagan now. Is this the way you write when your hippocampus shrinks?

Well, I still have enough brain cells left to skip past Yahoo and go to the original study, which they were good enough to link to.

It was published on PLoSONE, an online science journal that charges over $1,000 to peer-review and publish an article. Not to say that the content isn’t good, but it’s a little like a vanity press, not exactly the Penguin Classics Deluxe of science publishing.

The study was small, under 300 participants, and lasted an average of four years per subject. MRI’s were taken, which is really expensive. So I’m wondering if this study piggy-backed onto another study. It looks like it was done at Duke University. It would make sense for these researcher to add questionnaires to an ongoing MRI study, or else they had a rich patron. Were the study subjects random average people, or did they have something in common that would confound the interpretation of results?

Can scientists sort out subject’s religious beliefs accurately enough to correlate with MRI results? Here in America we’ve been accused of shopping around and picking and choosing our religion. A lot of people have kind of invented their own. I know enough born-again people not to lump them all together, or to underestimate them either. ‘Christian’ means very different things to different people.

I don’t want to harsh on these scientists, but I think this study might be re-published in the ‘Journal of Irreproducible Results’.

Rhode Island’s Nuclear Fatality–Part I

Posted on by ninjanurse

This is in memory of Robert Peabody, a husband and father working a second job to support his family, assigned to a dangerous task in an unsafe workplace, poisoned by a nuclear reaction. There are lessons to learn, may we not forget them.

It’s been almost thirty years since the Three Mile Island disaster put a halt to the expansion of nuclear power in the US. Public opinion was already turning against the industry. Once promising cheap, clean electricity, the power plants in fact required massive taxpayer subsidies to build and a special exemption from liability in case the worst happened.

The worst almost happened at Three Mile Island …

Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the Three Mile Island accident.

The worst-case accident occurred in 1986 at Chernobyl.

Today, a generation after the gas lines and bitter winters of the 1970′s, we’re again caught unprepared. We still depend on foreign oil and large, centralized power plants. Investment in alternative energy has been cut to a trickle since Ronald Reagan. The nuclear industry is portraying itself as a clean, green savior. Safety concerns are dismissed as a superstitious fear of radioactivity…

In more than 500 reactor years of service in the United States, there has never been a death or a serious injury to plant employees or to the public caused by a commercial reactor accident or radiation exposure. Says Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences: “Nuclear power is the safest major technology ever introduced into the United States.” link

In fact, a Rhode Island man was killed on the job by radiation exposure. In 1964 in Charlestown, Rhode Island, Robert Peabody was working the second shift at the United Nuclear waste processing plant. The training was minimal, supervision lax and written policies inadequate. Peabody, a Navy vet and mechanic, had picked up a second job to support his large family. When he came on the evening shift, no one warned him that a container full of radioactive water was more concentrated than what he usually handled. When he emptied it into a larger tank the highly concentrated sludge set off a fission reaction…

A blue glow filled the small room as the radiation charged the air with electricity. Peabody was blown flat on his back. The force of the blast also sprayed radioactive solution onto the tower ceiling, 12 feet above. Some of the volatile fluid gushed over the tank lip and onto the floor. The entire plant was instantly filled with the sound of screaming sirens.(Providence Journal, Sunday Journal Magazine ‘Chain Reaction’ 3/11/90)

[ 'Chain Reaction' is not available online free of charge. Yankee Magazine has an online article that covers the same incident, with more technical detail. This is some buried history that the Journal should re-publish.]

Two other workers who responded to the accident were exposed to a second, smaller fission reaction.

Robert Peabody was doomed in an instant, but it took him 49 hours to die. Turned away from Westerly Hospital, he was driven at top speed to Rhode Island Hospital by ambulance driver John Shibilio and placed in an isolation room. His widow attributes her cancer to the minutes she held her dying husband’s hand. Everything he touched had to be decontaminated or burned. His remains were cremated. He left nine children.

His death, and the corporate denial afterward, is an example of the weak regulation and lack of accountability that leaves workers unprotected. The danger to the public is not imaginary.

The nuclear industry likes to compare its safety record to coal. But much of the danger of coal mining is a matter of priorities. Worker safety is balanced against profit. A mine accident is a disaster for the miners and their community. A nuclear accident such as Chernobyl sends radioactive particles across national borders. Millions are unaware that they are exposed. These particles contain elements that do not degrade for many thousands of years, that accumulate in our bodies and concentrate up the food chain, capable of causing cancer and birth defects many generations after the accident.

The Peabody family was left bereft and in poverty. Robert Peabody was blamed for the accident that killed him.

EVEN AS PEABODY was admitted to the hospital, United Nuclear was working to discredit him, blaming “human error” and “ineptitude” in newspaper accounts of the accident. In addition to assuring the public that any radiation released into the atmosphere was insignificant, company officials said that Peabody had violated plant safety procedures by pouring the contents of the 11-liter “safe” bottle into the “unsafe” chemical tank. (Providence Journal 3/11/90)

No danger to the public. No blame to the corporation. They say it’s different now. Trust them.

For the aftermath of the accident, see Part II.

Scientific Advance Brings New Hope

Posted on by ninjanurse

Angela Christiano is a researcher on the front lines of hair promotion and preservation.

My mom and her mother had hair loss from a young age. I have a cousin also who lost all of her hair. Ironically, hair is a big part of my family’s life. My grandfather was a barber in Italy and then later in New Jersey. And my mother was a hairdresser before retiring. I’m the first person in my family to go to college and graduate school: Rutgers. My mother now says, “You’re just another hair person — you just do it differently.”

Dr. Christiano was facing divorce and a career crossroads. A personal crisis revealed the direction her experiments would take…

In 1995, a time of big transitions in my life. After doing highly successful postdoctoral research on genetic blistering skin diseases at Jefferson Medical College, I’d arrived here at Columbia to start my own laboratory. I had just turned 30. I was getting a divorce. When you start your first lab, a researcher is expected to find something different from their postdoc work. For my first six months here, I sat thinking, “What am I going to do when I grow up?”

In the midst of all this, I went to a beauty parlor and the stylist said: “What’s happened here? You have a big patch of hair missing from the back of your head.” I ignored that. But the next day at the lab, I asked a colleague to take a look. She let out a bloodcurdling scream: “You have a huge bald spot!”

Dr. Christiano was well qualified to tackle the affliction of hair loss. Hair and skin are part of the integumentary system, and skin disease was the focus of her previous research…

None of this history, however, led Christiano to her studies. That happened with remarkable serendipity. After she earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1991, she began an emotionally wrenching postdoctoral fellowship: hunting down the genetic basis of epidermolysis bullosa, a childhood disease that causes disfiguring and even fatal blisters. Every few months, Christiano collected blood samples from children at Rockefeller University Hospital in New York City to analyze their DNA. “These kids are covered from head to foot with blisters that are like third-degree burns. They have to be bandaged constantly. And to take those bandages off, you have to soak the children in warm water because if you just took the gauze off, you would take their skin off.”

Christiano felt powerless because scientists knew so little about the disease. But over the next five years she isolated one gene, then another, and another, until more than 50 mutations on several genes associated with epidermolysis bullosa had been nailed. Not only did her research lay the groundwork for effective genetic counseling, but she also developed the first prenatal test for the disease. She was 30.

Read the rest here at Discover Magazine. Dr. Christiano sounds like a really nice person. And I have to like a woman who knows her way around a hair salon and directs her own research lab.

Her discoveries will do more than treat hair loss, but if she gets rich doing that it will be well-deserved.

GETTING SERIOUS: Mary Beth Williams at Salon writes about surviving cancer and how the hair loss really is a big deal. Best wishes, Mary Beth, may you live to be 100 and have good hair to the end.

More and Better Predictions

Posted on by ninjanurse

Still searching for some credible psychic forecasts, but the field is pretty thin. Someone named Nikki from the Toronto Sun says that the year will be ‘up and down’, there might be earthquakes and celebrities will get married. And Michelle Obama will have twins. Maybe.

I give Nikki credit for being specific, but Michelle Obama is 46 years old. Hypothetically any famous woman that age might have twins, but I wouldn’t bet on it. And if I were Michelle Obama, I wouldn’t try. I’d let well enough alone.

Why psychics use their extraordinary gifts to tell us things like ‘Warren Beatty and Annette Benning will break up’ is beyond me. It seems like such a waste.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has a fifty-year prediction that is way more fun than vague guesses that there ‘could’ be a political sex scandal. I’m going to take a leap and say there will. And dogs will continue to bark.

Ray Villard speculates on possible findings from SETI by the year 2060. Here’s a scenario after we find out that we are not alone…

Finding and processing SETI transmissions becomes a bona fide science data collection program rather than exercise in hypothesis. Astronomers scramble to apply for research grants, and dream about receiving the Noble Prize.

Some signals are dug out of radio archival data. This kind of “hello we are here” message turn out to be surprisingly common along the galactic plane. Technological civilizations at a particular state of evolution apparently converge on similar beacon strategies that are energy-frugal and efficient.

In the absence of an exclusively directed transmission toward Earth, SETI astronomers diminish expectations of finding altruistic aliens wanting to share their advanced knowledge. Maybe the extraterrestrials are satisfied with simply broadcasting interstellar “tweets.”

The whole article reads like one of the smart sci-fi paperbacks.

Astronomers (not to be confused with astrologers) predict that the sun, after a longer than average quiet period, will begin to surge with energy flares, reaching solar max in 2013. This might effect satellites and other electronics, if 2012 hasn’t sent us back to the stone age.

I predict that by 2060 there will be a revival of the Luddites. Adherants will reject all electronic toys in favor of books and pencils. They will walk everywhere, which will make them generally fit and attractive. This will give them great appeal to youth, who will not tune in, but will drop out– causing much social disruption. You heard it here first.

Insecure About Privacy

Posted on by ninjanurse

Before I went back to school for nursing I worked in photofinishing. I sat in a curtained booth scrolling through rolls of negatives viewing the positive images– this was done for color correction. I saw enough weddings– and cake smushings, to be glad I eloped.

People would tell me that no one looks at your pictures– it’s all done on machines. Au contraire. The minimum-wage workers running the machines would line their booths with prints of anything interesting that came through. The job was monotonous and it didn’t take much. Cute dogs, cute babies, scenic landscapes, and anything naked would end up on the wall.

I can’t blame people for being worried about airport body scans…

The government has reassured the flying public time and time again that any naked images of them at airport checkpoints would be destroyed immediately.
But now new attention is being focused on another agency of the federal government — the U.S. Marshals Service — that in at least one case has been keeping thousands of similar naked images recorded by its body scanners.

Technology marches on, so it’s certain that images will become clearer and scanners cheaper. People worry that their image will end up on the internet.

Not to slander TSA workers, who seem nice enough and very hard working when I go through security, but there’s always a few bad apples. Click here for a bizarre story about a worker who was driven to assault a fellow worker who would not shut up about what he saw on the body scan.

I am not happy about the radiation. For myself, okay, but if I had an infant I wouldn’t want him scanned. The health effects might show up decades later.

I don’t have the answer, but I’ve seen enough to ask a couple of questions.

How much trust can you put in assurances that–’it’s totally risk free’ and ‘it’s totally confidential’?

Kind of Fun

Posted on by ninjanurse

I used to have the SETI at Home screensaver on my desktop until it crashed. It was pretty. It would be very cool if SETI actually caught a message from the depths of space, but most likely we’ll just have to solve our own problems down here. Unless the Rapture comes.

I’d bet that the odds of extra-terrestrial radio contact are a little better than the Rapture, and SETI thinks so too. They are planning a 50th anniversary re-check of some of the closest stars.

In a vast cosmic experiment equivalent to hitting “redial,” astronomers in a dozen countries are aiming telescopes to listen in once again on some of the stars that were part of the world’s first search for alien life 50 years ago.

The coordinated signal-searching campaign began this month to mark the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a 1960 experiment that was christened the world’s first real attempt in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – or SETI.

Like Project Ozma, which got its name from a character in L. Frank Baum’s series of books about the Land of Oz, the new search is called Project Dorothy.

A lot has been learned in fifty years, including where some extrasolar planets are. The SETI astronomers might not find alien intelligence, but they’re sure to come up with something good.