Science Feeds

SUMMARY: One of the most important numbers is irrationalScreengrab. π has fascinated mathematicians, engineers and other people for centuries. It is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (C) to its diameter (d);

SUMMARY: This video captures a weird plant behaviour; a sensitive plant folding up its leaves in response to a variety of disturbances Screengrab: sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica. I am sure many of you have met sensitive plants, Mimosa pudica, on your travels through the local glasshouses and plants nurseries. This plant is native to Central and South America, but now it seems to have escaped captivity and has established itself in several parts of the world. Neither this plant nor its flowers are particularly attractive, in my opinion, but it is a popular houseplant because of a particular “behaviour” it exhibits. Basically, this plant closes its leaves at night and opens them in the morning. But that’s not all; this plant also closes its leaves in response to being touched, blown on, shaken, or heated. Below the jump is a charming video that captures the plant’s movements in response to being touched, bumped, hit, and heated with fire along with time lapse videography that captures the plant opening its leaves again a few minutes later.

<!-- START CODE --><!-- END CODE --> <!-- Place this tag where you want the su badge to render --> Sneakers, computers, and little plastic toys can go all over the world, but people cannot. No matter who you are, there’s some country where you can’t go. Those of us who do get to travel, we cherish our journeys. We bring knowlege to and from our waypoints. We meet people. We tie the world together more tightly. Hiding here in plain sight is a solution to global poverty that works many times better than foreign aid.

I live in Maine (The way life should be, only colder). We’re right next to Canada and sometimes I like to cross the border. A couple of years ago I found myself in Fort Kent (top edge of nowhwere). I had an hour to kill. I wanted to cross the border for a bit — buy a baguette and wash it down with un café au lait.

Do I look suspicious to you? Canada seems to think so. Getting through the border was arduous. I was questioned by several people. My car was searched. I had to submit to a criminal background check (good thing they didn’t know my name used to be D.B. Cooper).

The funniest part was right before the criminal background check. It had to go inside the main office after entering Canada. After passing through the gate, the guard pointed it out and said “Go there.” I was not accompanied. After driving a couple feet were no guards in sight. I could have just kept on driving. This kind of “enforcement” doesn’t stop criminals, but it annoys honest people to no end.

How hard it is to get into the U.S.A.? It’s quite difficult for most of the developing world, but they come. They jump the hurdles and jump through the hoops. What happens when they do come? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? More and more people are making the case that we all win — even the countries these people are coming from. Andrew Mountford said this in a paper back in 1997, “Can a brain drain be good for growth in thesource economy?” [Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 53 (1997) 287-303].

Why do they come? Usually for economic gain. They want our jobs, of course, but mostly the ones we don’t want. It’s not just janitorial work anymore. All those jobs in science and technology that require a deep math background - it seems like we don’t want them. Some of us just hate math. Others are being actively discouraged or prevented from pursuing math and science [“America’s Wasted Talent: A Karplus Lecture”, David Drew, Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1998].

Consider now the unintended consequences of all this immigration:

1. Many of the world’s experts have immigrated here
2. Many immigrants send remittances home
3. Many immigrants return home to start businesses or teach
4. Brain drain changes the payoff matrix in those source countries

It is a wonderful thing that we have so many experts in this country. Engineers, Physicists, Chemists, Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, … so many of them were foreign-born. By their ambition and guts they came here. By our opportunity we attracted them. Without them our economy would suffer. Inventions would go uninvented. Courses untaught. These foreigners are national treasures.

Consider remittances. It’s a wonderful thing to receive a check from a family member when you’re poor. However you define poverty, poverty is inefficient. Attempt to fathom the daily mammoth worldwide effort spent on subsistence farming and washing clothes by hand; think of all those people carrying heavy loads on their heads. Highly intelligent people all over the world are walking for miles to work for pennies because they have no other option. They should be curing cancer or solving the Millenium Problems. As a race we are wasting precious cognitive resources. Poverty pours talent down the drain. However, when a family member in the U.S. sends money back home, that money can send them to school. It can pay for clothes and food. It can transform their lives.

Importantly, almost all of the money gets into the hands of poor people in the target country (Western Union fees vary by country and amount). Compare this to the IMF. According to the Brookings Institution, the IMF spends %20Best%20and%20Worst%20Practices%20in%20Foreign%20Aid.pdf?1">75 cents for every dollar that actually goes to the needy country - and how many of those dollars do you think actually get into the hands of needy people? (See pg.19 of %20Best%20and%20Worst%20Practices%20in%20Foreign%20Aid.pdf?1">this report).

Not everyone stays in the U.S. forever. They return to their home countries and start buisnesses or they teach. People call this “brain circulation.” The whole world is slowly becoming a melting pot of people and ideas.

Imagine you’re trying to make ends meet. You live in a developing country where you can hope for $5/day, maybe. Five of your family members moved the U.S.A., where each earns more than $100/day, but they had to get educated first. What would you do?

People watch their friends and family achieve success through education and emigration. It changes how they see the world. It opens their minds to options in a payoff matrix they would have otherwise never considered. Brain Drain inspires education and training. People call this the “Brain Gain,” and according to NYU‘s Development Research Institute, it can offset brain drain entirely.

In conclusion, immigration could potentially solve global poverty. Let the people in. Have a border check to monitor who comes and goes — of course, but let the people in, without the need for visas. Ironically, if we allowed people to move freely, the “undocumented” among us would spend more time in their home countries visiting family.

We’re only keeping out the honest law-abiding people anyway. Criminals and terrorists won’t be stopped by a little border station.


LINKS :

Four Ways Brain Drain out of Africa is a good thing, by Laura Freschi (New York University’s Development Research Institute)

Is Brain Drain Good for Africa? by Stephanie Hanson (Council on Foreign Relations)

Can a brain drain be good for growth in the source economy? by Andrew Mountford

“America’s Wasted Talent: A Karplus Lecture,” by David Drew

Opposing view :Brain Drain And Brain Gain In Africa, by Dr. Ravinder Rena (Eritrea Institute of Technology)

Today’s Nature Middle East published an interesting and thought-provoking commentary from Dr. Nidhal Guessoum, an astrophysicist and professor of physics at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, entitled: Does the Arab world (not) need basic science?

The accompanying blurb nicely summarizes the main argument in the commentary.

The Arab world cannot afford to ignore curiousity-driven basic research in favour of applied research, if the different states hope to produce an enlightened science culture at home.

Dr. Guessoum starts by defining what he considers basic vis-à-vis applied research. For the basic research, he refers – and justly in my opinion – to the French description thereof:

The French say “recherche fondamentale”, referring to any research around a foundational topic, be it in the laws and fabric of nature or in the essential components (particles, fields), interactions and phenomena that we need to scientifically understand and describe it.

This definition of Basic Sciences is profoundly important, because it accepts the premises that empirical, evidence-driven scientific research is the only real way available to humanity for exploring, learning about, and understanding nature in all its glory and the laws that govern the natural phenomena. In fact, it would not be stretching a point to consider that Basic Sciences research is fundamentally grounded in rationality.

In contrast, Applied Sciences research – what Dr. Guessoum also refers to as ‘development research’ – is done with the express purpose of testing and developing an idea into a tangible product, such as a particular technology, that can be put to good use in the society.

While acknowledging the need for continued support of applied research, Dr. Guessoum makes a strong argument for basic research. He discusses the primary defence of basic research, noting that “… few innovations are made without prior discoveries in fundamental science.” In addition, he makes a more fundamental appeal, saying:

I believe that science is not solely, or even primarily, for improving lifestyles: it is for human progress. We humans have been blessed with reason, intelligence, and the growing capacity to control our environment. With this comes the responsibility of both stewardship (khilafah in Arabic) and proper moral behavior and spiritual attitude (amanah).

This is a deeply recondite statement; in fact, I can find no stronger argument for the support of basic sciences, the foundational concept being reason and application thereof, in order to find answers about everything around us, some of which concern us directly and/or immediately, while others provide a framework for future understanding.

Dr. Guessoum goes on to cite some national and international statistics, emphasizing the observation that unless “countries… do not have a strong basic science program in both education and discovery… their scientific and intellectual progress will remain modest” – however much they “…pursue ‘research and development’”. He cites instances of poor allocation of funding for science in the Arab world, noting the inordinate emphasis placed on “applied”, “innovation”, and “technology” in existing Arab scientific literature, as well as amongst the primary funding agencies, and calls for an attitudinal balance, indicating – again, justly -

… encouragement of basic science is a must if we want to produce enlightened, informed, and well-educated communities, as well as robust home-grown socio-economic development. Basic research is difficult to control and direct; outcomes are often unexpected, and even results which initially seem devoid of potential can later yield important applications. Furthermore, for research to truly be productive, the scientists must feel free to explore all kinds of paths and ideas.

Intriguingly, Dr. Guessoum seemed to take pains to emphasize that he was, in fact, “…not calling for basic research to be given priority in funding or support in the Arab world.” – to which my question is: why on earth not? Perhaps there are political realities in the Arab world that I am not aware of, but given all the arguments Dr. Guessoum made favoring basic research, anything else would seem counter-intuitive, and indeed, counter-productive in the long run.

What struck a particular chord with me about Dr. Guessoum’s commentary is that what is true for the Arab world is true for the rest of the world, too, especially the developing countries, such as mine, i.e. India – a fact that often remains poorly understood. In 2003, the vice-Chairman of one of the country’s premier funding agencies, The University Grants Commission, acknowledged that “No cutting-edge technology will emerge without the background knowledge in basic sciences. So the interface areas of knowledge in physics, chemistry and biological sciences need to be strengthened at the universities” and called for the allocation of at least 2% of India’s GDP for basic research in science and technology. In 2005, the Ministry of Human Resource Development of the Government of India set up a Task Force for basic sciences, which recommended several pro-basic science changes, including that “…every institution of higher learning should earmark 5% of its non-plan budget for the furtherance of research in Basic Sciences” (PDF). And yet, according to official statistics in 2011, the investment in the field of Scientific Research & Development in the country remained at less than 1% of GDP. So, the problem of underfunding (and possibly low appreciation) of basic sciences is by no means restricted to the Arab world.

However, in the context of the social climate in the Arab world, there is another significant question that Dr. Guessoum seems to have skirted across, using grandiloquent, but rather vague, terms. He says:

As Arabs, contributing to human civilization in basic sciences will make our lives meaningful and comfort us in our quest to be morally responsible stewards of Earth.

Will the good doctor care to answer an uncomfortable question about the role religion plays in his region’s societies, and how far that fact influences the funding decisions he laments about? I submit that research in applied science and technology most often does not have to answer fundamental questions about life, nature and natural phenomenon, minimizing the chances of any intersection with the territories claimed by religion and religious philosophies, whereas questions in basic science often impinge upon the same areas.

Consider, for example, the evolution of human beings from less complex organisms; without the fundamental understanding of this evolutionary heritage, it is impossible to use the modern technological tools, such as molecular genetics, to probe the integral mechanisms underlying core biological processes. It is also an area about which a multitude of religions make grandiose claims that have been contradicted and disproven by empirical evidence gathered by basic science research. Can this be a/the pivotal reason for the devoutly religious (from all appearances) Arab world to consciously shy away from funding basic sciences?

100 parts per million. That was all the carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless gas, that was required to end the last ice age. An article in Nature Magazine this month confirms what many scientists have been agreeing upon for years: that CO2, anything but a harmless gas when released into the atmosphere, is a major driver of climate change. Watch out gas-guzzling SUVs and ‘dirty’ fossil fuel industries. I interviewed article author Dr. Jeremy Shakun from Harvard University to learn more about his recent climate study.Tweetbench/quotejeremy4.jpg" width=“500” height=“160” class=“mt-image-center” style=“text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0 auto 20px;” />The article in the April 2012 issue of Nature describes a study conducted by Jeremy D. Shakun and colleagues to confirm the link between carbon dioxide and climate change during the Pleistocene ice ages. Scientists have known for years that a link existed, according to analysis of air bubbles trapped in ancient ice from the Antarctic. “People drilled down through the Antarctic ice sheets, and we actually have a record of [the link between CO2 and temperature] that goes back to almost a million years ago,” Shakun told me in a recent interview. From these air bubbles, scientists could figure that carbon dioxide rose and fell over our planet’s most recent ice age, suggesting that carbon dioxide had something to do with rising temperatures that ended that same ice age. “…if you look at these two [CO2 and temperature] together, you see that they have this amazing correlation. It’s a better correlation than you almost ever get from nature – the two just go lockstep up and down together over the ice ages for the last 1 million years almost,” Shakun said. But just what exactly was that relationship? This is where strong debate has plagued many scientists’ efforts to pin the blame on carbon dioxide. “People have realized that there is clearly some link between CO2 and temperature in the past, but the question you get to is, well, how does it work? Which one is cause and which one is effect? How do the two interplay off of each other?” Shakun said.The curveball, as Shakun puts it, is that when scientists looked more closely at the ice-core records they had from Antartica, they found that the temperature in Antartica actually started changing a bit before the CO2 did. Not exactly the best of news for scientists and climate change communicators trying to stave off arguments from climate deniers that there is no ‘CO2 problem’ today. “This is something that [current] global warming skeptics have jumped on, to say ‘ah jeez, obviously CO2 must not cause warming because if we look in the past, in these ice cores, the CO2 comes after the warming… so we are in the clear today’,” Shakun said. Climate deniers have pointed to the fact that CO2 might be an effect of global warming, but not a cause_. They argue, based on these important old records, that carbon emissions don’t really matter for climate.They couldn’t be more wrong.“Scientists don’t really buy that logic for a lot of good reasons,” Shakun said. “Most climate scientists have seen that timing difference to mean that CO2 wasn’t the trigger for the past climate changes over the last ice age, but that it was an amplifier.”Shakun’s study with colleagues affiliated with Harvard University, Columbia University, and other major research universities in the U.S. and abroad sought to fill the gap that currently exists in the relationship record between CO2 and climate change in the last ice age. “These ice cores tell you about the global level of CO2, but they only tell you about temperatures just in Antartica, and that’s it. That is just one dot on the map,” Shakun said. Shakun describes how, for an analysis today, one can’t just go look at one place in the world to demonstrate a global phenomenon. “You go find some place in the last 100 years that got colder, and that doesn’t disprove global warming in the last 100 years – it’s just that one spot happened to get colder,” he said. “It’s global climate change we are talking about. It’s about the whole planet.”jeremy.jpg" width=“500” height=“150” class=“mt-image-center” style=“text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0 auto 20px;” />**Shakun and his colleagues set out to gain insight on global temperatures during the last ice age.“People have records of temperature from ice cores in Greenland, we have lots of ocean cores that people pull up from the sea floor, we have lake cores on land… people have used all these different kinds of ways to construct what temperature was in the past,” Shakun said. This data is especially rich from around the last ice age, as a point in the not-too-distant past of vast importance for past climate research. Samples can also be dated reliably using carbon-dating, ensuring an excellent picture of past climate conditions. Shakun and colleagues went to this data to solve the ‘mystery’ of CO2 and the last ice age. Sort of a “Who dun’ it?” for the last major glacial melt.“We went to the literature, and we just dug up as many of these good temperature records as we could find. We got a total of 80 of them,” Shakun said. “They come from pretty much all over the world.”“It was really simple science,” he said. “We said, we’ve got 80 records from around the world, let’s just slap them together, average them into a reconstruction of global temperature.” What a fabulous idea, for such “simple science”! “What you see when you put them all together is a pattern of global warming at the end of the ice age that really strongly mirrors the rise in CO2 at the end of the ice age. Even more interesting, you find that the global temperature started warming a bit after the CO2 rose.” This is very different from the view that many people currently hold that temperature changed first during the last glacial melt. “That is true for Antartica, but if you look globally, that’s not the case,” Shakun said. *“Global temperatures are following CO2.”It is hard to ignore the new evidence that Shakun and his colleagues have brought to the table this April. “… Global warming at the end of the ice age, resembling a rise of CO2 and coming after it… It’s pretty hard to look at that and not think that CO2 was a big driver of global warming during the last ice age,” Shakun said. *But what are some of the implications of CO2 being a big driver of global warming during the last glacial cycle? Why should we care that CO2 once ended an ice age?“[Our findings] are not really going to change scientists’ perspective … I think as far as the actual science on the matter, we have already got a lot of strong pieces of evidence on CO2,” Shakun said. "But obviously when we look out in the public, that’s not quite the case. We meet people all the time who say ‘eh, I don’t believe that. What’s the story with this global warming idea anyway?’ I think this is just one more additional piece that goes on that pile that says ‘yep, like we thought for a bunch of different reasons, CO2 causes global warming.’ “”CO2 Albert Bridge.jpg" src=“http://blogs.nature.com/from_the_lab_bench/CO2%20Albert%20Bridge.jpg” width=“340” height=“260” class=“mt-image-right” style=“float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;” /> So what is the take home message? “[Our findings] provide you with a really tangible example of what is means for CO2 to cause warming. You are sitting on the bus and you tell somebody ‘yeah, CO2 is causing global warming,’ and it just sounds like this abstract concept. But you tell somebody that CO2 can end an ice age and they get a feeling for what that means, and how powerful that is,” Shakun said. “Obviously if you have an ice age end, then that means a huge difference for the planet, a huge difference for sea level, for rain fall patterns, for temperature, for all sorts of things that actually matter to us, to society.”But the punches keep coming. As Shakun points out, the amount that CO2 rose at the end of the ice age was only around 100 parts per million.* “That sounds small… but it was apparently enough to really help drive the end of an ice age – that’s a huge effect,” Shakun said. *What is even more sobering is that today, humans have brought CO2 levels up another 100 part per million more.* “So we have done just as much,” Shakun said. “And in a century, we are looking to go up, going on as we are, by several hundred more. So 100 parts per million to end an ice age, and we are talking about people bringing it up many times more… this is NOT small potatoes what we are talking about here, what we are doing with CO2. This is big stuff, big changes.”Sobering indeed.* For more information about the study in Nature, read here this blog post? Please take the time to recommend it, or any other blog post that you liked here, for the blogging competition Open Lab 2013.Shakun, J., Clark, P., He, F., Marcott, S., Mix, A., Liu, Z., Otto-Bliesner, B., Schmittner, A., & Bard, E. (2012). Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation Nature, 484 (7392), 49-54 DOI: 10.1038/nature10915 Image 1: Flickr by RigmaroleImage 2: Copyright Albert Bridge and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence.

SUMMARY: We knew we were on a journey of discovery when we launched the Voyager spacecraft, but we had no idea how much there was to discover Image: NASA/JPL. “We knew we were on a journey of discovery when we launched the Voyager spacecraft, but we had no idea how much there was to discover.”Yesterday, I showed you a little about the unexplored oceans on earth, so today, I’d like to show you a little about the unexplored regions of space. In this video, created and provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we see an update on the journeys that the Voyager spacecraft are on and what they are showing us about space.

‘The editor said no, I’m afraid… ‘Just what does that mean?’The editor said, “No”, I’m afraid…’, as in, ’I’m afraid the editor said, “No”.’Or, ‘The editor said, "No, I’m afraid…" ’ ?Might seem obvious; but I’ve been informed that the editor deemed my offered piece ‘not suitable.’ I understand, of course, that the editor’s decision is final. However, rather than publish my piece, it was preferred to run Tuesday’s edition with no column whatsoever; and then yesterday, there appeared this bolus of abstruseness, that such ‘ecclesiastical burbling’ was apparently deemed ‘suitable’ is not my beef. (And I quite enjoyed today’s nice informative effort that, without being all temperamental luvvie about it, I fail to see what is ‘not suitable’ about my critique of the misappropriation of science by apologetic Christians.It’s at times like these that I’m inclined to quote the last line of The Commitments.

The ecology of antibiotic resistance on farms is complicated. Animals receive antibiotic doses in their food and water, for reasons of growth promotion, disease prophylaxis, and treatment. Other chemicals in the environment, such as cleaning products or antimicrobial metals in the feed, may also act as drivers of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic-resistant organisms may also be present in the environment already, from the air, soil, or manure pits within or near the barns. Ecologically, it's a mess and makes it more difficult to attribute the evolution and spread of resistance to one particular variable.

A new paper emphasizes just what a mess it really is, and what animals are exposed to in addition to "just" antibiotics. Led by Keeve Nachman at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future, his team took a different approach to examining farm exposures, by looking at "feather meal." What is feather meal, you may ask? I did when I met with Keeve last month at Hopkins as we discussed his research. Well, feathers are one obvious byproduct of chicken slaughtering, and waste not, want not, right? So feathers are processed into meal, which can then be used in a number of ways--among them fertilizer, and as an additive to feed for chickens, pigs, fish, and cattle.

We already knew that chickens receive antibiotics in their food and water supplies, just as other farm animals do. It was also known that some antibiotic residues persisted on chicken feathers--another potential driver of resistance in farm animals. However, Nachman and colleagues wanted to assess what other chemicals may be present in this feed meal besides antibiotics, and also whether those antibiotic residues persisted in the feather meal after processing/treatment of the feathers. As lead author David Love notes:

Why study feather meal? We know that antibiotics are fed to poultry to stimulate growth and to make up for crowded living conditions in poultry houses, but the public does not know what types of drugs are used and in what amounts. It turns out that many of these drugs accumulate in poultry feathers, so by testing feathers we have a non-invasive way of learning about what drugs are actually fed to poultry.

To do this, they examined 12 feather meal samples from the U.S. (n=10) and China (n=2). All 12 samples contained at least one antibiotic residue, and some contained residues of 10 different drugs (both of those were from China). While many of the antibiotics were ones used in poultry farming (or their metabolites), they also found drugs they did not expect. Most significantly, this included residues of fluoroquinolones, which they found in 6 of 10 U.S. feather meal samples. Why is this important? Fluoroquinolone use was banned in U.S. poultry production as of 2005 because of the risk to human health--so where are these residues coming from? The authors make a few suggestions for this:

These findings may suggest that the ban is not being adequately enforced or that other pathways, for example, through use of commodity feed products from livestock industries not covered by the ban, may inadvertently contaminate poultry feed with fluoroquinolones. Furthermore, if feather meal with fluoroquinolone residues is fed back to poultry, this practice could create a cycle of re-exposure to the banned drugs. Unintended antimicrobial contamination of poultry feed may help explain why rates of fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter isolates continue to persist in poultry and commercial poultry meat products half a decade after the ban.

Interestingly, the authors tested whether antibiotic residues at the level they found could influence bacterial growth, and found that they did inhibit growth of wild-type E. coli, but allowed a resistant strain to flourish.

Besides antibiotic residues, a number of other chemicals were also detected, including many I'd never thought to associate with farming. In the U.S. samples, they found caffeine--apparently chickens may be fed coffee pulp and green tea powder, which may account for this finding; acetaminophen (Tylenol), which can be used to treat fevers in poultry just as it can for humans; diphenhydramine (the active ingredient in Benadryl), which apparently is used for anxiety issues in poultry; and norgestimate, a sex hormone. Any kind of health significance to these (either to people or to the animals who are ingesting these via feather meal) is uncertain. In an interview with Nick Kristof in the New York Times, Nachman noted:

"We haven't found anything that is an immediate health concern," Nachman added. "But it makes me question how comfortable we are feeding a number of these things to animals that we're eating. It bewilders me."

So what we're seeing here are the presence of antibiotics and other drugs in feather meal, which is spread around as a fertilizer or fed to many species of domestic animals as an additive. It's difficult to keep up with these additional feed additives--in addition to feather meal, many animals could also receive distiller's grains in their diet, ethanol by-products which are another potential source of antibiotic residues.

This, my friends, is a clusterfuck.

Though I've focused on the U.S. data here, the paper notes that the Chinese samples are relevant as well--while most feather meal used here is domestically produced, we do import some, and about a quarter of what we import is from China, where antibiotics that are restricted or banned in the U.S. may still be in use. Furthermore, farmers may not even know this is in the feed they're using, as many mixes are proprietary. (And if farmers don't know, you can imagine how difficult it is for a researcher to determine if this is playing a role in antibiotic resistance or other public health issues on these farms).

Works cited

Love, D., Halden, R., Davis, M., & Nachman, K. (2012). Feather Meal: A Previously Unrecognized Route for Reentry into the Food Supply of Multiple Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) Environmental Science & Technology, 46 (7), 3795-3802 DOI: 10.1021/es203970e

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On Sunday, I interviewed Maggie Koerth-Baker, the author of Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us. The interview was live on radio, but you can listen to it here as a podcast.

Maggie is the science editor at Boing Boing, a journalist, and has had an interest in energy and the related science and engineering for some time. Her book is an overview, historical account, and detailed description of the energy systems that we use in the United States, outlining the flow of watts, CO2 emissions, methods of making more watts, what we use it all for, and more. Maggie focuses on the electrical power grid, which is actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than internal combustion powered transport (cars, trucks, etc.), but she does touch on the latter. She focuses on the US but she draws from overseas examples in discussing what is normally done, what is not normally done, and what we might do in the future. She develops compelling and sometimes startling imagery and provides interesting and lively metaphors useful in describing and understanding sometimes very abstract problems related to making, delivering, and using energy.

Here's the bottom line. If you want to have an intelligent conversation about energy, especially related to current problems and needs in the US and especially related to the electrical grid, you have to either know all the stuff that is in Before the Lights Go Out, or read the book before you engage in that conversation, or, if you can't manage either of those, then maybe you should just shut up. Seriously.

I've been engaged in conversations about energy at a significantly heightened pace over the last several months, for various reasons, and I've found that the stuff that comes out of people's mouths (my own included) is very often either very out of date or was never very correct to begin with. Maggie's book is a very engaging way of fixing that. If you read the book, you will be caught up.

I caution those of you who might listen to the podcast that we only touched on part of what is covered in the book! You can't just listen to the interview and skip reading the source material! Having said that, I'm not going to go into great detail here either. Listen to the podcast, get the book, read it, and report back. You will probably have interesting questions and additions to add to the comment section.

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Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!

- Phillipe Diolé

I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.

When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."

The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw parallels then, as I do now. They are both cold, forbidding, strange, contain tremulous mysteries, and do not give their secrets readily. Tales of their early exploration contain feats of unspeakable audacity, as well as tragedy. Solitary heroes stand out: Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok spacecraft, Jacques Cousteau developing the Aqua-Lung in order to push deeper underwater, the elite few men and women who have dared venture far above, far below. Listen to a veteran diver discuss the sea and an astronaut space: you'll hear the same hushed tones, the same fearful, learned respect.

After all, what experience does this planet offer us more phenomenologically similar to spacewalking than floating in a deep ocean? Water is the best environment for spacewalk training on Earth; substituting neutral buoyancy for microgravity, NASA Astronauts train at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, a giant swimming pool. I've always been delighted by images of this place; if you squint just right, and ignore the scuba divers, it almost looks like outer space is robin's egg blue and dotted with bubbles.

In spite of our egotism, the human organism is delicate. We're only built to tromp around the accommodating portions of the Earth. The moment we're submerged in the ocean, or we ascend too high a peak&#8212to say nothing of outer space&#8212we're out of our league. Yet, in our incorrigible hubris, we've long used technology to wander beyond our territory. Aristotle wrote of diving bells, and (apocryphally) even Alexander the Great explored the deep ocean&#8212in a submarine of white glass, where the fish gathered 'round to pay homage&#8212and returned to pronounce of his experience, "the world is damned and lost." Mercury spacecraft and the early Soviet Vostok capsules may as well have been diving bells; they were so small, it's said that they were worn, not ridden.

"The sea," Captain Nemo pronounces, in one of literature's more glamorous depictions of the deep, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, "does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still excercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and can be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears. Ah! Sir, live&#8212live in the bosom of the waters! There only is independence! There I recognise no masters! There I am free!"

This sentiment, an inverted Overview Effect, sounds familiar. Astronauts consistently speak of the irrelevance of borders, even nations, on a planet viewed from space. It's probably the most consistent revelation of spaceflight, the majestic panorama of a whole planet, seen without its despots and ideologues. The Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to be there for more than 24 hours, described the experience of seeing the Earth from space as "a thousand times more beautiful than anything I could have imagined." After orbiting the planet over a dozen times, Titov replied a call from mission control with the elated cry: "I am Eagle! I am Eagle!"

An Eagle, of course, has no masters.

Today, in cramped cockpits and bathyspheres, astronauts and their aquatic counterparts lie contorted in the same metal cabins, surrounded by death, peering from thick windows into empty, hostile landscapes. Cloaked in metal, they transport light where there has never been any&#8212to what James Cameron, after his much-ballyhooed recent dive to the Challenger Deep, called a "barren, desolate lunar plain," or (more viscerally) which William Beebe, passenger in the world's first bathysphere, described as "the black pit-mouth of hell itself."

This "black pit-mouth" is what interests me. Essentially every culture has a mythological history which includes primal undifferentiated formlessness. The abyss, as much topless as it is bottomless. And the abyss, figuratively speaking, is neither distinctly maritime nor interplanetary. Rather, it's a little of both: Tao, the primal ocean upon which Vishnu slumbered, amorphous being, chaos preceding time. Is this because the ancients knew on a symbolic level what our scientists empirically know now: that the abyss&#8212in both worldly forms&#8212is the seat of our lineage? We are, as Carl Sagan said, "made of starstuff." We're also risen from the sea. The salt in our veins is testament.

Beebe, one of the greatest American explorers, in his book Half-Mile Down, a record of his dive to 3,028 feet in 1934, wrote that it seems "a very wonderful thing, to walk about on land today, vitalized by a bit of the ancient seas swirling through our body. It is somehow of a piece with stars and time and space-something to be very quiet and thoughtful about, and proud of." Indeed, while beneath the waters lies a cruel landscape, and while the cosmos is vast and unforgiving, they are both our birthright. Our impulse to travel far below and above our limits is precisely that of children striving to return to the womb, only to discover that birth is as great a nothingness as death.

Between coral/Silent eel/Silver swordfish
I can't really feel or dream down here

Further Reading:

Half-Mile Down, by William Beebe
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson

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I have two only vaguely related items for you, and the first is really two items.

Paul Douglas has written a piece on climate change that you should read. Douglas is the famous Twin Cities meteorologist who worked for several years at our own WCCO. He was a regional celebrity, much loved by all, and a lot of people stopped watching television when he left that station a couple of years back. The blog post is: A Message From A Republican Meteorologist On Climate Change.

Given how sensible and smart he is, one would have never thought Paul was a ... oh never mind, that, there is a second thing you should know: Paul Douglas will be one of our guests at two Climate Change panels we are doing this July at CONvergence, as part of the Sketchick-FTB.com organized science and skepticism track. You'll be hearing a lot more about that later. Maggie Koerth-Baker, whom I shall be interviewing on the radio Sunday AM, will also be on one or both of those panels.

The other item that just came across my desk: General Motors Stops Funding The Heartland Institute. Why? The short answer is that the truth about the nature of the Heartland Institute was exposed by scientist Peter Gleick, and General Motors decided to do the right thing.

Thank you very much, that is all.

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A commonly used insecticide, and possibly an increasingly widely used form of that pesticide, could be a causal factor in bee colony collapse. It is not 100% certain that this pesticide's effects can be counted as one of the causes this problem, but there is a very good chance that neonicotinoids can cause a drop in hive population, and thus, should be examined to see if there is a relationship in some cases. From the paper's abstract:

Nonlethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse. Simulated exposure events on free-ranging foragers labeled with an RFID tag suggest that homing is impaired by thiamethoxam intoxication. These experiments offer new insights into the consequences of common neonicotinoid pesticides used worldwide. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Coming to a place near you in June.

Info

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Get your copy here.

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Now on CNN:

Imagine you are sitting in your office simply doing your job and a nasty e-mail pops into your inbox accusing you of being a fraud. You go online and find that some bloggers have written virulent posts about you. That night, you're at home with your family watching the news and a talking head is lambasting you by name. Later, a powerful politician demands all your e-mails from your former employer.

It sounds surreal. But it all happened to ...

Michael Mann.

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Climate scientist Michael Mann is no stranger to smear campaigns. Man has the distinction of having made important contributions to climate science, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. He is famous to many of you for having come up with the "hockey stick" metaphor.

Michael Mann is a good scientist who has done honest, important, and high quality work, but there are those who don't want to hear about the results he and other climate scientists have come up with. So, they hate him. And by "hate" I don't mean that they sit there not liking him. I mean, they actively hate him. They wake up every morning and try to think of things to do to ruin his life, and they conspire with each other to carry out these nefarious acts, and in some cases, they are paid by special interests to do these things.

We all get this hate, to one level or another. I was amused the other day when one of the haters, someone who had made death threats against me, had apparently pressed the button on his Linked In account to "find people to link to" and thus accidentally sent me an invitation to "Link In." I get an email that says "I want to kill you" then I get an invitation to link up. Made me laugh.

But in reality this is no laughing matter. Even though we all take a certain amount of crap for either being a climate scientist or a person who teaches about climate change or a blogger or journalist who covers these issues honestly and critically, no one has taken the crap that Michael Mann has had to take. I don't know how he does it.

Anyway, Michael has written a commentary for CNN that covers not so much the attacks on him, but rather, the attacks on climate science more generally. He talks about the theft of emails and subsequent dissemination and misuse of their contents and related events:

In the most infamous episode, somebody stole thousands of e-mails and documents from leading climate researchers, including me. They cherry picked key phrases from the e-mails and published them out of context, like a black-and-white political attack ad with ominous music. Fossil fuel industry-funded groups gleefully spread the e-mails online and badgered the mainstream media into covering the "controversy" they had manufactured.

It was no accident that this happened on the eve of a major international climate change meeting. ... The dozen independent investigations that did follow -- all of which exonerated the scientists -- got much less media coverage than the original nonscandal.

Go read his essay. Also, please, please check out the comment section and say something not horrible there to help diffuse the crap that I'm sure is going to appear there over the next few days!

Michael Mann is the author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

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I will be interviewing Maggie Koerth-Baker this Sunda, April 1st, no fooling.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the author of the new book, "Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us". Maggie is the science editor and a regular writer at Boing Boing, and hails from the Twin Cities. She was once described as "A lighthouse of reason in a churling ocean of stupidity," which is exactly why we all need to read her book and listen to her interview Sunday, April 1st on Minnesota Atheists Talk Radio.

From the publisher's review of "Before the Lights Go Out":

"Hi, I'm the United States and I'm an oil-oholic."

We have an energy problem. And everybody knows it, even if we can't all agree on what, specifically, the problem is. Rising costs, changing climate, peaking oil, foreign oil, public safety--if the fears are this complicated, then the solutions are bound to be even more confusing. Maggie Koerth-Baker... makes sense out of the madness. Over the next 20 years, we'll be forced to cut 20 quadrillion BTU worth of fossil fuels from our energy budget, by wasting less and investing in alternatives.

To make it work, we'll need to radically change the energy systems that have shaped our lives for 100 years. And the result will be neither business-as-usual, nor a hippie utopia. Koerth-Baker explains what we can do, what we can't do, and why "The Solution" is really a lot of solutions working together...

Please call in or email with questions, listen to the interview live, or pick up the podcast which is usually available later in the day.

The interview is April 1, Sunday, no fooling, 9:00AM Central. We don't know yet if we'll be gathering for a post show brunch at Q-Cumbers, but you can watch this space, or listen to the show live, to find out.

Listen to AM 950 KTNF on Sunday, April 1st, at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio: 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to radio@mnatheists.org during the live show.

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There is a spreading belief that if you put Nitrogen (instead of regular air) in your car tires, that you will get better gas mileage. The reasoning behind this may be sound, but the facts on which the reasoning is based are not correct. Therefore, the answer is no, it is not advantageous for the average person to use Nitrogen in their car tires. On even more detailed examination, it maybe that regular air is better than Nitrogen for most people. Nitrogen is in fact used in certain tires, and there may be a good reason for that, though the information I have is probably missing something. In other words, it is all rather complicated. The short answer is, don't bother with the Nitrogen, but there are some interesting details:

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Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup

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Attention Festival Fans! The Festival has been awarded spaces for 18 people to march in the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade. We have decided to give our fans the opportunity to win these spaces to march alongside legendary NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the Festival's Mondo Spider and other personalities in the 100th Celebration of the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade, Saturday April 14, 2012 in Washington, DC!

To win a space in this unforgettable festive event, which this year features Buzz Aldrin as Parade Grand Marshall, Katie Couric as co-host and Alex Trebek as parade route correspondent, we're asking Festival fans to submit their BEST creative entries for science- or STEM-related parade costumes or displays (such as marching with your robot, dressing up as an amoeba...). Winners must be available 8:30 am until 2:00 PM and be ready to show up rain or shine! There is no compensation for your participation in the parade.

The parade will be nationally televised with an estimated audience of 72 million viewers and more than 120,000 spectators on site cheering the parade on as it makes its way down historic Constitution Avenue!

In addition to Aldrin and the Mondo Spider, the Festival's 18 winners will have the chance to meet and march alongside such personalities as Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, "Milli Mole" (the mascot of the American Chemical Society), and Life Technologies' "Dream Gene". Other celebrities participating in the event include Marie Osmond, and U.S. Olympians Kristi Yamaguchi and Benita Fitzgerald Mosely.

Don't miss the chance to submit your entry for this unique opportunity! Click on the link for more information to apply to be one of the eighteen people to be in our group. The deadline for the contest is April 1, 2012. Once again, we are looking for the BEST costume ideas out there. Please provide an image of your idea when you send in your entry.

Known as the nation's greatest springtime celebration, the Cherry Blossom Parade each year commemorates the arrival of spring in Washington, DC and the incredible gift of 3,000 cherry blossom trees bestowed on Washington by Tokyo, Japan in 1912.

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