A Breakthrough in Imaging: Seeing a Virus in Three Dimensions:
[Via NYT > Science]
Researchers at an I.B.M. laboratory report that they have captured a 3-D image of a virus with a spatial resolution down to four nanometers.
[More]
This looks like really nice technology but I’d like to see a picture of what it produces. The PNAS article is behind a paywall still so I guess I will have to wait. Anyone know what the results look like?
Technorati Tags: Science
by bigbold
Urban Hen Enthusiast Brings Idea Home to Roost in Kamloops:
[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]
After several visits to Kamploops city hall and a campaign that has rallied urban hen enthusiasts with the slogan of “omelettes for everyone,” one BC woman and her supporters have persuaded the city of Kamloops to look at a pilot project that could allow residents to raise chickens in their backyards.
Would hens be sustainable in an urban environment? What other livestock could be raised? Looks like 4H could come back to the city.
Most municipalities that permit hens do not allow roosters for obvious reasons. And the birds, or rather their eggs, must be for personal use. No competing with the big farms.
As stated in this article, it is legal to keep up to 3 hens in Seattle proper. Raising your own chickens will probably not save any money but you will know exactly where the eggs came from and how they were produced.
Plus they destroy slugs.
I think this would be a great way to keep some of the heirloom breeds going, especially since some can be thought of as family pets. You can learn more at the City Chicken or Backyard Chickens.
in March 2009, Seattle Tilth is having a class on raising chickens or starting from chicks.
As a humorous aside, these roosters will never be fashionable in an urban setting. Not with squawks that last 15 SECONDS!
Technorati Tags: Economy, Environment
by Marcin Wichary
A Brief Guide for Mac Switchers/Try-ers (No Laments, Please!):
[Via Web 2.0 Expo]
Wow, CNET’s Rafe Needleman sure raised a ruckus with his Mac switcher’s lament article. If you are thinking about moving from a Windows PC to a Mac and want to avoid the feeling of lament, read on, I have some advice that might help you make the change.
This is a really helpful article for those making the switch. It covers all sorts of useful viewpoints that can be applied to anything creating a large-scale change.
Don’t make the shift cold turkey if you can. Talk with people who are experts. Talk with others in the same situation. Use communities to help. Take classes and read books.
These approaches work with almost any change. They are not really Mac-specific in their underlying usefulness. The use of human social networks is critical for the rapid implementation of any novel process.
These approaches use social tools to help make a personal change. It can be as simple as getting a new camera or buying a new car. Implementing an innovation works best when the social aspects of change are used.
These are use of subject matter experts, local mavens and community leaders. Moving the information of change around a group rapidly is the best way to guarantee rapid uptake of new technologies.
Technorati Tags: Education, Social media
3 of your office mates have already read this post:
[Via seachangestrategies.com]
Wonderful must-listen Marketplace segment on how hotels persuade guests to re-use towels. Bottom line, I note that says most guests IN THE ROOM YOU’RE STAYING IN have re-used generates the highest level of cooperation.
This has obvious and intriguing implications for our line of work, doesn’t it?
Learning how to leverage social mores can be used for good as well as ill. For too long, corporate ads have used these approaches. Let’s think about how human social networks can be used to change the world for the better.
It is through human interactions that people change their behavior. Peer pressure is not the same as nagging. Nagging is not a successful approach. But there are other ways as discussed in the above link. And ‘being one of the group’ is such a successful strategy.
Technorati Tags: Social media, Sustainability
Theremin-in-a-mug:
[Via TED | TEDBlog]
Steep yourself in the delightful tones of this homebrew theremin, built with a mug of tea:
Theremug from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.
The latest in TEDBlog’s chronicle of the evolution of untouchable music, it joins this cool Wii remote hack.
Thanks for the tip via Posterous, reflectionof.me
This could be very useful for those homemade scifi movies.
Technorati Tags: General
How to tell different stories with the same numbers:
[Via Only in it for the gold]
Here is a figure from Reuters about US employment numbers. The worst is over, huh?
Here is a figure from the New York Times showing essentially the same data. Hmmm. Notice how the longer time scale, and the expression of the total rather than the month-over-month change, changes the picture substantially and gives a much clearer picture of what is going on.
One of Edward Tufte‘s main points is that the way you display data affects the lesson people take from the data; that aligning the facts with human psychology such that people extract the real picture is a deep skill.
Of course, in the case of our friends who are arguing that global warming has stopped, you could equally argue that deliberately misaligning the facts with human psychology is also a deep skill.
Cherry-picking the data can be misleading. Why did Reuters only show the data from the beginning of 2008 and why did it only show the change from each month? Also why look at total number change rather than percentage, which would reflect how the job markets change?
Probably so that you can only take away from the story exactly what they decide to tell you. There is really very little further interpretation possible.
The second graph is much more informative. First it does show just how bad 2008 is but we can also compare it to other periods. In the previous recession, the job markets continued to drop[ for quite some time after the recession ended.
We are already below that bottom and the recession is not yet over. Just how bad is it going to get? Plenty bad.
Tufte is great for examining the narratives that can be created with graphs. If one wants to hide the truth, graphs can be used to obfuscate. So be wary of graphs, particularly from people with an ax to grind. Make sure they are not playing fast and loose with the facts
by Mclaire2
US advisers back 1st drug from DNA-altered animals – Reuters:
[Via Google News]
ROCKVILLE, Maryland (Reuters) – The first drug made using genetically engineered animals to near U.S. approval won key support on Friday from an advisory panel that judged it safe and effective despite concerns from groups worried about the genetic tinkering.
GTC Biotherapeutics Inc’s experimental anticlotting therapy, called Atryn, is made using a human protein gathered from female goats bred to produce it in their milk.
[More]
Producing therapeutic drugs in animals rather than in human cell culture or bacteria could have substantial effects on the costs associated with many drugs. The physical plants needed to produce many protein-based drugs are extremely costly. Actual capacity is limited and can take years to build.
In addition, there are difficulties with the cost of manufacture itself (i.e. the specialized media needed to grow the cells) as well as waste disposal problems after the protein has been produced.
Pharming overcome these difficulties with a more sustainable approach. Not only are media costs much less (i.e. potentially actual chicken feed) but the production levels (that is, the amount of protein per volume of ‘media’) can be much greater. This means a herd of 150 goats could produce the world’s supply of a drug, rather than a $100 million manufacturing facility.
Using farm animals hold advantages over using plants. Plant fertilization can be problematic, since pollen is air-borne. It is much easier to monitor the whereabouts of animals than of plants, so it is unlikely that the GM animals will trade genes with other animals. Production animals can be neutered so that no genes will be passed in any unintended fashion. Disposal could proceed much like current drug facilities but the ‘waste’ should be much smaller. Energy costs would be less.
Animals from rabbits to cows can be used. The economic footprint of this approach appears to be much lower than the huge footprint of a 10,000 liter manufacturing plant. In addition, scaleup would be much easier and more quickly performed using animals.
Often new products render a current therapeutic obsolete. Currently, the expensive manufacturing facility must then be modified for a new product or sold to someone who needs the capacity. Mothballing a facility can be very expensive and modifying it can also entail a large cost, which is passed onto us. Not so with animals.
A big plus is that instead of only producing drugs with a billion dollar market, the economies of this approach could make it easier to produce drugs for much smaller markets. Thus a more sustainable approach for the production of therapeutics could be maintained.
Technorati Tags: Environment, Science, Sustainability
by Noël Zia Lee
Using Social Media Efficiently: 52 Tips from Beth Kanter:
[Via TechSoup Blog blogs]
Wow. Beth Kanter has impressed the heck out of me again. She’s participating in Convio’s Now is the Time campaign of New Year’s resolutions for nonprofits and technology (along with our very own Robert Weiner who’s own resolution post is here.)
Beth’s New Year’s resolution is to use social media efficiently and she offers up 52 great tips on how to do so. And if you try one each week for the next year, maybe we can all be better communicators, have more effective and engaging campaigns, and mobilize our supporters for greater change. New Year’s resolutions always make me dreamy.
Some of my favorites from her list include:
Do an annual ROI for your blog (and other social media activities) using benchmarking and metrics.
Don’t set up a presence on every social network in the world all at once.
If you are not reading blogs and Web sites in an RSS Reader, make that your New Year’s resolution.
These rules are not only for non-profits but are important for anyone who is using social media to connect people or move information around. Many of these can be adapted to either non-profit or for-profit situations.
The key is capturing the right metrics. Web 2.0 approaches create a treasure trove of data that can be effectively mined to learn just what is working and what is failing, leading to effective solutions. So do not only have a plan for getting Web 2.0 tools up and going but also have a plan for mining the data they produce.
Technorati Tags: Open Access, Web 2.0
by apesara
How not to do a study on the efficacy of “alternative” medicine:
[Via Respectful Insolence]
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last four years of examining the various forms of woo out there, it’s to be very, very skeptical whenever an advocate of a highly dubious-sounding “therapy” points to a study as “proof” that the therapy, whatever it is, works. Usually, what I find is a small pilot study with inadequate controls or even a poorly designed study. For example, the acupuncture literature is rife with these sorts of studies. It’s also rife with larger studies for which the control was inadequate–or for which there was no real control at all. This phenomenon is generalizable to many, if not most, studies of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), as is another feature, namely that the larger and better designed the study, the less likely it is to find a treatment effect greater than placebo due to the treatment. Another principle is that at a statistical significance level of 95%, at least 5% of studies will appear to find a treatment effect through random chance alone. Guess which studies will be cherry picked and held up as “proof” while the preponderance of studies showing no effect are ignored?
There is at least one other form of studies pointed to by CAM advocates to “prove” that their woo “works.” Indeed, this form is perhaps their favorite crutch to fall back on. It’s what I like to call the “non sequitur” study. In other words, it’s a study that is, at best, only tangentially related to the question at hand, or, as I like to put it, a study that is related to the therapy being argued for only by coincidence. This sort of study is a favorite of homeopathy. Just think of studies about the molecular bonds of water homeopaths like to point to as “evidence” for the “memory of water.” It is this latter form of study that I’m going to deal with here.
Remember about three weeks ago, when I had a bit of fun with one of the most hilariously ludicrous bits of woo that I’ve ever seen, Tong Ren? If you’re really new to the blog and didn’t happen to read my post, I encourage you to go back and do so now. If you do, you’ll see, besides my own inimitably insolent prose, YouTube videos of a man named Tom Tam leading a bunch of people tapping on acupuncture dolls with small hammers and concentrating their “intent” to “heal” a person. I’ve seen a lot of woo before. A lot of woo. But Tong Ren was about the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. These people really believe that by taking what looks in essence to be a voodoo doll and tapping on it at the correct acupuncture points, they can direct some vague “energy” undetectable by science to cure cancer and all manner of other diseases. One thing you’ll also see is a news report that mentions a study of Tong Ren being done at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, a very prestigious institution indeed. Naturally, at every opportunity, the connection to Harvard University is played up, so desperate is Tom Tam to wrap himself in the mantle of seeming legitimacy that the attention of Harvard University suggests. When I poked around various Tong Ren websites, I couldn’t find out anything about the study other than that it appeared to be some sort of survey and that the manuscript had been submitted.
It appears that the manuscript has been accepted and was published recently in a journal I’ve never heard of, namely Complementary Health Practice Review. The article, entitled The Tong Ren Healing Method: A Survey Study, by Amy M Sullivan, EdD (Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine), Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, RN (Emory University), and Michael Miovic, MD (Dana Farber Cancer Institute). Of course, that this study appeared in a journal called Complementary Health Practice Review does not bode well for the quality of the study, and this is no exception. More importantly, the question studied by this study is related to the question of whether Tong Ren “heals” anything only by coincidence. Check out the abstract:
If this paper is typical of what gets published in the alternative medicine literature, then there are a lot of people in need of training in the Scientific Method. An anthropological poll based on what people report happen to them is not science. It is a poll.
The real telling thing for me is this:
Prior to the study, we determined that if 50% or more of participants reported improvements with symptoms of their disease or relief from side effects of treatment, we would consider this sufficient preliminary evidence to support future, more rigorous investigation of this healing method.
How was this figure arrived at? Why 50%? What is the percentage for any other sort of therapy? What placebo effects might alter this figure?
It looks to me that the 50% is just a gut reaction. I might argue that if even 30% of the people responded positively it was an important therapy? Or I could argue that over 70% was needed? The number is purely arbitrary and without any rigor to it at all.
And the journal wants $30 from me to read the paper myself!! Nice work if you can get it.
I wonder if insurance pays for this weird little therapy?
*taken from a great novel by Frank M. Robinson that had this little poem in it:
You remind me of a man.
What man?
The man with the power.
What power?
The power of hoodoo.
Hoodoo?
You do.
Do what?
Remind me of a man
and so on.
Technorati Tags: Health
Geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation, Part 2: White roofs are the trillion-dollar solution:
[Via Climate Progress]
Part I introduced urban heat island mitigation (UHIM). It discussed how lighter colored (or reflective) roofs and pavement, plus urban trees, can save energy, cut CO2 emissions, cool a city, and reduce smog.
But a global “cool roofs” strategy can achieve far bigger benefits – the equivalent of several trillion dollars worth of CO2 reductions – since it can increase the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet, thereby directly reducing the absorption of incoming solar radiation and hence planetary warming. The strategy proposed below “is equivalent to taking the world’s approximately 600 million cars off the road for 18 years.“
[100 m2 (~1000 ft2) of a white roof, replacing a dark roof, offsets the emission of 10 tonnes of CO2.]
This is technically geoengineering, although I’d call it geoengineering light or geo-reverse-engineering, since we are mostly undoing the albedo decrease caused by all the dark roofs and dark pavement we have covered the planet with.
A forthcoming article in Climatic Change, “Global Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2,” provides the detailed calculations. A two-page non-technical summary, “White Roofs Cool the World, Directly Offset CO2 and
Delay Global Warming,” has been written by two of the country’s leading UHIM experts: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Hashem Akbari and California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld (coauthors with me on “Paint the Town White–and Green“). I reprint it below:
(more)
Kind of a cool idea. Ways to increase the albedo by painting things white could be helpful. I wonder if building large floating islands of styrofoam up in the Arctic would also help reflect more of the sun’s rays away, helping keep a larger icepack?
Technorati Tags: Environment, Science
Climate change in Vanity Fair’s Oral History of the Bush White House:
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]
“Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House,” in the February 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, is a 20,000-word article that draws on interviews with more than 40 individuals, including Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz.
[More]
This is really addicting to read. Hard to put down. It is nice they make it available on the web.
Technorati Tags: Economy, Environment, Politics, Science
by päts
Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS):
[Via Climate Progress]
[Note: Watts Up With That, one of the web's most anti-scientific blogs, is a finalist for the Weblog awards "Best Science Blog" (see "Weblog Awards duped by deniers - again!"). Even more farcically, early voting suggests Watts has a chance of winning (see here). Since the fine science blog Pharyngula is doing well in the voting, I'd now suggest voting for it.]
In this post I’m going to present the general diagnosis for “anti-science syndrome” (ASS). Like most syndromes, ASS is a collection of symptoms that individually may not be serious, but taken together can be quite dangerous – at least it can be dangerous to the health and well-being of humanity if enough people actually believe the victims.
One tell-tale symptom of ASS is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.
The other key symptoms involve the repetition of long-debunked denier talking points, commonly without links to supporting material. Such repetition, which can border on the pathological, is a clear warning sign.
Scientists who kept restating and republishing things that had been widely debunked in the scientific literature for many, many years would quickly be diagnosed with ASS. Such people on the web are apparently heroes – at least to the right wing and/or easily duped (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“).
If you suspect someone of ASS, look for the repeated use of the following phrases:
* Medieval Warm Period
* Hockey Stick
* Michael Mann
* The climate is always changing
* Alarmist
* Hoax
* Temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide
* Pacific Decadal Oscillation
* Water vapor
* Sunspots
* Cosmic rays
* Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark
* Ice Age was predicted in the 1970s
* Global coolingIndividually, some of these words and phrases are quite useful and indeed are commonly used by both scientists and non-scientists who are not anti-science. But the use of more than half of these in a single speech or article is pretty much a definitive diagnosis of ASS.
[More]
This is a very nice checklist to help diagnose people with anti-science syndrome, although it really only deals with climate change. There will be another list for those that have the evolution form of the syndrome. It will include some of these phrases:
Very few sufferers of of ASS can be cured. Many, even though apparently quite reasonable on many subjects, display such strong ASS symptoms in specific areas that palliative efforts have little effect. Logic, reason and even hard evidence will have little effect.
Recognizing the symptoms can be very important. Save yourself time and do not try to convince them with facts. Those are things that are of absolutely no interest to them.
Technorati Tags: Environment, Science
Grape-seed extract kills laboratory leukemia cells, proving value of natural compounds:
[Via EurekAlert! - Biology]
(American Association for Cancer Research) An extract from grape seeds forces laboratory leukemia cells to commit cell suicide, according to researchers from the University of Kentucky. They found that within 24 hours, 76 percent of leukemia cells had died after being exposed to the extract.
[More]
Nice work. They identify the pathway that is affected and show that the inhibition does not effect normal cells. This work is a long way from showing any eficacy in humans but it is a very interesting observation.
Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power:
[Via Climate Progress]
A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour – triple current U.S. electricity rates!
This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today – and ten times the cost of energy efficiency (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?“).
The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power, is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.[More]
There are several other models for nuclear power plants that appear to be much cheaper, more stable and safer. The ones I think have some real potential are those based on Pebble Bed designs. The reactors are designed to be much less likely to fail in ways seen with current designs (i.e. overheating of the ‘core’ tamps down the nuclear reactors instead of resulting in potentially catastrophic explosions of steam seen in some current designs.)
These plants appear to be capable of producing energy at pennies per kWh but are still in the earlier stages so this could change. They are also modular, so that new capabilities could be brought on line. They are also smaller. allowing them to be used in regions that could not be served by larger plants.
Building new plants using older designs will not really solve our problems. But it seems that newer, creative designs may have a place in our energy repertoire.
Technorati Tags: Environment, Science
12 Elegant Examples of Evolution:
[Via Evo.Sphere]
by Tony Frankino
Building from Dan’s post highlighting the new Scientific American devoted to evolution, I thought it would be worthwhile to direct interested readers to the Feb. issue of WIRED, which lists “12 Elegant Examples of Evolution” compiled by the editors at the journal Nature. Images and links to original articles and videos accompany this diverse, interesting catalogue. Open the new year and celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday by considering whale origins, patterns of natural selection on complex traits, the developmental basis of morphological evolution, and the genesis of new species. It’s cool stuff.
Link: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/evolutionexampl.html
Image: Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research / Nature
Some nice examples, although I would probably use more from recent evo-devo work. What is always a hoot is to read the comments at the Wired site. Evolution always brings out the wingers who present the same tired arguments dealing with creationism.
My favorites are the ones that propose that God purposefully created the appearance of all this evolution just to test us. He created a Universe that appeared to be billions of years old even though it is only a few thousand. Rationalizations to maintain a religious belief even as facts undermine them are a constant feature of many fundamentalists.
Technorati Tags: Science
SpreadingScience
Sustainable Path Foundation Idea Club
