Monthly Archives: February 2008

FastForward Radio

Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talked about risk. There are small risks – like not getting the right thing for your Valentine, medium risks like harvesting corn for ethanol, and existential risks like global nuclear war.

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What, me worry?

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

A Triumph for Irrationality and Superstition

Try this one one for size:

France halts genetically modified corn

The French government on Saturday suspended the use of genetically modified corn crops in France while it awaits EU approval for a full ban.

The order formalized France’s announcement Jan. 11 that it would suspend cultivation of Monsanto’s MON810, the seed for the only type of genetically modified corn now allowed in the country.

I’m not a huge proponent of genetically modified corn, nor do I have anything in particular against it, but I can’t help but think that an outright ban seems a bit harsh. Can’t it be labeled genetically modified? Can’t meat from livestock that were fed genetically modified corn also be labeled appropriately?

But maybe it all begins to make sense when you read this:

The European Food Safety Authority says genetically modified products do not constitute a risk to human health or the environment, but some EU governments — including Austria, France, Greece and Hungary — are wary of biotechnology.

Right. The people who ought to know whether it’s safe say it is, and the government bans it anyway. Compare this with the cloned meat controversy in the US. In this instance, we have the government body saying that the suspect produce is okay, and some consumers are saying the won’t have anything to do with it.

No outright ban. Yet.

Are there risks associated with genetically modifying the plants we eat? Of course there very well could be, but the scientific consensus so far is that nothing particularly risky is being done with corn and other foods that are being modified. But cloned meat and milk? This goes back to something I’ve been pointing out for some time now: a lot of people have no idea what cloning is, but that doesn’t stop them from being scared of it.

The real downside here is that GM and cloning technologies that we have today can serve as the foundation for technologies that will one day provide us with food that is abundant and nutritious beyond anything we can even imagine today. I am confident that eventually we’ll have nanotech-based replication machines that will allow a user to scoop dirt into one end and get a cheeseburger (or Caesar salad) out the other. Today’s GM corn and cloned beef are very humble stepping stones in that direction. Well before we have the replicator, we are likely to see plants modified to yield significantly more food, of a better quality, and causing less damage to the environment. And we will see milk and meat grown in vats, much healthier than what we currently take from animals, and without the environmental damage or the ethical concerns of surrounding mistreating animals.

But we won’t see any of these developments, or they will at least be much slower in arriving, if they are legislated out of existence before they can even happen.

Carbon Recycling

In a recent post Phil asked, “So are we better off strictly recycling, or with a mix of recycling for metals and plastic, while reclaiming energy from paper and other organic waste?”

There’s an interesting parallel between recycling and “reclaiming energy.” Recycling allows you to use the same raw materials over and over. Reclaiming energy allows us to use carbon over and over.

Fossil fuels release carbon that’s been sequestered since the fossils they were made from were living. Ethanol releases carbon too, but it’s the product of plants that sequester carbon while they grow (paper and organic waste sequestered carbon recently). Instead of a one-way release of carbon, we’d get to take advantage of a carbon cycle. This makes it closer to being carbon neutral.

But NPR reported today on a study that apparently shows that ethanol is worse for the climate than gasoline. Their reasoning: when we devote more of our corn crops to ethanol, world food production is shifted to places like Brazil where rain forests are slashed and burned for farm land. And burning of rain forest releases a lot of carbon.

This highlights the importance of using things other than food to make ethanol. Making cellulosic ethanol from biological waste (like corn stalks) or switch grass could be carbon neutral. Using land that’s not being used for crops wouldn’t be a problem. Algae for diesel and ethanol can be grown in the desert.

Unfortunately that’s not the message that most people will take away from that study. “Ethanol is worse than gas.” Well, no. Ethanol can be much better than gasoline for the environment. We just have to be careful about unintended consequences. Perhaps it’s time to end corn ethanol subsidies.

Children of Gilgamesh

One of the wonderful oddities of the Epic of Gilgamesh is that our Mesopotamian hero is described as being two-thirds divine and one-third human. That’s a breakdown you don’t see every day. Hercules and other Greek demigods were generally described as having a mathematically comprehensible 50-50 split between human and divine parents. One possible explanation for the 2/3-1/3 reckoning is that the ancient author was counting divine parentage as twice as important as human, so a being who had one human and one divine parent would be counted as only one third human. This is never stated explicitly, however, leaving Gilgamesh fans across the centuries to speculate as to exactly how he came by a parentage divisible by three.

I don’t think anything like this was involved, however:

British scientists say they have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man in a procedure that researchers hope might be used one day to produce embryos free of inherited diseases.

Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.

“We are not trying to alter genes, we’re just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones,” said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

These researchers are being careful to produce an embryo that is essentially the offspring of just two parents — with genetic material from the third “parent” being brought in just to address a specific problem. But the implications are unavoidable — a human embryo could be produced with three or five or nine or 100 parents. I’m not sure what all the arguments against such a procedure would be, but one that comes to mind is that life is complicated enough without being brought in the world and being told that you are the child of some large number of people. And what would the legal obligations of the various parents be? Would they be divided up depending on the amount of genetic material contributed?

On the other hand — critical and possibly unanswerable social issues aside — wouldn’t such children stand to be particularly robust? One of the advantages of sexual reproduction is that greater variety leads to greater viability. Multiple parents could give offspring genetic variety on steroids. Still, I think their must be some risks associated with mixing it up genetically, and those would be magnified, too.

Via GeekPress.

Recycling and Alternatives

Per Bylund writes about the Swedish government’s coercive recycling regulations:

…[E]verybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state’s monopolist garbage-collection “service” no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn’t that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away — milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

The people of Sweden are thus forced to clean their trash before carefully separating different kinds of materials. This is the future, they say, and it is supposedly good for the environment.

What is interesting about this Soviet-style planned recycling is that it is officially profitable. It is supposed to be resource efficient, since recycling of the materials is less energy-consuming than, for instance, mining or the production of paper from wood. It is also economically profitable, since the government actually generates revenues from selling recycled materials and products made in the recycling process. The final recycling process costs less than is earned from selling the recycled products.

However, this is common government logic: it is “energy saving” simply because government does not count the time and energy used by nine million people cleaning and sorting their trash. Government authorities and researchers have reached the conclusion that the cost of (a) the water and electricity used for cleaning household trash, (b) transportation from trash collection centers, and (c) the final recycling process is actually less than would be necessary to produce these materials from scratch. Of course, they don’t count the literally millions of times people drive to the recycling centers to empty their trash bins; neither do they count, for instance, energy and costs for the extra housing space required for a dozen extra trash bins in every home.

Not to get into the politics of whether the Swedish government should or should not enforce such a vigorous model of recycling, I wonder how reclaiming refuse for biofuel production might fit into such an environment? All the wood, paper, and organic waste which is currently going for recycling or trash disposal might be converted into energy instead. I’m not sure this would make things any easier, but I would venture to guess that (at least) folks wouldn’t have to sort paper into different varieties or wash out their milk cartons before disposing of them.

There has been quite a bit of interest in cellulosic ethanol lately; I wonder how enthusiastically its widespread production from waste materials would be received by environmentalists? While you would no longer have paper ending up in landfills, you would have it being “used up” in the form of energy production. Whereas, with recycling, the paper will last a lot longer — although certainly not forever.

So are we better off strictly recycling, or with a mix of recycling for metals and plastic, while reclaiming energy from paper and other organic waste?

FastForward Radio

Don’t miss this, our Super Speculist Sunday Show! Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Darling visited about all things geeky.

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Michael Darling filed his first “M Report” on fusion reactors. The picture above is Robert Bussard’s electrostatic containment model for a small fusion reactor.

Phil’s brought us a new “Tales of the Paranormal” and “Astounding Science Facts.” And Stephen covered “Fun Tech!”

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

Odd Critter

It isn’t just new species of insects and bacteria that are being discovered. Every once in a while we get something like this:

New Species of Mammal

A new species of mammal has been discovered in the mountains of Tanzania, scientists report.

The bizarre-looking creature, dubbed Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, is a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi.
The cat-sized animal, which is reported in the Journal of Zoology, looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater.

It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs.

The story goes on to tell that these creatures are called shrews because their smaller cousins were thought to resemble shrews when first discovered. Personally,I don’t think they look like much of anything.

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A little aardvarkish, I suppose. But only a little. Anyway, these creatures are more closely related to elephants and rhinos (and, it turns out upon further reading, aardvarks) than they are shrews. The story concludes:

Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains are biodiverse-rich. In addition to this new species, a number of other new animals have been found there, including the Udzungwa partridge, the Phillips’ Congo shrew, and a new genus of monkey known as Kipunji as well as several reptiles and amphibians.

Dr Rathbun [who discovered the new species] said it was vital the area and its inhabitants in this biodiversity “hotspot” were protected.

Hera, hear. Let’s hope there are many more such finds to be made.

Strange Galaxy

Now this is just peculiar:

Galaxy’s spiral arms point in opposite directions

Astronomers are puzzling over a spiral galaxy whose spiral arms are wrapped in opposing directions. The unusual structure may be a lingering scar from a tussle with a smaller galaxy that was ultimately swallowed.

Before astronomers had studied this unusual spiral galaxy, called NGC 4622, they thought the spiral arms of galaxies were always oriented the same way relative to the galaxy’s direction of rotation. Specifically, spiral arms were always thought to follow, or trail, the direction of rotation – the same way that a swirl of milk in a stirred cup of coffee naturally orients itself.

But in 2002, astronomers led by Ron Buta of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, US, announced that NGC 4622, which lies 200 million light years away, was rotating the wrong way – its prominent outer arms were leading instead of trailing. And one inner arm even appeared to be wound in the opposite direction from the outer arms.

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What could cause such a thing to occur? The prevailing theory is a galactic cataclysm:

Scientists still do not understand how the galaxy got its oppositely oriented arms. One possibility is that the inner arms are the result of a struggle with a smaller galaxy that veered perilously close to NGC 4622 and was swallowed.

Before being ripped to shreds, the smaller galaxy could have stirred up matter in NGC 4622′s inner regions, leading it to settle in a spiral pattern opposite to that in the outer regions.

That seems likely. But how about an alternative explanation? What we are seeing is a galaxy that has been re-engineered. The highly advanced inhabitants are using these opposing forces of spin to generate energy or to perform some other task.

Discuss.

The Blue-Eyed Variation

I have green eyes, while my parents and all my siblings have blue eyes. I always thought that my eye color was the same as theirs, just tinted slightly differently. But the way I read this story, that is simply not the case:

ALL BLUE-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived near the Black Sea 10,000 years ago.

Human beings had brown eyes until a single mutation in a gene called OCA2 arose by chance in one individual, Professor Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen said.

The mutation “turned off” the mechanism that produces brown melanin pigment and “diluted” brown eyes to blue.
Most likely occurring in the north-west part of the Black Sea between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, the gene was dispersed in the rapid waves of migration to northern Europe that followed the end of the last ice age.

Professor Eiberg said the finding, published in the journal Human Genetics, helped to explain why Europeans were far more likely to have blue eyes than any other ethnic grouping.

Europeans also had a far greater range of skin tones and hair colours living in the one community than the rest of the world, where people are almost uniformly dark-haired and dark-eyed.

The researchers examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed people in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey.

Variation in the eye colour from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA,” the professor said.
“From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor.”

So it seems that my green eyes are actually a slight variation on the original human eye color — brown — while the rest of my family have this much newer trait that only showed up 500 generations or so ago.

Not that it matters, of course, it’s just interesting. It has been established that there is a mitochondrial Eve who is the ancestor of every human being alive on the planet. That is, we all inherited the unique mitochondria that she carried. Variations on that trait have been eliminated from the species.

So maybe there a was blue-eyed Eve? (or Adam?) The mitochondrial Eve lived some 130,000 years before the blue-eyed ancestor. It’s possible that that individual, too, is a common ancestor for much of the world’s population. But since blue eyes are a recessive gene, many of the blue-eyed ancestor’s descendant’s (like me) don’t have blue eyes.