Lake Lanier, the water source that serves a third of Georgia's residents, only has a 4 month's supply of water. Forecasters predict the drought could last months, and residents should look for news ways to conserve.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin says, the city has cut water use by not watering parks. She says maintaining water supplies for drinking and fighting fires is the primary concern. Atlanta commissioner for the Department of Watershed Management, Rob Hunter says Lake Lanier has a 121 day supply of water. He says reducing consumption is key. He offered residents several suggestions: take shorter showers, repair leaky faucets and pipes, and cut outdoor water usage. [More]

Labels: physics, science, weather

Labels: fun, health, science

The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health announced a study linking CCD to Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. I haven’t found a link to the study itself, which is published in the journal Science, but ScienceDaily has published a summery. The authors of the study claim that the presence of IAPV predicts CCD in a colony with 96% accuracy. In other words, if someone selected a honey bee colony in the US and all they told you about it was whether or not it had IAPV, not how big it was, where it was, what kinds of bees they were, you tell them if it had collapsed or not. If you did this 1000 times and had average luck, you’d be right 960 times.

But we don’t know if it actually causes CCD

That kind of accuracy is pretty amazing and makes IAPV a “significant marker” for CCD, but it doesn’t mean that it causes CCD. It might even be the other way around; CCD weakens a colony that was otherwise able to fend off IAPV, allowing the virus to infect the colony. Or something else causes both CCD and facilitates an IAPV infection. [More]

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time. [More]

Labels: organic, science

The chemistry of dreams goes back to before biochemistry began.

Scrooge blamed his nocturnal ghosts on a "crumb of cheese", and I know what he meant. I find it almost impossible to get an undisturbed night's sleep after eating the stuff and - worse - after drinking red wine.

The effect is very real - the last time I tried a refreshing bottle of red late at night I ground my teeth so hard that I smashed a molar.

Now the substances behind such unwanted nightmares are being tracked down. Tyramine, the main culprit, is based on the carbon ring of Kekulé's dream, and is broken down by the same enzymes as those hard at work during paradoxical sleep.

Aged cheeses, like Stilton, and heavy red wines are most to blame, while soy sauce and smoked fish are both rich in the stuff. [More]

85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most unusual dreams of the whole study. 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of participants eating Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, all female participants who ate British Brie had nice relaxing dreams whereas male participants had cryptic dreams, two thirds of all those who ate Lancashire had a dream about work and over half of Cheshire eaters had a dreamless sleep.

Commenting on the study, Neil Stanley, PhD Director of Sleep Research HPRU Medical Research Centre at the University of Surrey says: "The Cheese and Dreams study conducted by the British Cheese Board is the first study of its kind and suggests that eating cheese before you go to bed may actually aid a good night’s sleep.

What is particularly interesting is the reported effect different types of British cheese have on influencing the content of dreams. It seems that selecting the type of cheese you eat before bedtime may help determine the very nature of often colourful and vivid cheese induced dreams” [More]

This is all well and good for the Brits. But my question is will a Double Cheese Whopper make me dream about Carol Drinkwater and me surfing off Baja California?

It's all about science, ya know.

Labels: food, fun, health, science

There's a strange moon whizzing around Saturn that's shaped, oddly, like a walnut.

Now astronomers find that Iapetus got its nutty shape from a super-fast spin that was frozen into place early in the solar system's formation.

When the Cassini spacecraft snapped close-ups of Saturn's moons in 2005, it revealed a bulging waistline of rock along the equator of the now slowly spinning Iapetus. Astronomers think this characteristic shape persists because Iapetus was cryogenically frozen in time about 3 billion years ago, during the moon's "teen" years. [More]

Labels: fun, science, space

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The Black Death continues to cast a shadow across England. Although the modern English population is more cosmopolitan than ever, the plagues known as the Black Death killed so many people in the Middle Ages that, to this day, genetic diversity is lower in England than it was in the 11th century, according to a new analysis. Rus Hoelzel at the University of Durham, UK and his colleagues looked at the mitochondrial DNA from human remains at 4th and 11th century archaeological sites in England, and compared them to samples from the modern population stored on DNA databases such as GenBank. They found there was more variation in the ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences than in modern sequences. [More]

Labels: history, science

"The emissions that come from these worms can actually be 290 times more potent than carbon dioxide and 20 times more potent than methane. In all environmental systems you get good points and bad points."

This is because worms used in composting emit nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide.

Labels: environment, science

These results clearly suggest that yawning regulates the temperature inside your head, and that perhaps we yawn to cool our brains. What we don't have here is any biochemical cause-and-effect, but this is an incredibly interesting theory all the same.

The findings, if valid, draw a few unexpected conclusions about yawning. First of all, rather than stimulating sleep, a good yawn should fend off falling asleep. And secondly, far from being an indicator of boredom, yawning would appear to be a mechanism for maintaining attention.

So be sure and remember this for your next staff meeting -- it's an excellent excuse, and possibly even a valid one! [More]

Labels: fun, health, science

Two recent scientific discoveries mark the latest steps toward the ultimate medical-diagnosis technology: the tricorder.

Bones McCoy made Star Trek's portable black box famous by using it to diagnose ailments without ever touching a patient. Now, studies show that the tricorder is closer to becoming reality, because of new medical-imaging technology and a new state of matter. [More]

Labels: fun, science

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on May 30th this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is July 13th. Had Manhattan's grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then our special days would be the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due east and sets due west.

But Manhattan is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar. Upon studying American culture, and what is important to it, future anthropologists might credit the Manhattan alignments to cosmic signs of Memorial Day and, of course, the All-Star break. War and Baseball. [More]

Labels: fun, science

There are places in Manhattan where they’re constantly fighting rising underground rivers that are corroding the tracks. You stand in these pump rooms, and you see an enormous amount of water gushing in. And down there in a little box are these pumps, pumping it away. So, say human beings disappeared tomorrow. One of the first things that would happen is that the power would go off. A lot of our power comes out of nuclear or coal-fired plants that have automatic fail-safe switches to make sure that they don’t go out of control if no humans are monitoring their systems. Once the power goes off, the pumps stop working. Once the pumps stop working, the subways start filling with water. Within 48 hours you’re going to have a lot of flooding in New York City. Some of this would be visible on the surface. You might have some sewers overflowing. Those sewers would very quickly become clogged with debris—in the beginning the innumerable plastic bags that are blowing around the city and later, if nobody is trimming the hedges in the parks, you’re going to have leaf litter clogging up the sewers.

“But what would be happening underground? Corrosion. Just think of the subway lines below Lexington Avenue. You stand there waiting for the train, and there are all these steel columns that are holding up the roof, which is really the street. These things would start to corrode and, eventually, to collapse. After a while the streets would begin cratering, which could happen within just a couple of decades. And pretty soon, some of the streets would revert to the surface rivers that we used to have in Manhattan before we built all of this stuff. [More] [Update - Sorry, the link wasn't working. All better now.]

Labels: science

In a review to be published in the May 18 issue of the journal Science, Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, discusses a new consensus scientists are reaching on the origins and mechanisms of morality. Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are being synthesized in support of three principles:

1) Intuitive primacy, which says that human emotions and gut feelings generally drive our moral judgments;

2) Moral thinking if for social doing, which says that we engage in moral reasoning not to figure out the truth, but to persuade other people of our virtue or to influence them to support us; and

3) Morality binds and builds, which says that morality and gossip were crucial for the evolution of human ultrasociality, which allows humans - but no other primates - to live in large and highly cooperative groups.

"Putting these three principles together forces us to re-evaluate many of our most cherished notions about ourselves," says Haidt, whose own research demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says, "many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool, dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere - in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place." [More]

When offspring genetic engineering becomes possible I expect parental choices to produce bigger differences in how people morally reason. Conservative-leaning people will make their children morally reason even more strongly in the conservative style. The liberals will do likewise. So the size of the center will shrink. This will lead to deeper political divisions and perhaps civil war in some countries and wars between countries.

I also expect offspring genetic engineering to produce more other styles of moral reasoning including ones that are rare today and others that do not exist at all today. Who knows, maybe genetic engineering will move libertarianism up in the ranks of moral reasoning styles. [More]

Labels: culture, population, science

Labels: fun, science

Perhaps not surprisingly, the press release associated with this work focused on those compounds, including herbicides, that are most resistant to biodegradation, but fails to mention the even larger group of compounds that are intrinsically biodegradable. The usual news write ups about toxic chemicals and the environment 9999 times out of 10000 will inevitably highlight those that are the nastiest.

The huge benefits of the thousands of organic compounds used in the pharma, biotech, plastics, and other industries as well as medicine and agriculture will simply be ignored whether or not those compounds accumulate in the environment or not. Biodegradation is only one route by which thousands of compounds are destroyed naturally in the environment (heat, light and interaction with other non-living materials, are others). The predictive system will be useful, certainly, but its wider applicability should consider these other routes and the risk factors and toxicity associated with any particular chemical, rather than tarnishing all entries in the database simply on the basis of whether or not a microbial enzyme exists to digest it. [More]

Labels: future, science, technology

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Labels: fun, science

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Labels: fun, science

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They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well. The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up. [More]

Some of the most hilarious congressional testimony of the past thirty years has come from the lobbying organizations associated with American beekeepers. If the quinennial farm bill is the Olympics of Pork, then these boys are the gold medal winners. Every five years, we get to hear how the honey subsidy is the only thing preventing the complete die-off of all agriculture in America, as the domesticated bee population is responsible for most crop pollination, and gosh darn it, the lil’ buggers can’t make it on their own. I’m not exaggerating; the bee lobby’s rhetoric, particularly in the mid-1980s, really has included apocalyptic claims of this sort. The University of Kansas debate team achieved significant competitive success during that time period using positions built around the wilder claims of honey-subsidy enthusiasts. [More]

Labels: environment, production, science

Time to go long corn?...

Suppose we did get a serious environmental kickback from all the Bt corn we're planting. And suppose it showed up in honeybees?

The study in question is a small research project conducted at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004. The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called "Bt corn" on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a "toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations." But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.

According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."

Of course, the concentration of the toxin was ten times higher in the experiments than in normal Bt corn pollen. In addition, the bee feed was administered over a relatively lengthy six-week period. [More]

Our corn industry and more than a few corporate careers are built on the efficacy and safety of using Bt expression to defend plant from insects. Lord knows we've covered all the bases we could in checking this technology out. To begin with, bees don't feed on corn pollen. But still, the problem is real.

As an example of what honeybees face, Hayes says to make a fist and place it next to your body.

“That’s how large a Varroa mite is to a honeybee. And these mites suck a bee’s blood. Obviously, that debilitates and weakens their immune systems. The mites also vector viruses that affect honeybee health.”

Normally, honeybees forage within a 2.5-mile radius of their colony. They visit flowers to collect pollen and nectar to make honey to feed themselves and their young. That means they’re exposed to whatever is in the environment.

“Of course, honeybees are exposed to agricultural chemicals sprayed on crops or used systemically to control pests,” says Hayes. “Those pests are mostly insects, but so are honeybees. Even at sub-lethal levels, some of the chemicals can find their way through plant nectar and pollen to the bees.”

Researchers are also looking into any possibility that GMO crops could be playing a role in the bees’ behavior. “There are some concerns about GMO crops that can produce a toxin used to battle harmful insects. Those traits are also in nectar and pollen.” [More]

But if no other answer for the Colony Collapse Syndrome arises soon, the scrutiny on GM plants will intensify. While I do not consider the "precautionary principle" a reasonable approach, if something like this honeybee link gets proven - and it looks very unlikely - we're headed straight back to 1990 on our farms. This would put a stake in the heart of GM seeds.

This honeybee thing is getting freaky, and it's worth following.

Labels: GM, production, science, technology

After mosquitoes bite a host with malaria, the parasite that causes the disease proliferates in the insect, readying itself to infect the next human victim. It's no fun being infected, and one might think that mosquitoes would have developed a resistance to the malaria parasite over time. But several studies have suggested that mosquitoes engineered to build defenses against malaria are less fit than insects that chose to live with the parasites.

Now there's reason to take heart. Several years ago, a group of medical entomologists at Johns Hopkins University created a strain of Anopheles stephensi (a mosquito that bites rodents) equipped with a gene called SM1 that makes the mosquitoes resistant to infection with Plasmodium berghei, a rodent malaria parasite. In the new study, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group carried out a series of experiments in which 250 of these insects were put in a cage together with 250 wild-type counterparts and allowed to feed on malaria-infected mice. The resistant insects lived longer and produced more eggs than did those not resistant to the parasite, and after nine generations, some 70% of the population was resistant. The researchers speculate that carrying SM1 is a less costly strategy than whatever defenses malaria-resistant mosquitoes develop in the wild. [More]

GM mosquitoes that interfered with development of the malaria parasite would make it more difficult for the organism to become re-established after it had been eradicated from a target area, they said.

Malaria, spread by the single-celled parasite Plasmodium, is endemic in parts of Asia, Africa, and central and south America.

The organism is passed to humans through the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. Each year it makes 300 million people ill and causes a million deaths worldwide.

Some 90% of cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, where a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds. [More]

Labels: GM, health, science, technology

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals. [More]

Evidence from national databases suggests that both acute and chronic sinus inflammation (sinusitis) is being overtreated with poorly chosen medications, researchers report.

Data from 1999 and 2002 collected by the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey suggests that there were roughly 14 million visits annually because of chronic sinusitis and 3 million because of acute sinusitis. [More]

Labels: blog, science

Labels: fun, science

Monster whirlpool off Sydney

Explaining the image

Variations in sea levels above or below the normal are shown, with the two icy whirlpools in dark blue because the deep cold water has helped pull the ocean surface down by around 70cm.

The icy whirlpool closest to Sydney is 200kms across and plunging 1km towards the ocean floor. It's about 100km east of Sydney and moving clockwise.

Dude, a "MONSTER WHIRLPOOL" should not have to be explained.

It should be sucking oil tankers in.

Labels: fun, science

But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat hysteria, Mr. Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to substitute processed fats like palm oil and margarine for good old-fashioned butter because of the small amounts of natural trans fat butter contains.

Some researchers believe that the trans fat that occurs naturally in butter, meat, milk and cheese might actually be healthy. But to satisfy companies that want to call their foods completely free of trans fats, bakers like Mr. Reich are altering serving sizes, cutting back on butter and in some cases using ingredients like trans fat-free margarine. [More]

In the mid-1980s, Jacobson launched a campaign against saturated fats—then CSPI's "panic du jour." In turn, CSPI demanded that restaurants stop using beef tallow to cook French fries and other foods. By the early 1990s, most restaurants had acquiesced to Jacobson's demands.

At the time, partially hydrogenated oils were the only viable alternative to beef tallow and other oils high in saturated fat. Jacobson and CSPI, driven by their myopic dislike of saturated fats, dismissed a number of studies connecting partially hydrogenated oil—and the trans fats it contains—with increasing levels of cholesterol.

In 1988, Elaine Blume wrote in the Center's Nutrition Action Healthletter: "[H]ydrogenated oils aren't guilty as charged... All told, the charges against trans fat just don't stand up. And by extension, hydrogenated oils seem relatively innocent." Two years later, CSPI nutrition director Bonnie Liebman put it more succinctly: "The Bottom Line... Trans, shmans."

So, after years of pressuring restaurants to stop using beef tallow and other oils, and at the same time exonerating partially hydrogenated oils, CSPI bears much of the responsibility for restaurants using oils high in trans fats. [More]

Labels: food, policy, science

The study adds to evidence that modern central and northern Europeans are mostly the descendents of a small group of dairy farmers found in the 5th millennium BC, he said.

"The ability to drink milk is the most advantageous trait that's evolved in Europeans in the recent past. Without the enzyme lactase, drinking milk in adulthood causes bloating and diarrhoea," said co-author Mark Thomas.

"The benefits of milk tolerance … include: the continuous supply of milk compared to the boom and bust of seasonal crops, its nourishing qualities and the fact that it's uncontaminated by parasites - unlike stream water - making it a safer drink. All in all, the ability to drink milk gave some early Europeans a big survival advantage," said Thomas [More]

The idea of milk being safer because it had been "filtered" through a cow never struck me. It's like how Chinese laborers fared better during the building of the Transcontinental Railroad because they drank tea which had been effectively sterilized by boiling instead of raw water .

Labels: culture, dairy, science

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Imagine someone walking along at night strung with white Christmas tree lights. Even though you couldn't see a face or even clothing, you'd probably be able to tell if the person was male or female, young or old, just from the patterns made by the lights as they moved. Queen's University psychology professor Niko Troje thinks there's a lot more information encrypted in such "biological motion" and that it can be reliably teased out using sophisticated computer analysis. [More]

Labels: science