Over The Counter Culture » New science

Things you probably never knew toxoplasmosis could do to you

bradley — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:12:37 +0000

Mice and rats infected with toxoplasmosis are less scared of cats and can even start ‘deliberately’ hanging around areas where they can smell cats. Inevitably, that means they’ll get eaten, the cat will get the disease, and will help spread it around.

In humans, there is some evidence that toxoplasmosis is linked to schizophrenia.

Most amazingly, in women who get toxoplasmosis, the likelihood of a boy being born goes from slightly over 50% potentially all the way up to 72% – so for every 10 girls, 26 boys would be born.

If you have a specific blood type (Rh-), you’re 2.5 times more likely to have a car accident than uninfected people.

There’s controversial evidence that men become more anti-social, grumpy, risky/rebellious, but less curious – and that women become friendlier, keener to have sex, more outgoing, and might be considered more attractive by men.

In most healthy human beings, toxoplasmosis merely presents with flu-like symptoms, then sits dormant.

source

The Chinese, by any other name…

On the Happiness of the Fat and the Bereaved

bradley — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:04:22 +0000

Snippets from some astounding happiness, obesity and widowhood research. via Chris Dillow on Stumbling & Mumbling (with more findings, details on what was controlled for, and his thoughts as to whether this is true, and what it shows)

Marina-Selini Katsaiti finds that “obesity has a negative and statistically significant effect on individual well being”. She estimates that, in Germany, a three-point rise in BMI (from, say 24 to 27 – equivalent to gaining around 20 pounds for someone who’s 5’8”) reduces happiness on average by so much that it would require a 67% pay rise to compensate. In Australia it would require a doubling of income to offset the adverse effect of such a weight gain.
Now, contrast this to a new paper (pdf) by Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis. They show that, in the UK, men and women who have been widowed are happier in the 3-4 years after their loss than they were the year before it. Yes, their well-being slumps in the 12 months after bereavement, but it recovers thereafter.

Now, remember of course that winning the lottery will statistically do very little, if anything, to make you a happier person in the long run

How very peculiar!

Evil capitalists are out to get you – salad edition

bradley — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:12:00 +0000

The mere presence of salads on a McDonalds menu makes people more likely to consume the unhealthier food, according to a new paper published last month. Here’s the abstract:

This research examines how consumers’ food choices differ when healthy items are included in a choice set compared with when they are not available. Results demonstrate that individuals are, ironically, more likely to make indulgent food choices when a healthy item is available compared to when it is not available. The influence of the healthy item on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self?control. Support is found for a goal?activation?based explanation for these findings, whereby the mere presence of the healthy food option vicariously fulfills nutrition?related goals and provides consumers with a license to indulge

One thing to consider, though – true or not, there’s a rumour floating around that the salads are unhealthier due to the oily dressing. Shouldn’t this have been controlled for in the study?

Original paper; Initial coverage (Matt Yglesias); More

TED assembly

bradley — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:55:00 +0000

How I wish that instead of dull sermons from the chaplain or stern slobbers from the headmaster, assembly at school had been a TED video (or better yet, a live speaker of that caliber).

What a way to start the day.

Here’s a particularly interesting one I just watched, prompting further reading and me seeking to reconnect with an entrepreneur in the electric car industry:

Shai Agassi discusses the economics of mass electric car adoption in a scheme involving removable electric batteries and universal charge points that completely rethinks the economics of running a car. You get paid if you have to change your battery more than x times a year.

How feasibly can we actually drop our global CO2 production?

bradley — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:07:15 +0000

I hate talking about global warming – its boring, cliche, and largely depressing, because any careful thinking about it invariably leads to the conclusion that the only true solution, if climate change models based on CO2 are correct, is a mass human extinction event, or exodus (to other planets); your child is a much greater environmental nightmare than your Hummer H2 is.

If our primary objective as a species is a global reduction in happiness and development inequalities, allowing global population growth to continue apace is totally counterproductive. And that’s a sad thought, and one that may motivate a global terrorism movement far worse than Al Qaeda.

But take a look at this graph (source: McKinsey). It estimates the cost and effectiveness of the various proposed things society can do to bring emissions down. On the left, the negative y axis values show that we save a lot of money and abate CO2 emissions, with certain strategies like insulating our houses and offices. To the right, expensive strategies. It’s clear from the graph that the real gains to be made (measured as progress along the x axis) are in this economically costly zone.

The worst part: even with all known strategies pursued, we still hit the dangerously (*according to current climate models) high levels of 450ppm by 2030.

I’d like to be able to play with the graph and generate data based on different population and oil price forecasts. Their assumptions aren’t clearly stated, disappointingly. This link offers a modest amount of skepticism regarding this graph, and highlights some further insights it gives us, alongside some auxiliary information about the bang-for-buck of different climate change prevention schemes.

Paradoxical lifestyles

bradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:43:28 +0000

Just came across an interesting behavioural economics paper by Stutzer & Frey. Behavioural science is an extremely ‘hot’ field of academia at the moment, hitting the mainstream with books such as Freakonomics (Dubner & Levitt), Predictably Irrational (Ariely), Blink (Gladwell), Nudge (Thaler), etc), and with increasing influence in politics, notably within the Conservative Party here in the UK.

The key finding is this:

Our main result indicates [...] that people with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being

So you make yourself systematically worse off, and much unhappier, by buying a large suburban house (with long commute) with an extra bedroom for the rare occasions when your parents come to visit, instead of a short-haul townhouse – even though at the time of purchase, going for the larger suburban house seemed like a totally rational decision.

Same deal with getting a highly paid city job in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street or Madison Avenue even though it dramatically extends commute time – when we would lead a happier job working a ‘worse’ job locally.

The conclusion is not totally unexpected, but it’s an interesting example that makes you think about how irrational human existence can be – pretty depressing really. It highlights the importance of behavioural economics: we may be able to achieve a much happier society if it can succeed in revealing these paradoxical lifestyle choices and thus helping us to avoid them.

We don’t understand, long term, the relative contributions to our happiness and well-being of different factors in our lifestyle. Behavioural science in the 21st century could have a similar ‘enlightenment’ effect to nutritional/dietary science in the 20th.

I’d be interested to know what other examples there are, from your life, where you now think/suspect a decision you took at some point in life *thinking* it was totally rational has led to you being worse off overall?

(hat tip)

Backyard boffins beating Europe’s biggest

bradley — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:19:50 +0000

Spectre’s put together a great set of articles about Surrey Satellite Technology ltd. (SSTL). Get this, from a 2005 article: “A company formed by a small team of boffins in Guildford yesterday launched the first Galileo satellite, beating a rival consortium of three of Europe’s technology giants [Alcatel, EADS and Thales].

“SSTL expects to have a turnover of £30m this year, with pre-tax profits of around £1.5m. The company has grown by 25pc a year since it was spun out of Surrey University in 1985. The consortium, Galileo Industries, originally tendered at five times the price quoted by SSTL, but their satellite is still in testing and not expected to launch until mid-2006.”

“We specifically make low-cost and quick satellites,” he said. Giove-A, which weighs 600kg, has gone
from drawing board to launch in 30 months. “We take these components out of iPods and so on, and work out whether we can fly them in our spacecraft.” Sir Martin said conventional components can take up to 15 years to test, by which time they may be obsolete. “Imagine if you bought a PC that was 15 years old.”

The best thing about this: Surrey University owns 80% of the company (the rest is owned by the employees, and by Elon Musk, a name that should be familiar to anyone in the dotcom scene). So they held 80% of a very profitable company growing 20-25% y/y that makes its living stripping bits out of your gadgets to make ultra cheap, ultralight satellites – in a country with no real culture or history of space exploitation/exploration – in fact, SSTL was formed just when Maggie Thatcher nabbed the entire UK space budget! Surrey University really cashed recently when it sold SSTL to EADS earlier this year.

I don’t think we in the UK realise just how much potential we have locked up in our universities, waiting to be exploited and to take on commercial giants from way out leftfield.

Stanford owns the patent to Google’s search engine technology. Would tuition fees faced by students be so onerous if UK universities were doing the same with their bright stars?

WTF-of-the-day: Friday 30th May ’08

bradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:13:42 +0000

A US cleantech company called Blacklight Power has raised $60m for a new, very clean form of electricity production. Nothing astounding there, really – cleantech is very much du jour. What’s “WTFotd”-worthy about this story is that the technology they claim to have developed runs against a key part of quantum physics: they claim that they have discovered a lower energy level for electrons than the 1s shell resting state: the hydrino.

To the layman: hydrogen has been extensively studied because it’s the simplest periodic element, and when you’re talking quantum physics, studying basic, simple systems helps… a lot. So physisicts think they understand it pretty damn well. A fundamental tenet is that the lowest energy ‘shell’ (think of it as an orbiting satellite around a planet) that electrons can take around a hydrogen nucleus is called 1s. This is the ‘resting state’, and most physicists don’t believe it could be pushed any lower. *If* it could, then you could take out the difference in energy, use it to power a plant. But physicists believe that hydrogen electrons can’t go any lower: try to squish it in any closer, and it will just press back; so the only energy you would get out of it is energy you put in. Not the way to run a power plant. This is something that the general scientific body holds to be true (or so I understand – but IANAQP).

The hydrino controversy last churned up in 2005 – even hitting mainstream media. Apparently Blacklight is now moving on to scaling up to a 50kW reactor. It would be earth-quaking enough for this key tenet of physics to be proven false in a physics lab somewhere in a university. But for it to have been discovered by a startup in the industry by a non-physicist, and to be on its way to becoming a commercially viable power source? And for it to be roughly 10x cheaper than the cheapest solar power we have available (and even cheaper than the cheapest coal power?), at just 1cent a kWh? This scenario isn’t impossible, but seriously, come on!!

There’s a lot to be skeptical about here. The fact that none of his papers have been coauthored, or that a discovery as revolutionary as this can’t get into Nature or Science, or even any attention in New Scientist. Some scientists claim Randell Mills’ papers are ‘riddled with mathematical errors’, and with Mills’ background in medicine, not theoretical physics or even chemistry, that would be understandable. Various scientists have taken turns ripping his research to shreds. And yet Blacklight’s got great backers, NASA has taken an interest, and $60m has been stumped up. Wtf indeed.

[cf Venturebeat]

Energy

bradley — Sun, 25 May 2008 22:04:38 +0000

(just did some reading on means for capturing sunlight and how efficient they are; it challenged some of my preconceptions of where the solution might lie, so I though I’d share it with you guys too. I omit energy sources that are many thermodynamic steps removed from incident solar radiation, like hydroelectric, wind and waves – I *assume* these are extremely inefficient converters).

Chlorophyll (in plants, converts sunrays into ‘redox potential’ – useful chemical energy that can smash carbon dioxide and water together to form hydrocarbons – like sugar or biodiesel): ~100%

Conversion of chlorophyll-derived energy to useful molecules, like sugars: 50%

Factor in the energy spent by the plant so that it can live, and the sunlight reflected off the leaves, and your big green plant could theoretically convert just 11% (other sources quote 34%). Sugar cane is at the top end of the ones that have been measured: 4%; corn is 0.5% (corn is a major crop being used for bioethanol); wheat is 0.3%

Solar panels: 20%

Algae: 13%

I’d also like to know what the energy efficiency of a snickers bar or a sausage is (in terms of energy used by plants to make the individual components, energy to make the bar, energy to transport it to me, versus the energy it refuels my body with); my (largely baseless) guess is that it must be anywhere in the 0.000x – 0.0000000x% range. What a waste of sunrays!

UPDATE: http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/29/sapphire-energy-gets-open-checkbook-from-investors-for-algae-based-gasoline/ “Green crude” project putting bacteria in dirty water or seawater and extracting petroleum gets ‘blank cheque’ to make it happen, and quick. The Wellcome Trust is getting in on this, which is interesting – and probably a good sign for the viability of the technology

Your food has… software?!

bradley — Sun, 25 May 2008 08:31:17 +0000

Thought for the day: the genome of a cell is its software. “Mad” scientists like CJ. Venter are already finding out how to ‘install linux’ on bacterial ‘hardware’ by swapping out its own chromosome with that of another bacteria, or even a man-made chromosome.

And for some time now we have been editing the software of many cells out there: adding anti-pesticide genes, swapping out some genes to put in drought-resistant ones to help prevent famine in Africa and to deal with climate change, and in the lab it’s a daily occurrence, making certain proteins in bacteria ‘glow’ under UV light (so you can track them as they move around) by pasting in some code that we took from a squid’s software, or that of a firefly.

Meanwhile, machines to synthesise DNA (put together the long strings of A, T, G, C nucleotides in specific order) – i.e. to ‘burn the code on a cd rom’ – are getting smaller, more accurate and more affordable. It may not be long before they’re the size of a desktop printer.

————-

Imagine, if you will, a future in which more of your food is grown by you – apart from animals, which are too hard to keep and farm in cities (I’m assuming that like most people, you live in a city). This cuts transportation costs, is safer from bioterrorism, and gives you more flexibility and independence from rising food prices as the world’s population grows. Presumably this food takes the shape of plants, fungi (like quorn, but hopefully a lot more tasty!) and ‘friendly’ bacteria like you eat in Yakult.

You will have the power to ‘upgrade the software’ on your food by downloading a ‘patch’ from “Micro(-biology)soft Update”, synthesise the DNA, zap it into your existing self-renewing stock of plant seeds/fungi/friendly bacteria, and thus improve your food intake.

Here are some examples:

You find out you’re pregnant – just download the code for a gene that boosts the folic acid production of your carrots or your single-celled algae.
Maybe you’re bored with the flavour of your quorn? Go to download.com and download the ‘popcorn’ taste program and swap out the genes (programs) for soy sauce flavour.
Maybe you’ve just found out that you have a gene likely to make your eyesight degrade at a relatively young age? Many people do. Upregulate the Vitamin A gene by putting a couple more copies in.
Maybe your husband would like to try this new strain of yeast in his beer microbrewery that his coworker just started using and gives the beer a richer aroma. Or to make it less gassy to please his flatulence-intolerant wife.
Or maybe Micro(bio)soft needs to install a security patch to make your food resistant (and pass on that resistance to you, as an edible vaccine) to stop this annoying virus that some (bio)hacker has created
Or they’ve found a way to make your fuel crop convert sunlight and urban CO2 to plant cellulose even faster, so you can upgrade the biofuel crop that’s growing in one corner of your rooftop. This means you can generate electricity even better than before, and sell your surplus back to the urban grid and get even more income from it.

————–

Once the software on your food has been edited, just take it back up to your roof, or your balcony, or your windows (fungi and bacteria don’t need much space) and sow the seeds in the plant bed or seed your fungi/algae/friendly bacteria ‘aquarium’ with the new crop – it’ll have grown by Tuesday, in time for dinner.

The starting point would be Yakult having a website where you can go and customise the friendly bacteria that they put into their yoghurts and then deliver to your doorstep.

Microbial fuel cell not just a hydrogen creator, can also generate electricity

bradley — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:22:27 +0000

I keenly follow latest breakthroughs in biomedical science, neuroscience and bionanotechnology – I figure I could share some of that on this blog, if it’s something you’d like to see more, please let me know.

The Fuel Cell Bacteria: not only can Rhodopseudomonas palustris use light to create hydrogen, it’s also got an amazing superpower: munching on either volatile acids, yeast extract or thiosulphate, it can actually generate electricity (without the need for light). An R. palustris culture in a Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) generates roughly 2.7W/m², so there’s ample room for improvement (your average solar panel in the United States delivers 19 to 56 W/m²). Scientifically, this is a fascinating discovery – the team’s going to have a lot of fun (don’t laugh!) picking out the different metabolic modes in this bacteria capable of producing either hydrogen or electricity, and from loads of different inputs. Those landfill mountains of trash could be much less of a pain in the ass in the not so distant future… we may even be thanking this current generation for throwing so much good energy out (even if they curse us for impoverishing the Earth of a better fuel, namely petroleum).