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If someone told you that a laboratory was initiating a project with the purpose of building a synthetic brain with the “function, size, and power consumption” of a cat, would you say that was cool? Well, if someone told you that the laboratory was pursuing that project on behalf of the U.S. military, would that change how you feel? Would that make you nervous?

Believe it or not, both statements are true. The U.S. military is pursuing just such a project. Imagine the military applications of a synthetic cat brain under the control of the generals. Then imagine the outcome of a synthetic cat brain attached to some weapons system not under the control of the generals. I mean, we know what they do to the mice.

Squeek. Scurry.

Here’s a little note to all the hypochondriacs out there: You don’t need to sit and wonder what might be wrong with you. The Food and Drug Administration has assembled a useful resource for you to find out more about many of the little critters that could make you sick and die.

They call it the Bad Bug Book. However, to be fair, it isn’t just little germies and wriggling worms that are included in this resources. Also discussed are natural toxins, such as scombrotoxin, which can give you a bad rash or other histimine reaction from eating contaminated swiss cheese or mahi mahi.

Happy talk! Keep talking happy talk.

Is that dollar bill in your wallet an alien from a far-away planet? I’m not saying that it is, but I am noticing, looking at the SETI@Home project, that their latest news is that they’re looking for money.

The SETI@Home forum moderator has cryptically announced that “I have put up $25 in a check that will be mailed tomorrow.” Put up $25? Up there?

SETI@Home is a project that allows ordinary Americans to join their own computers into a giant network that processes packages of data from telescopes that scan the skies looking for signals from extraterrestrial life. So far, the project has found nothing.

That’s a useful finding, given that if we didn’t look or listen into outer space, we would never know if there would be anything out there, if only we would look or listen.

The idea that the universe is teeming with a Star Trek’s wild diversity of alien civilizations, all busy talking to each other, appears to have taken a bit of a dent.

Human understanding of extraterrestrial geology got a boost today, as the Cassini spaceship zoomed past one of Saturn’s bigger moons, Enceladus. Enceladus is a world covered by ice that is wracked by fractures and refreezing. There have been eruptions observed on Enceladus, which some speculate come from a warm underground ocean.

A different kind of Enceladus eruption takes place from time to time back here on Earth. Enceladus was originally the name of a son of Mother Earth and Father Time, defeated in battle by the goddess of wisdom, lying underground beneath Mount Etna. The exhalations of Enceladus were said to be the source of the mountain’s eruptions.

The following is, in my opinion, the most stunning of Cassini’s new images of Enceladus. To have seen something like this back during the Voyager’s trip through the Solar System would have been unbelievable.

For more images of Enceladus, visit NASA.

The President of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine writes:

Predictably, the subject of tort reform receded from the media spotlight when the democrats became the majority party in Congress. Although organized medicine cannot continue to place tort reform at the top of its national lobbying agenda at this time, it remains an important issue in state legislatures. Furthermore, beyond the necessity of lobbying legislatures, organized medicine has a duty to explain this issue to our patients and the general public.

Reform of our reckless tort system remains an absolute necessity for the future vitality of the medical profession. Most emergency physicians work 2-3 months per year to pay their malpractice insurance premiums and to continue feeding the litigation industry. This industry generates a tidal wave of litigation against physicians, with more than 80% of all cases having no basis in fact. (1) Furthermore, the ability of a
plaintiff to recover damages has no correlation with fault. (2) The ability to recover damages only correlates with the presence of an injury. This evidence proves that we have a broken tort system. We must look to state legislatures to provide relief.

Ahem.

The Sapped Vitality of the Medical Profession?

Is the vitality of the medical profession under threat? From 2002 to 2007, the number of applicants to U.S. medical schools grew by 25.8%, and the percent of those applicants with clinical community service and research experience has increased during that time, indicating a higher-quality applicant pool. The number of medical doctors in America doubled between 1980 and 2005. Emergency medicine, the branch Dr. Larry Weiss represents, is especially thriving, with five times as many practitioners in Emergency medicine in 2005 as in 1980.

It may sound awful that “most emergency physicians work 2-3 months per year to pay their malpractice insurance premiums,” but according to a review of placements by Merritt Hawkins in the 12 month period from April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008, the average base salary to hired emergency physicians not counting benefits offered for new hires during that time was $240,000 per year, and the Medical Group Management Association reported a higher average overall in 2007, $256,800; emergency physicians’ pay went up by 5.6% between 2003 and 2007, controlling for inflation. If an emergency physician really has to spend as much as 1/4 of their salary on malpractice insurance premiums, that leaves $192,600 per year in income. Report that annual income after malpractice insurance on the street, and wait for the world’s smallest fiddle to play a sad tune for you.

… and no, it’s not because emergency physicians are working all hours, burning the candle at both ends. The SAEM 2004-2005 survey of work hours shows an average total workload of 43 hours per week. That’s a respectable amount of work per week. But it’s not more hours than the typical full-time worker logs in. Yes, emergency doctors work hard. So do all kinds of people. ER docs make a lot more money than other hardworking people.

The tuxedo doesn’t help with the argument.

The Tidal Wave of Litigation?

A tidal wave of litigation? A tidal wave? There is no tidal wave of medical malpractice litigation. As Public Citizen demonstrates using a compilation of National Practitioner Data from the federal government, the number of malpractice payments per capita has actually decreased since 1991:

And in constant dollars (that is, when you control for the effect of inflation), the median settlement value hasn’t really changed at all:

“Aha!,” shout the statisticians. “You report the median, which doesn’t account for outliers. I bet there were a lot of really big settlements that are outrageously large, like in the millions!”

But no, actually, the share of settlements larger than a million dollars have actually gone down over time when you take inflation into account (which is what you always should do):

Unjust Litigation?

Dr. Larry Weiss’ last claim on behalf of his fellow members of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine is that malpractice litigation against doctors is unjust. In an appeal for support of his claim, he offers two citations to the New England Journal of Medicine. Two citations look better than one, but the two citations actually refer to one single dataset. The dataset contains 46 resolved malpractice cases from New York State alone dating back to 24 years ago, and as they really ought to the authors acknowledge that the generalizability of their results is suspect.

A larger, more recent study covering 469 separate medical institutions across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southwest, and West empaneled an impartial academic review panel. This panel judged that 1,406 legal claims involved some injury. That review panel determined that medical error was involved in 889 of those cases and uninvolved in 515 cases. In the cases for which medical error was determined to be involved, 73% resulted in payment and 27% resulted in nonpayment. In the cases for which medical error was determined to be uninvolved, 72% resulted in nonpayment and 28% resulted in payment. That distribution of outcomes is consistent with a model of justice.

I’m not trying to knock emergency medicine physicians, who work hard and save lives and should be applauded. I’m knocking the exaggerated scare tactics used to justify changes that would make it harder for people injured by medical error to be compensated, to the benefit of people who really make enough money already.

News this morning from the Red Planet:

Scientists analyzing two soil samples their Phoenix spacecraft dug from the surface of Mars announced they have discovered what may be the highly oxidizing chemical called perchlorate, a common component of rocket fuels, explosives and some medicines, they reported Monday….

It is also a serious and toxic environmental contaminant left over from many American chemical plants, and Congress is now in a battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over the EPA’s refusal to set safety standards for perchlorates in drinking water and milk.

Isn’t it enough that the chemical industry has poisoned our land here on Earth? Now it’s moved on to sullying the heavens! Curse you, curse you, DuPont and your thermodynamically unstable salts!

We tend to think of news as the sort of thing mostly covered by the major television networks, forgetting that anything else new exists worthy of our attention. Of course, there are lots of fascinating subjects that never reach the nationwide networks, but are covered by local outlets. That material is just waiting to be organized into topical categories by enthusiastic people interested in a particular subject.

That sort of project can be seen in action over at a wonderful site called Tursiops (tursiops being a genus of dolphins). Tursiops brings together news of whales, especially dolphins, from all over the planet.

Dolphin rescues, pods of killer whales attacking larger whales, the experience of captive marine mammals, and evaluation of supposed dolphin exposure therapies are all subjects recently covered by the articles over at Tursiops.

If you’re curious about whales, I suggest you go take a look - it’s much more interesting than watching another hour of Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News.

Last November, Jim reported on sightings of dragonfly-imitating spy robots at peaceful protests in Washington D.C.

What could these things be? One candidate: the Delfly, a miniature robotic surveillance device that looks like a dragonfly as it flies. These devices have cameras that send signals to a remote operator sitting at a computer. The Delfly was developed by a team in the Netherlands, at the Technical University of Delft.

The video below shows one of these devices in action - but keep in mind that the device shown in this video is the first public Delfly device. A second, smaller Delfly II has also been released, and the Delfly Micro, about a third of the size of the ornithopter seen in the video, has just become available.

The survival of our civilization may depend in no small part on that scummy green stuff you avoid at the beach.

There’s feuding about whether to really call algae plants, since they can be unicellular and since blue-green algae are actually bacteria. But they are photosynthesizing organisms, which means they’re good at capturing the energy of the sun and turning it into another form. Start with sunshine, add some water and some carbon dioxide, and BAM!, you’ve got algae. Algae use that energy to make their own oil. Algae can grow in the scummiest of places, on rocky outcroppings where agricultural crops won’t grow, even using seawater that agricultural crops won’t tolerate.

Earlier this year, we were told that algae oil biodiesel would be “years away”. Now we know how many years: just three. A commercial algae biodiesel plant will be built by 2001 on the island of Maui, producing 6 to 10 thousand gallons of biodiesel fuel per acre per year. And here’s the real kick in the pants: the plant will use carbon dioxide pumped from a conventional plant that already sits next door. Rather than pumping it into the air, it’ll be pumped right back into more energy production. That’s environmentally efficient. HR BioPetroleum claims that its project will be profitable within a year’s time, which if true will make the scheme economically smart too.

Update: Looks like Holland, Michigan may get an algae plant too, although on a smaller scale.

“Astronomers Claim Discovery of Earth-like Planet”, reads the headline from Scientific American. It’s an amazing find, astronomically. The planet is five times the size of earth. The planet is orbiting a star (Gliese 581) that is smaller than our sun, and so appears to be about the right distance to have liquid water. In that way, this planet appears to be something like earth.

But what about cultural similarities? How might the inhabitants of this planet, the Gilesians, let’s call them, be like the inhabitants of planet Earth?

In a second study, political scientists from Daimbridge University aimed a message directly toward the planet. The message alerted the Gilesians that they would soon lose their right to free speech and freedom of assembly. The message warned that Earthlings would be arriving soon to search through Gilesians’ homes and eavesdrop on their private conversation. The message also announced that Earthlings had the right to seize any Gilesian to be held prisoner on the planet Mars, after being designated an extraterrestrial combatant.

There has been no response from the Gilesians yet.

In that way, Gilesians appear to be quite a bit like people on Earth… or American Earthlings, at least.

A small addendum to the earlier article showing a photograph of the melting north pole: Contrary to the claims of defenders of pollution, 2008 has demonstrated a reversal of the long-term warming trend.

NOAA reports that June was the eighth warmest June ever recorded. What’s more, the January-to-June period from this year has been the ninth warmest similar period ever.

We’ve spent the last 50 years blasting rockets into outer space, and all we have to show for it is a commemorative coin.

Okay, okay, I know. That’s not all we have to show for it. We have things like satellite television, and the Weather Channel, and Google Maps. We also have military satellites spying on Americans right here in the United States.

For the amount that we’ve invested in the space program, we’ve got some nice door prizes. The trouble is, there really isn’t that much through the door. It’s just a big empty room.

SETI has been looking for signs of intelligent, technological extraterrestrial life for a long while now, and they haven’t found zip. There are no Martians, and it’s likely that there never were. The International Space Station is a station to nowhere.

We’ve got souvenirs, but we could have gotten most of them staying right back here on Earth. What we never really got was a true Space Age. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 came and went, and remained fiction. There is no Star Fleet. Space travel for civilians remains nothing more than a multi-million dollar roller coaster ride that is perpetually not quite ready to leave the ground.

The House of Representatives passed H.R.6455 yesterday. It’s a bill that requires the Treasury Department to mint a coin commemorating NASA - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Note that the coin celebrates NASA - but what has NASA done for us?

No, it’s not fair to say that NASA has done nothing for us, but is what they’ve done worth a coin? Maybe it’s worth a gold watch.

We went to the Moon, and found it dusty. We went to Mars, and found it rusty. The big news from Mars is that there is some water there. Water… you know the stuff… it’s that liquid that covers most of the Earth’s surface.

It turns out that space is mostly just space. It goes on, and on, and on, and on. Maybe there are some slugs or weird things or breathing slime living on a few other planets, or maybe they don’t exist. We’ll never know.

Sure, I was curious to see what might be out there. I remember the excitement that came with Voyager spacecraft’s fuzzy photos of the planets. But, gosh, Pluto isn’t even a planet any more. It’s just a sort of pair of big rocks that are really dark and cold now.

Some people, in groups like the Planetary Society, are afraid that if we don’t leave planet Earth and colonize outer space, the human race could be wiped out in a great cataclysm. They’re right. Humanity could well die out, along with all other life on Earth. Then again, isn’t that what’s going to happen to every living thing anyway? We’re all going to die - and space travel won’t stop that.

There are some good astronomers and other space scientists who are honest about the scope of their work, and I don’t want to devalue what they do. For the rest of us, though, I’m afraid that outer space has become a blank canvas that, when stared at for long enough, becomes a scrim for whatever it is that we’re seeking and not finding here on our own planet.

It’s fine to keep up the genuine space science, but the time for dreams is done. Even our earthbound visions are falling apart, and they’re not dying out as the result of anything dramatic, like a giant asteroid strike. They’re just wimpering their way toward oblivion.

Sometimes the answer to a mystery is that there’s nothing there, and never has been. Sometimes, all there is to discover is that there’s nothing to discover.

On the whole, the lesser prairie chicken has gotten a raw deal from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The USFWS found years ago that the lesser prairie chicken deserved protection as a threatened species under the Endagered Species Act, due to the severe population decline of dry land bird. Yet, the USFWS decided that the lesser prairie chicken wouldn’t actually get the protection from the government that it deserved, because there were “higher priority species”.

Higher priority species? Like what? The Bush Administration has illegally blocked ESA protections for a huge number of animals. It’s not as if the USFWS has been busy listing animals other than the lesser prairie chicken.

Still, the USFWS has done a good bit in compensation for the lesser prairie chicken. It turns out that about one third of lesser prairie chicken hen deaths are due to the birds flying into barbed wire fences. So the USFWS is funding a special project to place special markers along miles of barbed wire fence in the lesser prairie chicken’s habitat. The markers help the birds see the sharp fences, and avoid fatal collisions.

It’s mid afternoon here on the East Coast, noontime on the West, and wherever you are in between that - or elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere - chances are that the weather’s pretty hot. One way to feel cool is to use an air conditioning device that pumps all the heat outside your house so that your neighbors have to deal with it, and the whole world suffers under the global warming you contribute to.

If you’re not inclined to that approach, I suggest using the power of your mind as you enter the world of Lophelia. Lophelia is a genus of hard corals found in the cold waters of the deep ocean. The Lophelia web site, however, takes the the scientific name lophelia and applies it as a way to describe the entire realm of deep water corals.

Most of the content seems designed for the middle school or early high school level. The imagery, however, including some movies of life in the deep, are enough to keep anyone cool.