Study One:

Maria A. Blasco and Bruno M. Bernardes de Jesus at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center have found a way to extend the lifespan of mice in a way that could be applied to humans. It’s a gene therapy that targets the telomeres, the end caps of chromosomes that deteriorate with age. The therapy repairs or slows down damage to the telomeres, without causing an increase in the rate of cancer. Mice that received the therapy had life spans an average of 24 percent longer than mice that did not. For human beings, such an impact would bring average life expectancy up into the nineties.

Study Two:

Byung Yang Lee, Seung-Wuk Lee, and Ramamoorthy Ramesh of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories have found a virus that you actually want your computer to have – because it can be used to generate electricity. The virus is harmless to humans. It infects bacteria only. The virus has a tubular shape that causes it to tend to line up in orderly rows when assembled in large numbers. The virus also happens to be constructed in such a way that makes it piezoelectric, meaning that it can generate carry an electric charge in response to the application of physical force.

The Science Fiction Plot:

Imagine a world in which people are expected to live to be a hundred years old, thanks to a gene therapy that protects their telomeres, and which is free of the pollution now associated with the generation of electricity, thanks to the use of piezoelectric squares packed with electrically conductive viruses that are harmful to humans, linked up into gigantic networks of sidewalks and roads that stretch across entire continents.

Problems arise, however, when the virus becomes biologically adaptive, infecting a bacteria that grows along the roadways and sidewalks, and begins to evolve to exploit its new interconnectedness… into a new form of life that “thinks” using the roadways as nerves and has, as its physical body, the entire system of objects that are powered by the electricity generated by those roadways. So, people’s toasters, transportation and telephones begin behaving in frighteningly unusual ways.

At the same time, the human population of the Earth is undergoing a new boom. Shortened telomeres, it turns out, lead to prolonged reproductive ability as well as prolonged life span, and families of five children have become the worldwide average. Given that those children all have 100-year life spans, they require a lot more food, which requires the use of more land and water for agriculture, and now, in the third generation after the discovery of the telomere therapy, things are getting very tight on Planet Earth.

Two heroes find two very different ways of solving these problems, and assemble what forces they can to apply their ideas, in contradiction, and then in open conflict, with each other. Soon, each hero begins to question what he/she is really fighting for, because the survival of the human species is on the line, but protecting it may bring about further consequences…

1. It isn’t really the planet that needs protection. The Earth will not explode, or crash into the sun, for billions of years. What needs protection is the ecological integrity of Earth’s biosphere. Ecological integrity is a difficult thing for many people to understand.
2. Most people don’t have a sense of attachment to the Earth on a planetary scale. They’re focused more locally and at the national level. Most people, for example, evaluate the plausibility of global warming according to the weather in their neighborhood.
3. Most people have very little direct experience of the natural world, unfiltered through human civilization. Even those places that seem to have retained a natural ecological integrity are, in fact, already strongly compromised by the consequences of human industrial activities, even though those activities are far away.
4. People don’t like to sacrifice their own needs. They tend to be selfish.

Environmental activists already get the big picture, and are thinking about more than just their own needs. To move environmental issues forward, however, a new approach is called for. This approach needs to be something that will appeal to people’s local focus, their selfish drives, and not rely on distant ideas of ecology or the natural world.

As luck would have it, there are very local, very selfish reasons to support environmental protections and to resist the growth of the pollution of our world through industrial activities. A study released this week identifies just one of these reasons.

A team of researchers from Columbia University did an analysis of prenatal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a form of air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels in cars and in electric power plants, and found a correlation with childhood obesity. Children whose mothers were exposed to high concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the air were twice as likely to be obese as children whose mothers were exposed to low concentrations.

When I first saw news of these results, I suspected that the association might take place through poverty, with conditions of poverty causing both the obesity and higher exposure to air pollution from cars. However, the study controlled for poverty. Furthermore, previous studies have found that mice exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons become more obese than mice that are not exposed. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons appear to both cause the creation of fatty deposits and to prevent the normal reduction of those deposits through metabolic activity.

The implications of this study are local and highly personal: The more cars you have driving through your neighborhood, the more fat your children are likely to become. You kids don’t need to be riding in the cars – simple exposure to the air pollution released by automobiles encourages your children to become overweight, and will keep them more chubby than they would be otherwise.

Of course, there’s more than one side to the story. Cars are not only machines that make us fat by spewing out toxic chemicals. They are also machines that kill us by spewing out toxic chemicals. According to another study on the impact of air pollution from cars and electric power plants that was released this last week, more than four times as many people in the United Kingdom are killed by toxic air pollution from automobiles and power plants than are killed in traffic accidents.

Why is it, then, that we’re given a seat belt to keep us safe from car crashes, but aren’t given breathing masks to keep us safe from the filth that cars spew out into the air?

How would you respond to Chuck’s argument that the scientists who are the most cooperative are the most legitimate? If you don’t agree with his ideas, what alternative suggestion would you make to paranormal investigators?

Democrats and Republicans in Congress may be inactive on the issue of climate change, but the climate itself has remained quite active in its warming shift. Last month, 15,000 new record high temperatures were set in the lower 48 states.

It’s not just in the USA that global warming is having an impact, of course. That’s why they call it global warming.

In Antarctica, for example, grass that typically grows in the United States is now growing, and spreading its range, in Antarctica. The Larsen B ice shelf on the side of the Antarctic Penninsula has lost 85 percent of its size since 1995, making it now not so much an ice sheet as an ice pillow case.

1. Lightning could not have reached this part of the cave to start a fire of organic materials there, so the researchers surmise that ancestors of modern humans must have either created fire in the cave or transported fire to the cave. The implication of their discovery is that ancestors of modern humans already had some control over the use of fire one million years ago. Homo erectus, and perhaps other species of humans, were living at that time, but remains of Homo sapiens of anything close to that age have not been found.

2. One of the alternative explanations that researchers eliminated was that the fire could have started in a pile of bat guano. Apparently, piles of decomposing bat guano can become so hot that they light on fire all by themselves. No traces of bat guano were found on the site, however.

Liz Goodwin of Yahoo News writes that Guachat’s survey shows that right wingers “have become dramatically more skeptical of science”. Alan Boyle of MSNBC states that Gauchat’s study describes “conservatives who are skeptical about the scientific elite”. John Hoeffel of the Los Angeles Times reflects on the study, musing that “the conservatives who dominate the primaries are deeply skeptical of science”.

Skepticism, however, is at the heart of science. Science is a process through which new discoveries are tested through disciplined skeptical analysis. Skepticism is the philosophical position that assertions need to be substantiated with facts.

What the survey actually measures is the level of trust that religious and right wing Americans have in science. It suggests that these groups have increasingly levels of distrust in science.

Distrust is not the same thing as skepticism. The distrust of science by religious and right wing Americans described in the survey is based in dedication to ideology. When scientifically-established facts dispute the ideological model of reality held by religious and right wing Americans, increasingly large numbers of those Americans choose to reject the facts rather than rethinking their ideology.

If right wingers and religious Americans were truly skeptical about scientific research, they would change their beliefs when confronted with new information that does not agree with those beliefs. Instead, they keep their beliefs, and simply assert, without factual evidence, that the results of scientific research must not be true.

True skepticism is an honorable and disciplined practice. The label of “skeptic” should not be sullied by connection with people who simply don’t have the strength of character to admit that they’re wrong.

When he ran for President four years ago, Barack Obama promised over and over again that under his watch, the decisions of the federal government would be based on science, not on political expediency. Yet, this week (and not for the first time), the Obama Administration decided to ignore the advice of the government’s own scientists, and block environmental action.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Wednesday that it would refuse to provide protections against the nitrous oxide and sulfur oxide pollution that causes acid rain. This decision came in spite of the acknowledgement by the EPA’s own scientists that the proposed pollution protections are necessary to prevent further ecological degradation of the waterways in the northeastern United States.

Whether you’re interested in a President who defends the integrity of science in the public process or you’re looking for President who will protect America’s natural resources, Barack Obama is not a leader you can trust.

With a sea level rise of just 5 feet, the southern end of Florida will disappear, and much of North Carolina will be lost beneath the waves. The predicted 40 to 70 feet of sea level rise will reach far beyond what is now the coast, going up major rivers to engulf major cities. Consider Washington D.C., most of which is less than 30 feet above sea level.

Thanks to global warming, this is what the National Mall will look like in the future, with barnacles covering the first 20 or 30 feet of the Washington Monument. All of Washington D.C. will be under water, having become a gigantic reflecting pool, with no cherry trees by its side in the springtime.

Remember that this is a best-case scenario. We have already waited too long to prevent this catastrophe. Will we now continue to delay efforts to prevent additional damage to our country?

Global warming is real. The changes have already begun. It’s time to take action.

Our way of life needs to change, and here’s a good start: Put your car keys in a little box. On that little box, put a lock. On the top of that little box, stick yourself a note: “Our planet needs a better form of transportation than this. Walk. Bike. Take a bus or a train.”

That’s on the land. What’s happening in the water?

An article in this month’s edition of scientific journal Science looks at the geological evidence, and concludes that the acidification of the oceans of planet Earth that’s taking place right now is probably the most extreme that has taken place for hundreds of millions of years – and maybe even longer in the past than that. The reliable geologic record of rocks formed from marine sediments goes back 300 million years. Nowhere during that time was there an acidification trend as intense as what the oceans are experiencing right now.

Let’s put that into context: The very first primitive dinosaurs didn’t evolve until about 225 million years ago. It was about 300 million years ago that vertebrates laid their eggs on land for the very first time.

The authors of the journal article discuss “the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.” I’d say that’s a big deal.

Open a separate window containing a random number generator.

There are 29 categories listed on the left. Generate a random number between 1 and 29, and roll your mouse over the corresponding category.

Subcategories will appear. Generate another random number to pick which one, and click on the link.

There will be a number of tables. Generate a random number to pick which one. (Click the pdf)

There will be a number of columns. Generate a random number to pick one.

Finally, there will be a number of rows. Generate a random number to pick one.

Write down the statistic.

Now do it again, and share the two statistics, in order, here.