[Update: I originally called the new space policy "visionary" in the title of this post, but after some thought I changed it. It's actually not visionary, it's pragmatic, so I took the word out. Other than that I haven't changed anything in this post since it originally went up.]

President Obama gave a speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center today to outline his new, revamped space policy.

You may remember that his last revamping caused quite a stir, with people screaming that it would doom NASA. I disagree. Canceling Constellation still strikes me as the right thing to do, because it was becoming an albatross around NASA’s neck. Mind you, this was also the recommendation of the blue ribbon Augustine panel. You may also note that NASA astronauts are split over all this, with Buzz Aldrin, for example, supporting Obama, and Neil Armstrong and many others disagreeing.

It’s a mess, and hard to disentangle what everyone’s saying. There’s been a huge amount of misinformation about it (with — shocking — Fox news leading the way; they spout so much disingenuousness, nonsense, self-contradiction, and outright stupidity that it makes me want to fly to their studios just to slap them). But Obama’s plan seems pretty clear.

The New Space Policy Plan

1) As before, NASA’s budget will be increased in the new plan. Let me repeat that: NASA’s overall budget will go up. And not just a little; we’re talking $6 billion over the next five years. A lot of that goes into scientific research. So far from it being doom and gloom, that’s good news.

2) A new heavy-lift rocket will be developed. Let me repeat that as well: funding is provided for NASA to create a new heavy-lift vehicle. So yes, Constellation will be canceled, but a new system will be developed that (hopefully) will be within budget and time constraints.

3) The Orion capsule, based on Apollo capsule legacy, will still be built. Initially it will be for space station operations as an escape module, but can be adapted later for crewed space missions.

4) He wants NASA to plan manned missions to near-Earth asteroids in the 2020s, and to Mars in 2030s, but no return to the Moon.

OK, so what do I think of all this?

My opinion on the new space policy

1) The increase in NASA’s budget is most welcome. Some of this goes to climate change studies (which the denialists will rant and scream about, but too bad). Some goes to science, some to education. All in all, given NASA’s minuscule budget, any increase rocks. And a lot of this goes into space science.

2) This new rocket proposal makes me very happy. As I have stated repeatedly, NASA keeps going from one project to another without a clear goal or a streamlined system of attaining it. The Shuttle, as amazing as it is, was a terrible project once it was realized — hugely over budget, hobbled massively from what it should have been able to do, and unable to provide cheap and easy access to space with a fast turnaround. Ditto for the Space Station; it became a political pork barrel project and instead of a sleek engineering wonder it became another bloated project with no clear goal.

Some people are complaining that we’ve already sunk $10 billion into Constellation, and we shouldn’t throw that money away. I think that’s a red herring. If Constellation was a waste of money, then we need to staunch that flow. I’m not saying it was, but I’m pointing out that you need to show me that the system was not a waste of money first before complaining that we can’t cancel it after spending that much.

As Elon Musk, head of Space X, said in a press release:

The President quite reasonably concluded that spending $50 billion to develop a vehicle that would cost 50% more to operate, but carry 50% less payload was perhaps not the best possible use of funds. To quote a member of the Augustine Commission, which was convened by the President to analyze Ares/Orion, "If Santa Claus brought us the system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn’t change, our next action would have to be to cancel it," because we can’t afford the annual operating costs.

Mind you as well that this money already spent won’t be wasted. It’s not like we have a lot of rockets sitting around gathering dust. That money was spent on developing technology, knowledge, and experience that will go into any new system created.

I’ll note that the cancellation of Constellation means a loss of many jobs. This new plan should restore a lot of them. I’d be interested in seeing a balance sheet for that.

Another complaint with little or no merit (coming from a lot of folks, including the insipid talking heads on that Fox link above) is that once the Shuttle is over, we need to borrow a lift from the Russians to get to space. As much as I’d like to see us with our own, independent, and healthy space program, I don’t see riding with the Russians as entirely a bad thing. It’s cheaper than the Shuttle, by a large amount. The bad political decisions involving NASA for the past forty years have put us in this predicament, not anything Obama has done over the past 15 months.

And I’ll remind you that this predicament really started rolling when the Bush Administration and NASA decided to stop the Shuttle program with no replacement possible for at least four to five years after the last Shuttle flight. Even if Obama had done nothing; we’d still need the Russians’ help to get into space.

And it’s only temporary. Under Obama’s plan we’ll have a new rocket system around the same time Constellation would’ve gotten going anyway.

As far as relying on private space, I have been clear about that: NASA should not be doing the routine, like going to low Earth orbit. Let private companies do that now that the technology has become attainable by them. NASA needs to innovate. And I’ll note that NASA has relied on private space venture — Boeing, Lockheed, and many others — for decades. This is hardly new.

3) As an adjunct to everything I just wrote above, the Orion legacy capsule project will continue, underscoring my point. We’re taking the knowledge gained over the past few years and applying it to new technology. I rather like Orion, and I’m glad it’s not going away.

4) Well, here’s where I think the new policy falls short. I strongly support missions to near-Earth asteroids. These rocks are areal threat to life on Earth, and the more we know about them the better. Getting to them via rocket is actually easier in many ways than getting to the Moon, so these kinds of missions are cost-effective, and we can learn vast amounts from them. And we would also gain critical experience in visiting asteroids that could come in handy if one has our name on it.

I’m not as gung-ho on getting to Mars because I think the engineering and knowledge needed to put humans on such a long trip is not where it needs to be yet. So how do we get that knowledge? By going back to the Moon.

Obama specifically downplayed a return to the Moon, and it seems he said that we won’t be doing that. I think that’s a huge mistake. Yes, we’ve been there before, but that was a totally different set of missions. That was a race to win, not to stay. A lot of science was planned and obtained for the Apollo missions, but it wasn’t sustainable. Stopping now — especially with a heavy-lift vehicle on the horizon — is a tremendous waste of an opportunity.

Going to Mars depends critically on knowledge learned on going back to the Moon and staying there. So on this point I disagree with Obama’s new plan.

Conclusion

Obama has clearly been listening to both supporters and critics (imagine that!). It almost sounds like he’s been reading my blog (I wish). Bill Nelson, a Democratic Senator from Florida, was vocally opposed to Obama’s initial plan, but accompanied him to this speech. That indicates to me that they have been talking — certainly about the politics, but also about the nuts and bolts — about all this. Obama’s change in plans to continue Orion and more concrete plans for a heavy-lift vehicle clearly come from listening to his critics.

Certainly, this revamped policy the right political move for him; Congresscritters from NASA centers were pretty unhappy about that first policy of privatization. But it’s also the right thing to do.

Obama, in this speech, stated specifically he wants us to be the dominant world power in space. He says that under this new plan, we will actually be sending more astronauts into space in the next decade than we otherwise would have. If his plans are accepted by Congress, if they are funded at the levels requested, and if NASA can implement them, then I think the President is correct.

My overarching desire: that NASA have a clear goal, an actual set of specific, visionary destinations that will inspire the public and make us proud of our space program once again. Part of that desire is for this to have political support and funding to make it possible. Too often, NASA has been told to go do something but not given the money to do it, and that’s a major factor that we’re where we are right now.

Obama’s new policy, with one exception, will give NASA what it needs to be visionary again. That one exception — not returning to the Moon — is a strong one for me, and I will see what I can do to get it put back in. I’m just one guy, but I’ll talk to folks and see what trouble I can stir up.

In the meantime, I’ll also caution that at this moment, these are just words from the President. Good words, and hopeful ones, but just words. It will take deeds to see this through: a clear plan by the White House, cooperation from Congress, and a commitment from NASA to see this policy through.

If those things can happen, then for NASA, for America, and for humanity, then the sky is no longer the limit.

Per ardua, ad astra.

Months after the hack heard ’round the world, the independent review is finished. A panel of 11 led by the University of Oxford’s Lord Oxburgh investigated the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose researchers were accused of manipulating data based on information gleaned from thousands of stolen emails. The panel’s conclusion: The scientists did not intentionally distort the truth, though their statistical rigor leaves something to be desired.

“We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it,” says the Oxburgh report. “Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention” [Nature]. This conclusion came after interviewing people within the organization and combing through the data in 11 of the center’s peer-reviewed papers published over the span of 22 years.

Oxburgh found the researchers “squeaky clean” in terms of their intentions—and that’s what this was, an investigation of the scientist’s integrity, not their results. But, the panel found their methods to be somewhat lacking. Specifically, the report says, “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” The university issued its own statement after the Oxburgh report’s release, including this response to the charge that they didn’t use the best statistical methods available:

Specialists in many areas of research acquire and develop the statistical skills pertinent to their own particular data analysis requirements. However, we do see the sense in engaging more fully with the wider statistics community to ensure that the most effective and up-to-date statistical techniques are adopted and will now consider further how best to achieve this.

Another area for suggested improvement is in the archiving of data and algorithms, and in recording exactly what was done. Although no-one predicted the import of this pioneering research when it started in the mid-1980’s, it is now clear that more effort needs to be put into this activity.

However, some of the panelists noted, even adjusting for newer statistical models didn’t alter the conclusions. David Hand, who is the president of Britain’s Royal Statistical Society and sat on the Oxburgh panel, dug into the infamous “hockey stick” chart of global temperatures by Penn State’s Michael Mann during his investigations. Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there. The upward incline is just shorter than Mann’s original graphic suggests. “More like a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick” [New Scientist], he says.

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DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot In Here, our interview with climate rivals Michael Mann and Judith Curry
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Cosmic Variance: ClimateGate, Sean Carroll on the controversy
Bad Astronomy: The Global Warming E-mails Non-Event

Image: iStockphoto

DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad-scientist research agency, has unveiled new ambitious plans for a flying car called the Transformer (TX). DARPA has already started soliciting proposals from companies to develop a TX prototype and have it ready for testing by 2015.

The military’s plan for a flying car goes several steps beyond previous commercial designs like the Terrafugia Transition. That “roadable aircraft” was designed by a startup company as a lightweight plane that would fold up its wings on landing, and then zoom off on the roads. But DARPA’s proposed vehicle could overcome flaws that have hampered the Terrafugia–including its inability to navigate through bad weather. The agency wants to create a sturdier vehicle that would not just take off and land vertically, but could also carry four people and zip across 250 miles on a single tank of gas.

In its proposal, DARPA states the TX should be both a robust ground and air vehicle, enabling soldiers to avoid water, difficult terrain, and road obstructions–to say nothing of IEDs and ambush threats. It should be no bigger than 30 feet long by 8.5′ wide and 9′ high in ground configuration — on the order of two Hummers nose-to-tail — and should have wheels and suspension giving “road performance similar to an SUV” and “capable of handling light off-road travel” [The Register].

The vehicle’s capacity for vertical takeoff and landing would mean that it won’t need to taxi down a runway. DARPA wants the vehicle to be large enough to carry “four fully suited” soldiers, or a medic and a stretcher, which suggests that the vehicles could serve as flying ambulances. The agency expects the TX to attain an altitude of 10,000 feet and to cover 250 miles on a single tank of gas. That means less Humvee, more Prius: The agency suggests that proposals would be wise to include ideas like “hybrid electric drive, advanced batteries, adaptive wing structures, ducted-fan propulsion systems [and] advanced lightweight heavy fuel engines” [Wired.com]. However, despite all the sophisticated machinery, DARPA wants to keep flying/driving the vehicle pretty simple, saying that any soldier who can drive a Humvee should be able to fly a TX with its “automated takeoff and landing” options.

In one of its mission plans, DARPA suggests that a TX could lift off from a base in Afghanistan, fly 60 miles to skip over the IEDs and landmines littering the roadsides, and then set down to conduct a 100-mile patrol on the ground. Another mission plan calls for the vehicle lifting off from an aircraft carrier, flying to shore, and then driving the rest of the way to its destination. DARPA’s guidelines require that the TX be no louder than a helicopter in flight mode and as quiet as a conventional automobile in car mode, suggesting that soldiers wishing to avoid unwanted attention could bring the TX down to the ground to drive to covert ops spots.

While the flying car is still confined to the realm of a DARPA dream, technophiles raised on The Jetsons can’t resist pointing out that the TX would be awesome for civilian use, too. It would genuinely be able to lift off and set down in rooftops and streets, and quiet enough to do so without violating noise ordinances. It would be able to drive properly on the ground. Its robotic autopilot would remove the need for expensive, perishable piloting and instrument-rating skills which is such a burden for today’s private pilots [The Register].

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DISCOVER: 6 Blue-Sky Ideas for Revolutionizing the Automobile (photo gallery)

The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has erupted for the second time this month, sending a long plume of ash across the north Atlantic into the UK, enough to disrupt air traffic there!

NASA’s Terra satellite caught the plume:

You can easily see the plume extending from Iceland across the ocean. Boston.com’s The Big Picture has dramatic and beautiful shots of the volcano as well.

I’ve seen a few volcanoes in my time, but I’ve never witnessed an actual eruption. I’d really like to… from a safe distance. This particular eruption is likely to be a big pain to a lot of people for quite some time; there have already been floods and evacuations due to the activity. I feel badly for those folks affected, but I also can’t help but gasp in awe at the beauty of events like these. It always amazes me that violence on such a large scale — volcanoes, solar flares, supernovae, galactic collisions — can also be so beautiful.

In the digital age, many of us are compulsive multi-taskers. As I type this, I’m listening to some gentle music and my laptop has several programs open including Adobe Reader, Word, Firefox and Tweetdeck. I’ve always wondered what goes on in my brain as I flit between these multiple tasks, and I now have some answers thanks to a new study by Parisian scientists Sylvain Charron and Etienne Koechlin.

They have found that the part of our brain that controls out motivation to pursue our goals can divide its attention between two tasks. The left half devotes itself to one task and the right half to the other. This division of labour allows us to multi-task, but it also puts an upper limit on our abilities.

Koechlin has previously suggested that the frontopolar cortex, an area at the very front of our brains, drives our ability to do more than one thing at a time. It allows us to simultaneously pursue two different goals, holding one in the ready while we work on the other. Just behind the frontopolar cortex lies the medial frontal cortex (MFC), an area that’s involved in motivation. It drives our pursuit of multiple goals, according to the rewards we expect from them. Koechlin wanted to understand how these two areas cope with multi-tasking.

To do that, he used a brain-scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of 32 volunteers, as they carried out a challenging task. They saw a steady stream of letters, all from the word “tablet”. For every block of three letters, they had to say if the first one was a “t” and if the other two appeared in the same order that they would in “tablet” (e.g. TAB rather than TEB). If the letters were red, they would get a sizeable cash reward but if they were green, the reward would be smaller.

Based on this same set-up, they had to cope with two slightly different tests. In the “branching” tests, they had to deal with two separate streams of triplets, a primary one indicated by normal letters and a secondary one indicated by italics. The primary stream was continuous and the volunteers had to revert back to it every time they finished a secondary triplet. They had to hold the primary stream in mind so that they could return to it after their interruption. In the simpler “switching” tests, they started afresh with every new triplet, so they only had to cope with a single stream of information.

Charron and Koechlin found that in the switching tests, when the volunteers were only faced with a single task, both halves of their MFC were active, particularly the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex (dACC) and the presupplementary motor area (PMA). The more money was at stake, the stronger the activity in these regions.

In the branching tests, both halves of the MFC were also active, but they were split between the two tasks. The right dACC took control of the secondary task; when the volunteers could earn more money from these triplets, only the right dACC became more active. The left half took control of the primary task; its activity matched the rewards associated with the primary triplets but not the secondary ones.

The frontopolar part of the brain also became active during the branching tests, which fits with its established role in multi-tasking. However, its attentions weren’t divided by the two tasks and it only became more active when both the primary and secondary rewards were higher. This suggests that the frontopolar cortex plays the role of coordinator. While each half of the MFC encodes the incentives of pursuing each separate goal, the frontopolar cortex encodes the incentives of pursuing both goals together.

It also suggests that we might not be able to cope with more than two tasks at the same time. Charron and Koechlin tested this with an even more fiendish “double branching” test, where the two streams of triplets in their original experiment were interrupted by a third stream. To succeed in this task, they had to retain three separate lanes of information at the same time. They couldn’t. When they tried to return to the first stream from the second, or the second from the third, their answers were no better than guesswork.

Despite what some psychologists have suggested, it seems that the human brain is capable of multi-tasking although to a far lesser extent than a computer can. While my laptop is running several different programs at once with nary a hint of discomfort, Charron and Koechkin’s work suggests that my brain can’t handle any more than two tasks at once.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1183614

More on multi-tasking: Information overload? Heavy multimedia users are more easily distracted by irrelevant information

Groups of people with whom I disagree (so many, many groups…) should not hand in their census forms. That way they will be under-represented in official figures and basically count less. And do you really want to be in the government’s database when the black helicopters come?

Just kidding. Only two days left, hand in your census forms! Even people I don’t like.

A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck China’s southern Qinghai Province this week. The death toll now stand at more than 600, and rescuers pulled more than 1,000 people from the rubble alive. But, geologists say, this quake doesn’t seem linked to the massive one that shook the nearby province of Sichuan two years ago.

“It’s not the same fault, it’s a consequence of the same bit of global tectonics, which is the collision of India with Asia. That’s the only link I’d make,” said Dr David Rothery [BBC News]. The May 2008 Sichuan earthquake resulted from a thrust fault, which happens frequently in the region near the Himalayas where India and Asia collided long ago. But although this week’s quake happened not far from there, Rothery says it was a strike-slip event, which happens when there is sideways movement along a fault line. That’s the type of event that caused the January earthquake in Haiti.

The results have been devastating in the rural region of Qinghai. As many as 70 Buddhist monks were reported dead in the collapse of one monastery, Thrangu, about six miles outside of Jiegu. Some of the worst casualties occurred at local schools, where Xinhua reported at least 66 students and 10 teachers dead, including 32 at an elementary school and 22, 20 of them girls, at Yushu Vocational School [The New York Times]. As in Haiti, poorly built structures worsened the death toll. And rescuers continue to be hampered by a number of difficulties: Qinghai is difficult to reach, cold, and at an altitude of approximately 13,000 feet.

With so much shaking going on in 2010—including major earthquakes already in Haiti, Chile, Japan, and elsewhere—the question on many minds is whether the planet is becoming more prone to earthquakes. For geologists, a few months are less than the blink of an eye compared to the timescales with which they work. But, they say, there is natural variation in seismic activity. “Relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970’s to the mid 1990’s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years,” said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science & Technology. “We still do not know the reason for this yet” [LiveScience].

2010’s quakes aren’t “unusual” activity, the U.S. Geological Survey says. But, they have been so clustered and so deadly that they’ve created the unshakable impression of an increasingly-shaky planet. “What happens is when a lot of people get killed there’s a lot of reporting of it, and if an equally big event occurs somewhere out in the middle of nowhere it doesn’t attract the attention,” said G. Randy Keller, professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma [LiveScience].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In my talks, I often discuss the different groups who came to meet with me when I worked on Capitol Hill with regard to who was most effective. On science related issues, the general breakdown fell into two categories (with exceptions): Scientists from universities or NGO's would usually show up in my office with a briefing binder as thick as a phone book. There would be a lot of charts, p-values, figures, and complicated concepts. Most didn't talk to me, but at me. And the take home message would be different than that of the other scientists I met the previous hour on the same subject. Special interest groups were frequently very well organized. They spoke with a common theme and brought articulate speakers. Rather than stop in our office, they usually hosted large and well attended briefings, supplying easy to digest hardcover books with titles like 'climate change conspiracy.' Typically they were funny and made references to Michael Crichton's science fiction. Perhaps most importantly, they provided a free boxed lunches and held long Q&As to engage the audience. Both types introduced themselves as the "honest broker" of scientific information, but the latter often made the stronger impression with staffers. Now removed from ...

In 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was walking across Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sharp stinging pain in his leg. A passer-by had jabbed him with the tip of an umbrella and, having apologised, the two parted ways. Three days later, Markov was dead. The umbrella had fired a small poisoned pellet into his leg, turning Markov into the most famous victim of one of the world’s deadliest poisons – ricin.

Ricin is a great example to cite to people who think that “natural” equates to “healthy”. It’s a protein that comes from the castor bean, which is easy to grow, used in a wide variety of products, and delivers large amounts of its lethal chemical payload. One milligram can be lethal, and there is no known antidote. All of these qualities make it a potential bioterror weapon, and they have galvanised the quest for an antidote. That quest has just taken a big step forward, for Bahne Stechmann at the Curie Institute has discovered the first small molecule that protects mice against ricin.

Stechmann’s drug, known as Retro-2, not only saves mice from death by ricin, it also defends them against a related class of poisons called Shiga-like toxins. These are produced by disease-causing strains of the gut bacterium Escherichia coli and while less toxic than ricin, they can also be fatal. So Stechmann’s new discovery is a two-for-one defensive deal.

Both ricin and Shiga-like toxins have similar structures. One half of each protein – the A subunit – does the killing. It irreversibly breaks ribosomes, the factories that cells use to produce new proteins. A single ricin protein can knock out 1,500 of these factories every minute and without the ability to create new proteins, our cells perish. But a weapon is useless if it can’t be fired in the right place.

Getting the A subunit into range of the ribosomes is the job of the other half of the protein – the B subunit. It’s a backstage pass that sticks to docking molecules on the surface of our cells and allows the entire protein to be smuggled inside. Once there, it gets shuttled from one structure to another until it reaches the endoplasmic reticulum, where ribosomes live. If you block this chain of transport, you neutralise ricin and Shiga-like toxins; after all, the proteins cannot destroy what they cannot reach. And that’s exactly what Stechmann’s team has managed to do.

Stechmann, working with a large team of French scientists, scoured a library of over 16,000 potential drugs for any candidates that could protect cells from ricin. Modern technology allowed him to simultaneously test all of these chemicals on ricin-treated cells. To see if they worked, Stechmann gave the cells a radioactive amino acid; those that managed to incorporate this gift into new proteins were clearly shrugging off ricin’s ribosome-killing efforts.

The result of this “high-throughput screening” is the beautiful image below. The green band at the bottom is a baseline of death – it represents the no-survivor aftermath when human cells meet ricin. The yellow band at the top consist of control cells that are all still alive – that’s what you’d ideally be aiming for in terms of an antidote. The red dots represent what happens when the cells were treated with each of the 16,000 drugs. The vast majority are hovering at the green level, because most of the chemicals didn’t work. But you can clearly see that at least six of the drugs had a positive effect – these red dots stand out from the crowd, flirting with survival.

Stechmann decided to pursue two of these molecular guardians, Retro-1 and Retro-2 – they had the winning combo of protection against ricin and few side effects of their own. And to top it all off, the compounds worked against Shiga-like toxins too. In laboratory cells, these drugs only partially protected against death by ricin but, surprisingly, Retro-2 actually did much better when it was actually tested in mice. Even when Stechmann used a dose of ricin that would normally kill 90% of mice within three weeks, small doses of Retro-2 managed to save half the animals and larger doses protected all of them.

Neither Retro-1 nor Retro-2 works by actually affecting the toxins themselves; instead, they just stop them from reaching their destination. By acting on the host rather than the invader, they could work against many other threats and it should be harder to evolve resistance against them. For now, it’s not clear how exactly the two drugs prevent ricin and Shiga-like toxins from reaching their killing grounds. This is the big question that needs to be answered; doing so will allow scientists to develop Retro-2 into an even more effective anti-ricin drug.

Reference: Cell http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2010.01.043

More on new drugs:

• Rapamycin – the Easter Island drug that extends lifespan of old mice
• Drug improves endurance without need for exercise
• Drugs and stimulating environments reverse memory loss in brain-damaged mice
• Drugs that work against each other could fight resistant bacteria
• Sneaking medicines past the brain’s defences
• Neutralising anthrax by gumming up a molecular lock

It was a green idea that boogied straight off the dance floor and onto the city streets. Residents in the French city of Toulouse are testing out a special stretch of pavement in the city center that produces energy every time someone walks across it.

The pavement is embedded with special sensors that convert energy from motion into electricity. It’s an idea that was first implemented in a Rotterdam nightclub by the Dutch company Sustainable Dance Club (SDC), where the company installed special modular dance floors that harvested the dancers’ energy.

City authorities in Toulouse hope to replicate that system in the city center; as people walk across the special pavement, they’ll help generate between 50 and 60 watts of electricity. Energy captured during the day would be stored in a battery that could be used to power a nearby street lamp at night.

French authorities are powering ahead with the testing despite concerns about the system’s high cost, and have already overcome several problems along the way. The Guardian reports:

The prototype of the modules, said [City deputy mayor Alexandre] Marciel, was unsuitable for street use as “at that stage they only worked if you jumped on them like a kangaroo. So a model was developed on which you can walk normally and still produce enough energy to power the lights,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, experts have figured out a way to harness body heat from morning commuters at the busy Stockholm station and transfer it to the heating system of a nearby building. It’s a system that is already in use at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, but the Swedes have worked out a way to move the heat between buildings.

The station is toasty in the morning as more than 250,000 Swedes rush about getting to work; the station’s ventilation system traps their body heat, which is then used to warm water in underground tanks. That water is then pumped through pipes to a nearby 13-story building about 100 yards away and used to heat that building. In the long run, experts hope to lower energy costs in the new office building by at least 20 percent each year, all for an initial investment of just $30,000, writes Time magazine.

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Image: SDC

Yesterday I pointed to a new paper, Plasmodium vivax clinical malaria is commonly observed in Duffy-negative Malagasy people. P. vivax is the least virulent of the malaria inducing pathogens, and it is presumably responsible for the fact that the Duffy antigen locus is one of the more ancestrally informative ones in the human genome. In most of Eurasia the the Duffy negative null allele* is present at very low frequencies, less than 5%, and often simply absent. In contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa the Duffy negative variant reaches frequencies as high as 95% in West Africa, and and 90% in many other regions. In North Africa and the Middle East the frequencies are intermediate, likely due to the necessity for local adaptation to malaria in many regions, and the historical introduction of the Duffy negative allele via the slave trade.

Before genomics, looking at the Duffy locus was one simple way that geneticists ascertained the proportion of white admixture in the African American population. The Duffy negative allele was nearly absent in Europeans, and present in frequencies of ~95% in West Africa. Therefore, the ~70% frequency in African Americans indicates what we know from other sources, a substantial minority European contribution to their ancestry. The people of Madagascar are similar insofar as they are a byproduct of admixture between African and non-African populations. The source of the non-African ancestry is rather easy to determine, unlike most African countries Madagascar has one language, Malagasy, and it is of the Barito family of languages. Aside from Malagasy the Barito languages are spoke only in a small region of southern Borneo in Indonesia. There are other aspects of the Malagasy culture which make their Southeast Asian provenance clear. The photo above is of Andry Rajoelina, the current President of Madagascar. Two aspects of his visage are salient, his youth (he used to be a disk jockey!), and the fact that his features do not seem typical Sub-Saharan African. Many of the leaders of Madagascar, including the former royal family, are from the highlands where Asiatic features and folkways are more prevalent.

But there is also a clear African component to the Malagasy, more obvious among coastal populations, but also possibly dominant in a genetic sense in terms of proportion to the Asian according to research using uniparental markers. An analysis of Y lineage Fst genetic distances suggests that the Malagasy are, on the whole, somewhat closer to East Africans than to people from Borneo. I stipulate on the whole because as implied above there seems to be regional variation, which Southeast Asian ancestry and culture least hybridized with a Sub-Saharan African in the central highlands, likely for ecological reasons.

If the Duffy negative allele was viewed purely as a neutral locus, and so ancestrally informative, one would assume that the Malagasy were mostly African. In the figure to the left the red tinted portions represent Duffy negative proportions, the green Duffy positive, and the darker shade P. vivax positivity. The green star indicates a site where P. vivax positivity was only found among the Duffy positive, while at the sites with red stars it was found among both antigen state groups. As you can see at none of the sites was the Duffy positive allele modal, and at Andapa the frequency of Duffy negative was typical of much of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the total data set 72% of the individuals were Duffy negative. Going by the previous cited work this would underestimate Asian ancestry, which seems likely to be near parity, if not quite.

Two points come to mind:

1) It seems clear that the Duffy locus is not neutral. It is subject to natural selection, as even though the malaria caused by P. vivax is relatively mild, it t does reduce fitness. Natural selection should result in an increase in frequency of the negative allele in regions where malaria caused by P. vivax is endemic. In the American South malaria was not as extreme of a problem, nor does Duffy negative status have a strong side effect (e.g., sickle cell), so it was a neutral locus and appropriate to inform ancestry.

2) Modern African populations may not be an accurate representation of the allele frequencies of Duffy in the ancestral groups which contributed to the ancestry of the Malagasy. More plainly, the Africans who intermarried with the Barito speakers may have had much higher frequencies of Duffy positive alleles because natural selection had not proceeded so that the null allele was driven to near fixation.

To assess the plausibility of #2, one needs to know how the Malagasy, or more accurately, the speakers of the Barito language which became Malagasy, got where they are. Unfortunately, no one really knows, and the hypotheses are controversial because of their speculative nature. It seems likely that the Southeast Asian mariners initially arrived in the western Indian ocean region ~2,000 years ago, but widespread settlement of Madagascar’s interior may not have been occurring until ~1,000 years ago. By the 13th century there was a large Muslim city in the north of Madagascar integrated into the Indian ocean trade network, so Madagascar is on the fringes of written history at that point. The anthropological evidence seems to point to a sojourn on the coast of East Africa by Southeast Asians, as there are aspects of Malagasy culture which seem related to Bantu groups in that area. Additionally, there some genetic data which point to an African contribution on the mtDNA from populations further north on the coast, toward Kenya, and Y DNA which suggests a connection with the adjacent region of the continent in Mozambique. A model of how this could occur is that the initial colonists in East Africa picked up local wives along the northern coast, and eventually resettled in Madagascar. After this settlement there were periodic migration of Africans from nearby regions, either voluntary or forced through slavery, which added the later diversity. The fact that this component is male-biased would point to slavery of the sort practiced in the New World, whereby Africans were forced to work in agriculture and male robustness was prized (this is in contrast with much of the Middle East, where female African domestic servants were the primary driver of slavery).

One of the mysterious aspects of the arrival of the Malagasy is that there aren’t records by the literate polities which fringed the Indian ocean of their movements. But why should there be? Open ocean traders were generally marginal to these states, who simply extracted rents from the activities of the merchants and migrants. It seems entirely plausible that many populations have been on the move throughout history, their impact in particular regions slowly being ablated by time. There is one aspect of Africa which makes it entirely plausible that the Barito presence would disappear or be marginal: the local populations seem biologically very well adapted to the pathogens on the continent. It is notable for example that the Arab and Persian cultural influence in East Africa never spread inland beyond the Indian ocean littoral. And yet these groups were present on the East African coast from the time of the Romans on. It seems likely to me that Africa is relatively resistant to “back-migration” from Eurasia on ecological grounds. North Africa is part of the Palearctic ecozone, while the highlands of Ethiopia are also ecologically distinct. Both these regions are strongly shaped genetically by populations with Eurasian connections, in the former case predominantly so, but both they are exceptions which prove the rule.

The maps to the left show topography and population density respectively. In Madagascar in the highlands Southeast Asians could transfer wet rice agriculture, and also escape the most baleful influences of African diseases (which would naturally be introduced with African populations). It is also where there is the greatest population density. In contrast the coastal regions are more lightly populated and have more African influence. Like South Africa or the Kenyan highlands I believe that Madagascar was one region of Sub-Saharan Africa which was open to the settlement of outsiders who lacked biological defenses because of its ecology. Granted, it seems to have been unsettled before the Malagasy arrived, but if its pathogen environment was equivalent to that of the mainland I suspect that African genes and culture would have replaced the Malagasy component rather rapidly. The Malagasy are just one of many populations which made some sort of great trek. Most of them disappear, get absorbed or become extinct. But in a few rare cases, such as in that of Iberians in the 16th century, or Polynesians 2,000 years ago, and the Malagasy, these travelers encountered territory which they were able to settle easily. And so we have concrete evidence of their past existence, their present existence. You couldn’t plausibly invent the cultural makeup of Madagascar, because our model of history and human population movement is simplified, and all the outliers and rough edges have been hidden or consciously removed.

Though the highlands of Madagascar allowed the Southeast Asian settlers a refuge for endogenous population growth, which allowed them to perpetuate their culture and leave a stamp on the island, Madagascar is African, and much of the island is clearly suited for malaria. The evolutionary dynamics may be contingent on the peculiarities of the island’s demographic history, but they will still proceed nonetheless. It is noted in these results that though varieties of P. vivax seem to have moved from the Duffy positive to the Duffy negative segment of the population, it is still much more virulent in those who are Duffy positive. There were 15 times as many full blown cases of P. vivax induced malaria (as opposed to positive infection status) among those who were Duffy positive than among those who were negative. Nevertheless, the emergence of strains able to infect Duffy negative blood cells opens up the possibility for more virulent strains in the future which could result in many more cases of full blown malaria within this population.

Let me jump to the conclusion:

Our observations in Madagascar showing conclusive evidence that P. vivax is capable of causing blood-stage infection and disease in Duffy-negative people illustrate that in some conditions P. vivax exhibits a capacity for infecting human erythrocytes without the Duffy antigen. The data assembled in this study suggest that conditions needed to clear the barrier of Duffy negativity may include an optimal human admixture. In Madagascar with significant numbers of Duffy-positive people and full susceptibility of hepatocytes in Duffy negatives, P. vivax may have sufficient exposure to Duffynegative erythrocytes, allowing more opportunities for de novo selection or optimization of an otherwise cryptic invasion pathway that nevertheless seems less efficient than the Duffy-dependent pathway.

There are several issues that I’ve glossed over in this paper, and one of them is that there are other populations which have a mix of negative and positive individuals. Implicitly the American South is one. But malaria is not endemic in most of the South. But in Brazil there is a similar racial mixture, and its climate is conducive to tropical diseases. It seems there are issues with detecting the P. vivax pathogen within blood cells, and so earlier studies as to the possibility of the infection of those who were Duffy negative were often muddled or inconclusive. In this study they established the existence of this group rather clearly, but is it due to the peculiarities of Madagascar’s population mixture and history? True, Brazil also has an admixed population whose Duffy allele frequencies are interchangeable with that of Madagascar, but Brazil has been settled for only the past ~300 years or so, with much of the population being of more recent origin (Brazil had the highest slave attrition rate on the American mainland, which explains the African nature of Afro-Brazilian culture. Many of the slaves were from Africa, or first generation, at emancipation). A lower bound for Madagascar is ~1,000 years, and the coexistence of Barito and African populations is likely closer to ~2,000 years. So the existence of P. vivax lines which can penetrate the negative allele population may be a function of the longer time given to the emergence of adaptive strategies.

I suspect the fact that there is a component of what ecologists term “patchiness” in the settlement patterns of various populations and ecology in Madagascar might have aided in the persistence of the Duffy positive allele. It seems that in much of the rest of Africa once agriculture became common and the conditions for the mosquito which carries P. vivax improved the Duffy negative allele swept to fixation. At this point the P. vivax infection rates were so low that natural selection became less of an issue (the extant variation was reduced, and only a small proportion of the population would have been subject to selection). It is on marginal areas where fixation did not occur that you’d have the diversity which might allow for the emergence of different P. vivax lineages. Another place to look besides Madagascar would be the margins of Ethiopia, as well as South Africa, where Bantu farmers came up against a very different ecologies and populations which they could not assimilate, or did so only partly.

* Duffy is really the the antigen itself, so “Duffy negative” means lacking the antigen. But I’m going to use the shorthand Duffy negative to point to the alleles which confer this state, which have names such as FY*A and FY*B. The gene itself is DARC.

Citation: Ménard D, Barnadas C, Bouchier C, Henry-Halldin C, Gray LR, Ratsimbasoa A, Thonier V, Carod JF, Domarle O, Colin Y, Bertrand O, Picot J, King CL, Grimberg BT, Mercereau-Puijalon O, & Zimmerman PA (2010). Plasmodium vivax clinical malaria is commonly observed in Duffy-negative Malagasy people. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107 (13), 5967-71 PMID: 20231434

Image credit: BBC, Wikipedia

Don’t be fooled by the name—Iceland is one of the hottest hotspots in the world, geologically speaking. The island’s volcanic legacy reared its head again yesterday as a massive eruption by a volcano beneath a glacier caused the evacuation of hundreds of residents and created ash clouds that delayed flights all around Northern Europe.

The volcano, called Eyjafjallajokull, rumbled last month, but that was nothing like this. “This is a very much more violent eruption, because it’s interacting with ice and water,” said Andy Russell, an expert in glacial flooding at the University of Newcastle in northern England. “It becomes much more explosive, instead of a nice lava flow oozing out of the ground” [AP]. The flood caused by melted glacial ice caused the evacuation about 800 people. Waters threatened to spill over onto Highway 1, Iceland’s main highway that makes a circuit around the island. But some quick digging by construction crews altered the course of the water.

The huge cloud of ash meandered to the south and east toward the United Kingdom, and probably will move over mainland Europe before it finally dissipates. As a precaution, yesterday British aviation authorities totally closed the nation’s airspace. The move effectively grounded all flights in Britain from 11 a.m. local time and affected an estimated 6,000 flights that use British airspace every day, aviation experts said. Oddly, for travelers, the closing was announced under clear blue skies [The New York Times]. The altitude of the ash cloud made it difficult to see from the ground.

The main aviation risk posed by the ash cloud wasn’t that it would interfere with visibility, experts say, but rather that the fine silicate particles can seriously damage airplane engines. The particles can clog ventilation holes, causing the jet engines to overheat. Says vulcanologist David Rothery: “Air traffic restrictions have very properly been applied…. If volcanic ash particles are ingested into a jet engine, they accumulate and clog the engines with molten glass” [BBC News].

Despite the flight cancellations, scientists tried to assure people in Britain that the ash wasn’t heavy enough to be a public health concern. In fact, it’s nothing compared to the worst eruptions to happen in Iceland, according to vulcanologist Dougal Jerram. “One of the most influential ever eruptions was the 1783-1784 event at Laki in Iceland when an estimated 120 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide were emitted, approximately equivalent to three times the total annual European industrial output in 2006. This outpouring of sulphur dioxide during unusual weather conditions caused a thick haze to spread across Western Europe, resulting in many thousands of deaths throughout 1783 and the winter of 1784″ [BBC News].

The danger this time around is that Eyjafjallajokull will trigger an eruption of its more powerful neighbor, Katla. That happened back in 1821.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: World Versus the Volcano, how massive eruptions leave the world cold and hungry
80beats: Three Miles Down in the Carribean, the Deepest Volcanic Vents Ever Seen
80beats: Volcanoes on Venus Could Be Alive and Ready To Erupt
80beats: Congo Volcanic Eruption Threatens To Surround Native Chimps with Lava

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Chris 73; USGS

In American society the connection between religion and belief in god(s) is very close. This of course is not a universal. In Indian and Chinese religion there isn’t a necessary connection, though as a matter of operational reality most religious adherents in India and China do seem to believe in god. In the Abrahamic tradition the issue seems clear cut, but both Judaism and Islam are strongly orthopraxic, and somewhat less fixed on theological orthodoxy, so there is perhaps more wiggle room than one might think. Additionally, Jews are a nation, an ethnicity, as well as a people, and so those who are not particularly religious observant or believers in the God of Abraham, the God Isaac and the God of Jacob, may still identify with Judaism as their religion. The ‘cultural’ aspect of religion has even crept into Christianity, which was originally rather particular as to the content of one’s beliefs. In much of Europe the proportion of self-identified Christians exceeds the proportion of those who avow Christian theism.

In the comment below Amos Zeeberg guesses that many Jewish scientists are also atheists. This seems plausible, and ERV confirms it thanks to Amazon search, 75% of self-identified eminent Jewish scientists are atheists in Elaine Ecklund’s data set. And this tendency may not be limited to Jewish scientists, consider Freeman Dyson, a self-identified Protestant who admits to not confessing beliefs which one would expect from a Protestant.

I wanted to dig deeper. So again, the GSS. I wanted to look at the variable GOD and see how intelligence and education affected it across various religious categories. God has six responses:

- Don’t believe
- No way to find out
- Some higher power [I omitted this by mistake in an earlier version of the post, it was in the data analysis]
- Believe sometimes
- Believe, but doubts
- Know God exists

I clustered the first three into the category “non-theists,” and the middle two as “theist with doubts.” This is mostly because the sample sizes for religious groups crossed with the GOD variable aren’t that big on the secular end of the range. My question was how response on GOD related to intelligence controlled for religion and denomination. For religion I looked at Protestants, Catholics, Jews and “Nones.” For denominations only the Southern Baptists, United Methodists and Episcopalians had decent sample sizes.

To measure education was easy, and I divided them into two classes, those with at least a college degree and those without; the variable DEGREE. To measure intelligence I used WORDSUM, a vocabulary test. I constructed two categories, “average” and “smart,” the former ranging from 0-7 and the latter 8-10 correct.

I’ve included the results in the whole GSS data set without controlling for religion so you have a reference point. The rows add up to 100%. Additionally, if the numbers are bold that means that that point is outside of the 95% interval of its equivalent in the other category. For example, for the general population there’s a difference in proportion between non-theists between the smart and average whereby the 95% interval still does not overlap. Not so with theists with doubts.

A few notes. Sorry about the small sample sizes for some groups. That’s why seeing a lot of un-bolded numbers. But I do want to observe that for Jews and United Methodists many of the values came very close to being outside of the 95% intervals, and to a lesser extent with Episcopalians as well. Catholics are surprisingly homogeneous in this data set. One caveat is that there’s been a massive defection from the Catholic church since 1990, and the data goes back to 1972. It seems that the more ’secular’ the group the bigger effect that intelligence or education has. This goes for comparing Protestant denominations as well, Southern Baptists are relatively uniform, the Episcopalians less so. This makes sense since Southern Baptists are much more stringent in terms of the beliefs one must espouse, so that there’s an automatic filter. By contrast Episcopalians tend to accept a level of privacy in regards to theology or strength of belief. Interestingly, it is among those who have no religious affiliation that intelligence and education seem to be wear away theism the most.

One question I had was the independent effect of intelligence vs. education. Education may have a socializing effect. So I decided to look at the differences by intelligence controlling for education.

I want to note that for college graduates the difference between proportions of non-theists between the smart and average came very close non-overlapping on the 95% interval. It looks that even controlling for education intelligence has an independent effect. I’m shocked by the finding for people with post-graduate education, but perhaps there’s some peculiarity about the who go on to receive advanced degrees of some sort but are not particularly bright.