Flu vaccine push already underway; first batch causes seizures in children

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As ridiculous as it seems, retailers across the U.S. are already stocking their stores with Christmas goods. It's all about the big commercial push, of course, since retailers make about 50 percent of their profits during the Christmas season.

Similarly, flu vaccine manufacturers generate huge profits during the Christmas season, too, and they've already begun shipping this year's winter season flu vaccines to U.S. pharmacies and hospitals. Never mind the fact that the actual flu strain in the vaccine is little more than a hodgepodge collection of last year's flu strains. Each year's flu vaccines are technically only applicable to last year's flu season, making them perfect for time travelers but useless for everybody else.

Along with the big vaccine push comes the inevitable vaccine propaganda. It's all so predictable: First there's the announcement that "everybody should get vaccinated." This is followed by some later announcement in the pre-Christmas season of "how bad" this year's flu season is getting. This is followed yet again by another urgent bulletin by health authorities urging everyone to get vaccinated.

The big vaccine push only quiets down when vaccine supplies dwindle. But as long as vaccines remain in inventory, the big vaccine push will stay aggressive, and during this annual charade, there won't be a word mentioned about vitamin D and how it is far more effective than any vaccine at protecting people from seasonal flu.

Reading between the vaccine lines
This year's vaccine push has begun with some curious admissions by the vaccine industry, reflected in a Reuters story (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...). After the usual explanatory text about how flu vaccine manufacturers have started shipping their largest quantity of vaccines ever produced for flu season, the story prints this curious text:

"And U.S. officials said they were changing the labeling on a vaccine made by Australia's CSL Ltd (CSL.AX) because it appears to have caused a higher than usual rate of seizures in children."

Now hold on a second.

If you read between the lines here, this statement implies that: 1) Vaccines cause seizures in children. And then 2) This particular vaccines causes a higher rate of seizures in children than the usual rate of seizures in children.

Why is this curious? First off, because vaccine pushers have always sworn their vaccines caused no seizures whatsoever. No neurological problems. No spontaneous abortions in pregnant women. No increased rates of autism. Vaccines are all perfectly safe, they say, and no children are ever harmed by them.

That's the mythology, at least, behind vaccines. But the reality is far different: Vaccines do cause seizures in children, and this year's vaccines look like they're going to cause a significantly higher rate of seizures than usual.

Note, by the way, that this was not the headline of the story. This admission was tucked away in the text of a Reuters story, without any real emphasis. If Reuters was really interested in reporting the truth about vaccines, the story headline would have been, "Flu vaccines cause seizures in children."

Line up, sheeple!
The story goes on to say, "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone be vaccinated against seasonal flu this year."

Yep, everyone. That means one-month old infants. Pregnant women. Children with seizure disorders. Immune suppressed seniors. Everyone!

You see, in years past, vaccines were never recommended for everyone due to well-founded safety concerns. In some people, you see, the nearly-dead viral strains used in vaccines can actually cause the very flu they claim to prevent. So the CDC has, for as long as anyone can remember, always warned certain groups to be excluded from vaccines for their own safety.

Well not anymore. Any safety concerns have been thrown out the window in the quest to push more vaccines onto more people. Billions of dollars in pharmaceutical profits are at stake here, and health officials can't afford to let a little safety get in the way.

This Reuters story continues:

"Most years, seasonal influenza infects between 5 percent and 20 percent of the U.S. population and kills 36,000 people. It puts about 200,000 into the hospital."

Well, not really. The 36,000 figure often quoted from the CDC is wildly inaccurate (http://www.naturalnews.com/026169_m...). It's a statistical guess based on such outdated data that to quote it as fact is laughable. Besides, it's technically wrong to say that influenza kills anyone. The real killer here is vitamin D deficiency which causes a stalled out immune system. If people had sufficient levels of vitamin D circulating in their blood, the flu virus would be powerless to harm them. And since there are viruses everywhere in the world around us every single day, isn't it more accurate to say that the "flu season" is actually the "vitamin D deficiency season?"

Think about it: Why does the flu circulate in the winter months in North America, but the summer months (June - August) in Australia? It's because those are the times of weaker sunlight exposure resulting in widespread vitamin D deficiencies. The flu is always around, living amongst us, just waiting for weakened immune systems so it can strike. To say that "the flu" kills people in the winter is factually wrong. It's the vitamin D deficiency that kills people by giving the flu an opportunity to attack a weakened immune system.

This is a simple factual point that the entire system of western medicine, with all its high-IQ doctors, has so far failed to realize. Sometimes it feels like we're still living in the Dark Ages of medicine, I swear...

Where are the clinical trials?
Anyway, this Reuters story continues with one more whopper of a statement:

"The labeling for one vaccine, CSL Limited's Afluria, has undergone changes this season to inform health care providers about an increased incidence of fever and febrile seizure... The FDA said it was asking CSL to conduct a study of its vaccine in children."

Read between the lines on this one: This Afluria vaccine causes an increased risk of seizures, it's being imported into the USA to be injected in children this flu season, and the FDA is just now asking for a study? That means, of course, that no study has been conducted on this vaccine yet.

In other words, this vaccine which causes seizures in children has never actually been properly tested in children according to FDA guidelines, so the FDA wants a test to be done but the vaccine will be injected into children in the USA anyway, even before the testing is likely to be completed.

And that means, of course, that U.S. children are being used as guinea pigs to see what happens to them following this vaccine injection. If enough children have seizures or end up paralyzed or dead, the FDA will probably pull the vaccine off the market. But that only happens after the fact and after the damage has already been done.

Don't you get it? Your children are the experiment! The American People are the guinea pigs for every vaccine these companies come up with, and it doesn't matter if the vaccine causes seizures, brain damage or even death... American children are going to be injected by the millions in order to find out what happens.

No need for influenza vaccines in anyone
This whole annual charade is utterly useless to begin with. There is simply no medically justifiable need to inject anyone with a flu vaccine -- ever! What people need is vitamin D to activate their immune response so that natural exposures to seasonal flu are easily handled by their existing immune system functionality.

Let's face it: The human immune system is far more intelligent and technologically advanced than any flu vaccine. It already has a pattern recognition system that can identify and destroy foreign invaders in the blood. But as research has shown, when vitamin D levels are deficient in the body, the immune system is effectively paralyzed and can't respond. (http://www.naturalnews.com/029312_i...)

When vitamin D levels are high, the immune system responds rapidly to any influenza threat. That's why I never get a flu shot and even so, I haven't been sick for years. I do, however, get sunshine on a regular basis, and when I can't get sunshine, I take a quality vitamin D3 supplement. And guess what? I don't need a flu vaccine at all. I can walk into a room full of sick people infected with influenza and be completely and utterly immune to their coughing, sneezing, nose wiping and finger-licking handshaking.

Having vitamin D in your body is like wearing a bulletproof vest for influenza.

The medical industry won't tell you this because there's huge profit to be made in scaring people into paying for flu shots they don't need. If people were told the truth about the dangers and the ineffectiveness of flu shots, very few would buy them. Because the truth is that, even in best-case scenarios, flu shots are maybe effective at preventing infections in one percent of those who take them.

And that means ninety-nine percent of those receiving flu shots are wasting their time and their money. Plus, they're exposing themselves to chemicals that are obviously dangerous to the human body or else they wouldn't cause seizures in children, get it?

And yet every flu season, people line up by the millions to get injected with something that might harm them, and they actually pay for being potentially harmed! Why do people do this? Because they foolishly trust in health authorities who almost universally have financial ties to the vaccine manufacturing companies and so are pushing a particular agenda in order to profit from vaccine sales.

But scientifically speaking, the flu season could be stopped in its tracks by handing out vitamin D3 supplements instead of vaccine injections. No needles. No seizures. And no drug company profits.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather swallow a vitamin than get jabbed with a sharp needle. But that's just me.

Most other people, it seems, would rather spend their winters wiping their noses raw with Kleenex, drowning themselves in over-the-counter flu medicines and missing a week or two of work while they try to fight off a flu infection they could have prevented with a few vitamin D supplements in the first place.

Believe me, it's a lot more fun to laugh off the flu season and spend your winters healthy, well rested and completely immune to seasonal flu.

Wanna join me in a healthy winter this year? Just boost your vitamin D levels and you too can laugh off seasonal flu and all the sheeple lining up to get injected like cattle in a branding line.

Supplement Regulation: Be Careful What You Wish For

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A recurring theme at SBM is the regulation of supplements, and the impact and consequences of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). As one of SBM’s international contributors, I thought it might be helpful to look at how the DSHEA stacks up against the equivalent regulations of its neighbor to the north, Canada. Given the multiple calls for overhauls and changes to DSHEA, an international comparison may help focus the discussion around what a more science-based framework could look like.

Briefly, the DSHEA is an amendment to the U.S. Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that establishes a regulatory framework for dietary supplements. It effectively excludes manufacturers of these products from virtually all regulations that are in place for prescription and over-the-counter drugs. The FDA notes:

Generally, manufacturers do not need to register their products with FDA nor get FDA approval before producing or selling dietary supplements. Manufacturers must make sure that product label information is truthful and not misleading. FDA’s post-marketing responsibilities include monitoring safety, e.g. voluntary dietary supplement adverse event reporting, and product information, such as labeling, claims, package inserts, and accompanying literature. The Federal Trade Commission regulates dietary supplement advertising.

Quackwatch has excellent resources on the DSHEA, and SBM bloggers have brought up specific criticisms of the Act at posts like this, this and this. The main concerns with the Act can be summarized as:

  • DSHEA draws a crude distinction between food and drugs, even defining therapeutic and pharmacologically-active products (e.g., herbs, botanicals, some hormones) to be categorized as foods, and therefore eligible for DSHEA exemptions from the FDA’s drug regulations.
  • Manufacturers can put virtually any claim on a supplement, without any requirement to provide persuasive clinical evidence, as long as it’s accompanied by the Quack Miranda Warning: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” Disease treatment claims are not permitted, but are typically restated as permissible “structure/function” claims, implying an ability to improve the structure or function of the body only. (Colloidal silver is one example)
  • There is a lack of regulatory oversight of manufacturing practices.
  • In multi-chemical products such as herbals, there is no standardization of active ingredient(s), nor are there mandatory purity guarantees.
  • There are essentially no pre-marketing requirements before selling products. Once available for sale, there is little ability for the FDA to issue cease-sale orders and recalls. Regulators can block the sale of products only after significant problems have been identified (i.e., ephedra)
  • The regulation of marketing claims is effectively left to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which can prosecute manufacturers for fraud.

The Canadian Regulatory Framework

Until several years ago, Canadian natural health products fell into a regulatory grey zone. Products were treated either as drugs, or as foods. Consultation began in the late 1990’s on a new framework to provide regulation and oversight to these products. In 2004, the Natural Health Product (NHP) Regulations, under Canada’s Food and Drugs Act, became a reality. The NHP Regulations cover nutritional supplements, probiotics, traditional Chinese medicine, vitamins, herbal products, and homeopathy – many of the same products that would be considered “dietary supplements” under DSHEA. Rather than fully regulating these products as drugs, or leaving them virtually unregulated, the NHP regulations were a regulatory compromise: implementing manufacturing quality and safety standards, while significantly relaxing the standards for product efficacy claims. The Natural Health Products Directorate is the unit of Health Canada (Canada’s version of the FDA) that administers the NHP Regulations. Health Canada assures Canadians of the following:

Through the Natural Health Products Directorate, Health Canada ensures that all Canadians have ready access to natural health products that are safe, effective and of high quality, while respecting freedom of choice and philosophical and cultural diversity.

Let’s look at the DSHEA through the Canadian regulatory framework lens. Does it set a science-based example?

Lowering the Efficacy Bar

One of the biggest problems with DSHEA is that it facilitates unsubstantiated efficacy claims. While DSHEA doesn’t apply to homeopathy, the NHP regulations do. Health Canada says that regulated products are “effective,” so what’s the evidence standard being applied?

Health Canada’s Evidence for Homeopathic Medicines: Guidance Document states that applications for licenses for homeopathic products must include evidence to support the “safety, efficacy, and quality” of a homeopathic medication. All “homeopathic medicine” must be from substances referred to in homeopathic pharmacopias, such as the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States (HPUS), or other references.

Under the NHP Regulations, if randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials are not conducted, manufacturers can make efficacy claims based on “traditional uses”, i.e., anecdotal evidence of use and efficacy. The two most common types of traditional use claims are provings, and references to homeopathic materia medica, which are essentially compilations of provings. There is no objective evaluation of efficacy in provings or in materia medica. Health Canada offers a list of 59 references it will accept at “evidence”, with publication dates as old as 1834 — dating back before the germ theory of disease was proposed.

Consider the popular remedy Oscilliococcinum, sold as an influenza treatment. It’s prepared by decapitating a duck, taking 35 grams of its liver and 15 grams of its heart and fermenting it for 40 days. The solution then undergoes serial dilutions (1 part in 100) 200 times in a row, (in homeopathy lexicon, “200C”) and is dried on lactose/sucrose tablets. (Wikipedia notes that that in order to obtain even a single molecule of the original fermented duck, a volume of tablets greater that the mass of the entire universe would need to be consumed.) Consulting Health Canada’s NHP database (Search NPN 80014156 here) Health Canada has registered the product, with the labelled medicinal ingredient as “Extract of the liver and heart of Annas barbariae: 200C” and approved the following recommended use (translated from French):

Homeopathic medicine to relieve flu symptoms: fever, chills, body aches, headaches.

This is one consequence of Canadian regulation: the efficacy standard has been lowered so far, it’s meaningless. The Canadian regulatory process assigns distinct registration numbers, dosages, and specific “recommended uses” to hundreds of physically indistinguishable brands of sugar pills.

Shifting categories, let’s consider an herbal product. Ginkgo biloba was discussed back in December in the SBM post Ginkgo Biloba-No Effect. Yet the product Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D. Ginkgo Biloba is approved by Health Canada (Search NPN 80003088 here) with the following recommended use:

helps to improve memory. helps to improve attention. consult a health care practitioner for use beyond 6 weeks. [sic]

Again, the evidence bar is far lower than a critical appraisal of the evidence would suggest is accurate. The result? Arguably worse than under the DSHEA. Statements based on questionable evidence gain a regulatory stamp of approval.

Manufacturing Oversight

The NHP Directorate establishes manufacturing standards and issues site licenses. Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) must be followed. Setting aside the labelling accuracy of homeopathic remedies, the licensure should provide consumers and health professionals with more assurance that what is on the label is actually in the product. Health Canada’s FAQs include a question on DSHEA and it states:

In the United States, dietary supplements are considered as food products under the Dietary Supplements Health Education Act (DSHEA) and, as such, claims may not be made about the use of a dietary supplement to diagnose, prevent, mitigate, treat, or cure a specific disease. These products are not subject to mandatory review, approval or quality requirements, including appropriate testing for identity, purity or potency of active ingredients.

However, GMP standards also exist for supplements sold under DSHEA, so it’s not clear if the NHP regulations impose more strict requirements for Canadian products.

Standardization

The NHP Directorate has created a series of monographs about dozens of single-ingredient products which are intended to provide more standardization of product labeling, dosing and constituents. All of this is worthwhile. Unfortunately a quick scan reveals some significant discrepancies between the current state of the evidence and what’s in the monographs. Harriet Hall’s recent SBM post on glucosamine points out there’s little persuasive data to suggest it has any meaningful effects. In contrast, the current Health Canada-approved monograph for glucosamine selectively cites the positive trials, and labels it effective for osteoarthritis pain. So while the Regulations may be supporting improvements in the consistency of the the finished products,  the evidence standards may be compromising their real-world utility.

Marketing and Post-Marketing Surveillance

One of most important elements of the NHP regulations is the implementation of pre-marketing registration requirements. That is, only products reviewed and deemed to meet minimal standards of product quality, safety, and the (relaxed) standard for efficacy claims are permitted to be sold. Unfortunately, even after after six years, thousands of products remain unregistered due to a backlog at Health Canada. Until then, these products continue to be sold. Despite the published standards for consumer advertising of natural health products, there seems to be little enforcement of these requirements. As noted by Tom Blackwell in the National Post,

Recent ads, for instance, tout unapproved natural remedies as being able to prevent diabetes, heart and eye disease, treat menopause and Parkinson’s and help melt away excess weight. By contrast, makers of prescription drugs are essentially barred from promoting their products directly to consumers at all.

Federal law says even natural products — considered generally safer — must be approved under the natural health regulatory system before they can publish or air any kind of ad, and even then must stick closely to the claims allowed in the licence. Many companies that are waiting for word on their applications have chosen to ignore that rule, however, while others have not even attempted to get approval, observers say.

This regulatory backlog seems to have complicated the enforcement of marketing claims, and advertising standards for both approved and unapproved products don’t seem to be facing any serious scrutiny. In Canada, the Competition Bureau is the agency most comparable to the FTC, but it doesn’t seem to have the same focus on actively and publicly prosecuting fraudulent claims. While it has on occasion required companies to change their messaging, it’s rare, and only when the company has gone beyond the already over-generous efficacy claims allowed through the regulations. Perhaps this situation will change when the registration backlog is eliminated.

With respect to product withdrawals, the Minister of Health has the authority under the NHP regulations to direct the stop sale of a product or to cancel licenses of products to prevent injury. Licenses can also be suspended for regulation contravention, or if a product does not appear to meet safety criteria. It’s difficult to directly compare the FDA to Health Canada in this regard, as most Canadian warnings echo FDA advisories for products that may or may not be sold in Canada.

A Science-Based Regulatory Framework for Supplements

Given the regulatory approaches of Canada and the USA, what might a science-based framework look like? I see at least four different perspectives towards supplements/NHPs. I’m sure more will emerge in the comments.

  • Consumers want products that are safe, and labeled accurately. They may consult health professionals, or make their own decisions about whether products are effective.
  • Science-based health advocates, like the contributors at this blog, argue that that product safety and quality are paramount, and efficacy statements must be based on good science. They argue against a different approval standard for products just because they’re deemed a “supplement.”
  • Free market advocates, and those that call for health “freedom” question the value of most regulation that inhibits choice, emphasizing personal responsibility over government-legislated consumer protection measures.
  • Supplement manufacturers generally seek a market where they face as few regulatory restrictions as possible, whether it be safety, efficacy, or quality.

Certainly, there is some common ground here. Many will likely be agreeable to a regulatory framework that give consumer and health professionals assurance that they’re being protected from health fraud and dangerous products. Even free market advocates generally accept that markets operate less effectively when consumers cannot evaluate benefits and consequences (risks). With respect to health “freedom” claims, I question if anyone anyone wants the “freedom” to be sold products that don’t contain what is claimed, or have not been evaluated to be safe. Turning to manufacturers, some may welcome more rigorous regulatory verification of their own quality processes, especially if it helps with market acceptance.

One approach to to a new framework could be to unbundle the various types of supplements and treat each according to the science. Herbal products and botanicals stands out as the most likely to benefit from some elements of the Canadian regulations. Without quality manufacturing and standardization of active ingredients, it is impossible to infer anything about a particular herb. However, with respect to homeopathy, it’s questionable if anyone benefits from the regulation of sugar pills.

The biggest differences in opinion will clearly be the standards for efficacy and safety claims. Supplements/NHPs will rarely be be supported by the rigorous data we require for prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Through the NHP regulation process, Canada effectively eliminated any meaningful efficacy requirements, to accommodate products like homeopathy. Yet if all treatment and efficacy statements are forbidden, the information will emerge elsewhere. It’s an issue that other regulators are grappling with, too. Ben Goldacre, writing in The Guardian, points out the European Union’s process, evaluating health claims for similar products, has rejected 80% of claims submitted for formal approval. Ben’s solution is unorthodox, but one that I’m starting to warm up to:

You’ll never stop companies making these claims. You’ll never stop people enjoying their claims. This game is at least 200 years old. The best solution I can foresee is an EU-mandated bullshit box, where people can say whatever they want about their product, where consumers can join in, but the game at last is clearly labelled.

Conclusion

Canada has implemented a supplement registration and regulation framework with the goal of assuring Canadians that natural health products are safe, effective, and of high quality. While its approach to manufacturing quality is laudable, there are significant shortcomings with respect to product efficacy standards, and the regulation of marketing. The DSHEA at least informs consumers that the labelled statements on supplements haven’t been evaluated by the FDA. In Canada, with approved products, such as homeopathy, recommended use statements have been both evaluated and approved.

Yet if we want to incorporate dietary supplements into science-based practices, consumers and health professionals need quality products, but also objective and transparent evaluations of efficacy. As a health professional that advises consumers on natural health products, I welcome any regulation assures me, and my patients, that what’s on label is actually in the bottle. Without this information, I can’t make evidence-based recommendations. Yet if a regulatory system doesn’t also properly inform consumers about product effectiveness and safety, how can they be expected to make rational decisions about their own health? Canada’s approach offers some lessons, but also some cautions, for those calling for supplement regulation.


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Your doctor didn’t graduate from a U.S. medical school? That’s just fine … – Los Angeles Times

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Baltimore Sun (blog)
Your doctor didn't graduate from a U.S. medical school? That's just fine ...
Los Angeles Times
Some US patients -- or even fellow doctors -- might be less than comfortable with a foreign-born physician who didn't graduate from a US medical school. ...
Foreign-Trained Doctors As Good As US-Trained CounterpartsBusinessWeek
US vs. Foreign Med School Grads: No Difference in Patient CareWall Street Journal (blog)
Lower death-rates seen among patients of foreign-trained doctorsExaminer.com
Health Affairs (blog) -New York Times -ModernHealthcare.com
all 49 news articles »

Shop, Buy, Repeat – Huffington Post (blog)

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Daily Mail
Shop, Buy, Repeat
Huffington Post (blog)
Need to multi-task while you are searching for spiritual enlightenment? Me too! Why not put the Eat, Pray, Love official soundtrack (available at Starbucks) ...
Asia Transpacific Journeys Suggests “Eat, Pray, Love” in India and IndonesiaPR-USA.net (press release)
Eat Pray Love Shop: Consumer blitz for film about inner peaceCanada.com
Movie to set off memento madnessRegina Leader-Post

all 254 news articles »

The Face on Mars

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The Faces on Mars 1976 Viking1, click for the new MRO image. All images credit: NASA/MSSS

The face on Mars the conspiracy theorists pointed to as some cover-up is no more.  The HiRiSE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a close in hi-res image of the same location and it looks totally different.

Back in 1976 when the Viking1 took images looking for a good landing spot for Viking2 NASA said “it’s just a mesa”.  Oh no, the conspiracy groups were hot on it, gotta love ‘em though – they’re colorful and nobody really takes them seriously.

The image above is the Viking1 image and if you click it you will get to see the new one from the MRO.  To see the Viking one image with NASA caption – click here.  To see the MRO image and image data -  click here.

This isn’t the first photographic proof the “faces are really nothing” and this isn’t even my favorite.  This one is, taken back in 2001 by the Mars Global Surveyor.

Note: We are hearing all over the news about the stupendous northern (and southern) lights that will be coming our way tonight and tomorrow night.  Turns out there were two CME’s and there is indeed a possibility of a major geomagnetic storm, more likely we will see minor storm conditions, so yes we will see the aurora (if the darned clouds go away), but how far south they will be visible is hard to say.

So far we have no unusual activity, but that is going to change rather suddenly.  Keep an eye on this chart, it updates every three hours and when the top graph lines go to red (indicating a value of 5 or 6) we are in conditions favorable for the Aurora.  Around here, a value of 6 is pretty much a sure sign I can see the aurora (at 43 N latitude).  If the chart goes to a blue bar, go outside and look because who knows you could see them even if you are south of 43 N or north of 43 S latitude you might see them.  Up here, an value of 7 to 9 will make the lights horizon to horizon and bright.

NCBI ROFL: Beauty week: Ugly babies are perceived as incompetent. | Discoblog

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44075162_309ca5e28e_oBaby beautiful: adult attributions of infant competence as a function of infant attractiveness.

“To determine at what age children first elicit differential expectations from adults as a function of their appearance, a sample of black, Caucasian, and Mexican-American adults rated photographs of a sample of black, Caucasian, and Mexican-American infants at 3 time periods in the first year of life. These adults first rated the infants on physical attractiveness and then rated the infants on 12 bipolar adjectives. The adjectives were reduced to 4 dimensions of infant behavior by factor analysis. A strong beauty-is-good stereotype was associated with 3 of the dimensions. On the measures of smart – likable baby, good baby, and causes parents problems, there was a beauty-is-good bias that prevailed across ethnic groups. In contrast, no such bias was found on the measure of active baby. The activity index was expected to reflect positive characteristics, but it appears to have implied overactivity and irritability. Strong and consistent expectations for behavior of attractive and unattractive individuals thus appear to be elicited soon after birth in Caucasian and non-Caucasian populations.”

pretty_babies_percieved_better

Photo: flickr/ AntToeKnee

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Fatty, Sugary Western Diets Give Kids Inferior Gut Microbes | 80beats

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BacillusThe health detriments of a Western diet—eating foods high in fat, sugar, and animal protein—are now well known. However, according to a group of studies out in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, how you eat when you’re just a kid can have a great impact, influencing the gut microbes you’ll carry your entire life.

Researchers led by Carlotta de Filippo studied the gut microbes of African children raised in Burkina Faso versus those in European children from Italy. According to the team’s findings, the kids’ diet had a dramatic effect on what bacteria they harbored in their guts to help them with digestion. The Burkina Faso children, who grew up eating a lot of fiber, had gut bacteria that help to break down that tough material. Meanwhile the Italian children, who grew up on a Western diet, had guts dominated by a kind of bacteria that’s more common in obese people, and they had less bacterial diversity overall.

Two other PNAS papers this week took on the formation and evolution of a human’s gut microbiome. One showed how a nursing infant gets its first helpful gut microbes from mother’s milk, and the other followed the same baby for two and a half years—collecting “samples” from diapers—to show how its population of gut bacteria changed and developed.

For an in-depth take on these studies and insight on how they fit together, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons


EPA on Oil Dispersants: No More Toxic Than Oil Alone | 80beats

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471883main_gulf_amo_2010209What do you get when you mix oil and dispersants? A mixture that doesn’t seem to be more toxic than oil alone, the EPA said yesterday. Their statement came after a second round of testing eight oil dispersants.

The EPA tested the response of two sensitive Gulf species, the mysid shrimp and a small fish called the inland silverside, which they exposed to mixtures of dispersants plus oil and to oil alone.

The results indicate that the eight dispersants tested are similar to one another based on standard toxicity tests on sensitive aquatic organisms found in the Gulf. These results confirm that the dispersant used in response to the oil spill in the Gulf, Corexit 9500A, is generally no more or less toxic than the other available alternatives. [EPA statement]

Chemical dispersants help break down oil, in theory putting it in a form easier for microbes to consume. Still, dispersants are toxic, and BPs unprecedented use of huge amounts of Corexit worried EPA officials, who were uncertain of the chemical’s long-term effects. Reportedly, BP and the United States Coast Guard have not used dispersants since July 19, when the leaking well was successfully fitted with a temporary cap.

The tests prove that the oil itself, not the dispersants, is “enemy No. 1,” Paul Anastas, EPA assistant administrator for research and development, told reporters on a conference call. [CNN]

Still, Anastas says EPA scientists have more research to do on the lingering effects of dispersants:

“The type of acute toxicity we’re discussing today is only one part of the hazard,’’ he said. Another is the health effects of the breakdown products of the dispersant, which the agency has yet to investigate. [New York Times]

As we reported yesterday, since the temporary cap was put in place oil slicks have been quickly disappearing from the surface of Gulf waters. Some say that the oil evaporated, that sunlight broke it down, or that the dispersants helped microbes eliminate it:

Adm Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said: “It’s becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find.” … By some estimates, up to 40 per cent of the oil may have evaporated as soon as it reached the surface. Experts said that warm surface water and weeks of sunlight had broken up the crude, along with strong winds and waves during storms last week. The Gulf’s waters also contain bacteria that have always degraded oil that seeps naturally from the ocean floor. [The Telegraph]

But the fact that the oil is quickly disappearing from the water’s surface doesn’t have everyone celebrating. As Discovery News reports, researchers have seen such vanishing acts before only for the oil to reappear on shore, as happened with the 1979 Ixtoc I oil gusher which also used dispersants. Larry McKinney, who worked on that spill, said he fears that the oil will mix with sediment and sink to the continental shelf.

“It’s a race,” McKinney said. “Can the microbial activity eat up the oil before it mixes with sediments and sinks? … BP used a lot of dispersant and the oil went someplace,” McKinney said. [Discovery News]

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Image: NASA


Science, and rumors of science | Bad Astronomy

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Dennis Overbye of the New York Times has a good article on rumors in science: how they get started, and how they propagate. As someone who stamps flat about a dozen or more of these every year, I appreciated Overbye’s take on it… especially as I’ve been too busy to look into the latest ones, like the foofooraw over a misunderstanding about how the Kepler mission has found hundreds of Earthlike planets. It hasn’t, and happily the NYT article covers that terrestrial tempest in a teapot pretty well.

I try not to report astronomy news here until it’s officially released, and even then I always try to read the journal paper affiliated with it, if there is one. I’ve skipped a lot of press releases after reading the paper and finding the PR was inaccurate, or the news incremental (in other words, a step in the right direction to understanding something, which is important in science but not always newsworthy), or that the work has been done before. I’m surprised at how often that last bit happens; in science new observations confirming previous results are important, but again, newsworthiness has different criteria.

Anyway, even if you read something here, I’m not asking you to believe it. I do my best to look into these things when they occur, but it’s not always possible to be 100% accurate. Take everything you read with a grain of salt. You’ll be a lot less likely to get fooled that way.

Tip o’ the printing press to Sarah Anderson.


Antarctic Particle Detector Buried in Ice Records Cosmic Ray Weirdness | 80beats

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icecube_skymap_22string09Detectors buried thousands of feet under the Antarctic ice recently confirmed a mysterious cosmic lopsidedness. Though it might seem reasonable for our planet to receive energetic particles, called cosmic rays, on average from all directions equally, more cosmic rays’ seem to approach Earth from certain preferred directions.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is still under construction, confirmed these odd cosmic ray preferences, previously detected in the northern hemisphere.

Cosmic rays–energetic particles flung from as nearby as the sun and light years away–are the extra “noise” in the observatory’s experiments; to filter out this noise, researchers needed to map where the cosmic rays are coming from. In a paper published earlier this month in The Astrophysical Journal they confirmed that more cosmic rays seem to come from certain directions–an observation known as anisotropy–in the Earth’s southern hemisphere too.

[T]hey used IceCube to study a longstanding puzzle: whether the distribution of cosmic ray arrivals is uneven across the southern sky, as scientists have previously observed in the northern hemisphere. Indeed, the team found, IceCube detected a disproportionate number of cosmic rays arriving from some parts of the sky. But the reason for this uneven distribution remains unclear. [ScienceNOW]

Physicists designed the detector to search for neutrinos–particles that race through most matter without a trace. The detector picks them up only in the off-chance that they slam into matter, making a brief-lived and only slightly more detectable particle called a muon. The problem is that the detector also picks up muons created when cosmic rays collide with matter in our atmosphere and the muons make their ways into the underground detectors. So the researchers must weed out these cosmic ray-created muons (by studying their paths through the detector). Still, observing the direction of these muons’ arrivals has proven an interesting study on its own.

“IceCube was not built to look at cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are considered background,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Rasha Abbasi in a statement. “However, we have billions of events of background downward cosmic rays that ended up being very exciting.” [LiveScience]

The completed detector will have almost four times the sensors of the 2007-2008 partially-built system that collected the data for this published study. This may help researchers uncover the cause of this uneven barrage of energetic particles.

The IceCube group is currently extending its analysis to improve its understanding of the anisotropy on a more detailed scale and delve further into its possible causes. While the newly published study used data collected in 2007 and 2008 from just 22 strings of optical detectors in the IceCube telescope, they are now analyzing data from 59 of the 79 strings that are in place to date. When completed in 2011, the National Science Foundation-supported telescope will fill a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice with 86 strings containing more than 5,000 digital optical sensors. [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

They suspect that the particles may originate from a supernova, such as the nearby supernova remnant Vela, or that perhaps the preferred direction results from interstellar magnetic fields which could steer the particles into these preferred approaches.

“At the beginning, we didn’t know what to expect. To see this anisotropy extending to the Southern Hemisphere sky is an additional piece of the puzzle around this enigmatic effect — whether it’s due to the magnetic field surrounding us or to the effect of a nearby supernova remnant, we don’t know,” Abbasi says…. “This is exciting because this effect could be the ’smoking gun’ for our long-sought understanding of the source of high-energy cosmic rays.” [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Related content:
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DISCOVER: Ice Fishing for Neutrinos From the Middle of the Galaxy

Image: University of Wisconsin-Madison / IceCube Neutrino Observatory


Proof That We Live in the Future: Tweets From a Robot Astronaut | Discoblog

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robonaut-tweetsAstronauts aboard the International Space Station have been tweeting from space for six months now, making that Twitter phenomenon officially old and busted. So what’s the new hotness? Tweets from an ISS-bound robot astronaut.

Robonaut 2 is currently cooling its heels at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, awaiting its scheduled trip to the International Space Station on November 1st. Once on board the ISS, the two-armed humanoid bot will help out astronauts with their duties; it expects to be particularly useful on tasks that are “too dangerous or boring for astronauts.” But it will also find time to tweet.

Already, Robonaut 2 has addressed some pressing questions via Twitter with answers like these:

“Robots are non-gender by design. I’m an it.”

“No, no relation to Hal. Don’t know if I’d want to admit to having him on my family tree if I was. Def. don’t condone his actions”

Fans can get much more information from the first robot astronaut during its “twitterview” tomorrow. Send a question marked #4R2 and Robonaut will begin answering them at 10 am CST.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Astronauts in Space Finally Enter the Intertubes
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80beats: Robonaut 2: Coming Soon to Space Stations and Assembly Lines Near You
80beats: Japanese Consortium: We’ll Send a Humanoid Robot to Walk on the Moon

Image: flickr / NASARobonaut


Farked moonset | Bad Astronomy

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A while back I posted a pretty cool picture care of the European Southern Observatory:

eso_vlt_moonset

It shows the Moon setting behind the Very Large Telescope observatory in Chile. BABloggee Craig Clem notified me that in July this picture was the victim target of a Fark.com Photoshop contest (some pix maybe NSFW), where people are invited to have at the image and do what they will.

My favorite? No contest:

moonset_space1999

Nicely played, robbase. Nicely played.


Letter from SciFoo: The joys and sorrows of the Unconference | The Loom

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scifooThis morning I am sitting down at my desk with a small red notebook with the words “Google: Open Source Programs Office” on the cover. It is filled with my scrawlings from a meeting this weekend at Google Headquarters, known as SciFoo. The notebook was part of a standard meeting goody bag SciFoo dispensed, along with one of those very heavy plastic cubes that meeting organizers love to engrave as a memento of a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Since I never check baggage when I fly, I left the cube behind. SciFoo was a wonderful meeting, but not without room for improvement. I can sum my feelings up this way: love the small, empty notebook for recording thoughts, not so fond of the heavy, self-celebrating cube.

SciFoo is the product of a three-way media/technology union between O’Reilly, Google, and Nature. They decided a few years back to bring together a big bunch of people each summer, and let them make up the conference on the spot. When we arrived at Google HQ for SciFoo 2010, the 300-odd invitees had some getting-to-know-you drinks, and then a fairly big subset rushed the scheduling board to grab a time and room where they could hold a session of their liking. With a dozen or so sessions taking place every hour from morning till dusk, formulating a schedule was a fairly random process. Nevertheless, I ended up participating in a lot of fascinating sessions, and milling about in the Google courtyard was just as enlightening.

Here is a buffet of some of the experiences I had–a selection of links and thoughts in roughly chronological order.

1. Saturday morning, Rebecca Saxe of MIT talked about her work on morality in the brain. She can use magnetic pulses to temporarily reduce people’s moral judgments back to childhood. Here’s Rebecca talking in a Discover panel I moderated, and at a TED lecture.

2. Ray Jayawardhana, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, brought us up to date on exoplanets. Scientists have found 473 of them (I lost track at around 12, I think). I got to know Ray when he went to college with my brother. He spent a number of years writing about science for the Economist and Science, and then he decided he’d rather go explore the universe. Fortunately, he hasn’t given up writing, and next year he will be publishing a book called Brave New Worlds. In the meantime, you can watch him on this video.

3. I had to skip a bunch of cool-looking sessions to speak at one called RuleCamp. Four speakers had to present three rules each for doing something. Eric Drexler, a pioneer in nanotechnology, presented Three Rules to Understand Anything. I confess I can’t present them here, because I was still trying to figure out my own three rules. Basically, Drexler urged people to read widely, let themselves be confused, and realize that the experts might be wrong.

I presented Three Rules to Be Understood. (Drexler and I never spoke beforehand, amazingly enough). Mine were:

One: Mentalize (get in the heads of others, think about what they do and don’t understand)

Two: Choose your words (don’t just go on auto-pilot and spew out dead language–see my Index of Banned Words.)

Three: Respect stories. They are powerful ways of conveying information. But they only work if you actually tell coherent stories, not isolated fragments joined by your own thoughts. You must mentalize, but you cannot expect your readers or your audience to read your own mind.

Jonah Lehrer, who writes excellent articles and books on the brain, offered some insights from neuroscience on how to have more Aha moments. Take a warm shower, pretend your problem is far away, and move to Silicon Valley.

Garrett Lisi, who splits his time between searching for theory of everything and windsurfing, offered Three Rules for Being a Mad Scientist. He promptly presented eight rules, which, in itself, was his main message: don’t worry about the rules other people set.

4. Theodore Gray led a session on the future of books. Gray produced the first truly awesome book for the Ipad, the Elements. Here’s a YouTube demo of the thing. Gray bemoaned the drift going on right now to make ebooks nothing but static replicas of print books. It’s as if people had decided to base the web on nothing but pdf documents instead of html language. He used his own book to show how you can make ebooks that are like nothing on paper.

Gray also argued that authors would start making and selling these new books on their own, because traditional publishers were trapped in an old way of doing business. It should be pointed out, however, that Gray, who co-founded a very successful software company, could drop ten grand on a software programmer for his book without batting an eye. I came away confirmed in my suspicion that more typical authors cannot, in fact, do it alone. But we can experiment.

5. At some point in the evening, I got into a loud conversation with a very funny psychologist. It turned out his name was Bruce Hood. He works on, among other subjects, the psychology of the supernatural. Here’s a video of a lecture he gave on the topic. His next book is on the biology of the self–something to look forward to.

6. The Joys and Sorrows of Blogging on a Network: On Sunday morning, I was one of the speakers in a session organized by John Dupuis. He was inspired to organize it by, among other things, the Pepsi affair over at scienceblogs.com. That experience raised an interesting point: what are the pluses and minuses of blogging about science on a network? For me, the reasons are obvious, but that’s because my network is actually a magazine, and I blog as a journalist. But networks don’t always provide these obvious benefits. They may not provide good technical support to their bloggers, and they may take the network in directions individual bloggers may not like.

I’ve always thought that people put way too much stock in blog networks. In practice, they are practically indistinguishable from our personal collections of favorite blogs from all over the Internet. They seems like a hangover from the old days when writers were inescapably bound together on the pages of a magazine or a newspaper. But, as is often the case, I’m wondering if I may be wrong. Blog networks can provide a psychological support to bloggers–a camaraderie that can lift the spirits when we look out at the vast wilderness of the Internet.

In a nice bit of timing, some of the folks who walked away from scienceblogs.com started up their own blog network yesterday, called Scientopia. Let’s see how that experiment fares.

7. Thank goodness my session did not run up against that of Armand Leroi. Leroi is an evolutionary biologist in England; I got to know him through his wonderful book, Mutants. Here’s a video of him talking about the book (the book is much cooler, though). I had no idea Leroi had moved on to the evolution of music. He has done some intriguing experiments in which he uses people’s ratings of music to drive the evolution of songs. He played us a starting song–just noisy garbage, basically–and a song that evolved from that ancestor after hundreds of generations. It was lovely in a Brian Eno kind of way–so lovely that Leroi couldn’t help but start dancing.

Here’s the DarwinTunes site where you can read about the research and watch a video.

I also had no idea that Leroi was a television personality in England, where he writes and hosts science shows. He hosted a show on Aristotle as a biologist earlier this year, which you can’t watch on the web outside the UK. (Grrr.) But he says he’s writing a book on it, so I look forward to that.

And so endeth the buffet. For me, the best sessions were ones where somebody had something new to offer. People could pepper the speaker with questions and bring forth their own connected ideas, but the sessions needed an anchor to work well. Some of the other sessions ended up as under-informed free-for-alls. For example, I was in a session on biodiversity, run by Beth Shapiro of Penn State. She works on, among other things, ancient DNA in mammoths. In other words, THE VERY COOL. Check out this video of a lecture she gave in 2008. (Note to producers: Dr. Shapiro is not tall, so don’t block her face with the mike.)

At SciFoo, Shapiro asked the 20 or so people who gathered for the session if biodiversity should be preserved, and why. People started throwing out lots of reactions and got into arguments, but our arguments seemed to me to be a big muddle, because we were talking at different levels of the questions, and because, frankly, most of us didn’t know enough about the subject to really dig deep into it. Over the weekend, the SciFoo organizers liked to tell us how wonderful we were, which seems to have created an illusion that the meeting was a hotter ticket than the Clinton wedding. As a whole, the meeting was certainly stimulating, but I don’t think its social status should have been a free pass for us to hold forth on anything and everything.

I was glad when Shapiro started talking at the end of her session about her own work, and about what it’s like to eat a piece of boiled mummified mammoth. Apparently it’s like the food on British Airways.


X-Prize Foundation Wants To Make Tricorders a Reality | Science Not Fiction

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tricorder

Doctors are not doing so well. In addition to being extremely expensive to train, maintain, and, of course, to visit, they have a lot of other problems. If your doctor is a drunk, an addict, or just plain-old incompetent, his or her colleagues may not tell you or anyone else.[1] Even when doctors are sober and sharp, their diagnoses are often, ahem, less than correct. Mark Walker’s “Uninsured, Heal Thyself” paints a pretty terrifying picture:

Physicians can and do misdiagnose frequently: they prescribe for nonexistent diseases or injuries and fail to notice symptoms or make the correct inferences. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted: “Two 1998 studies validate the continued truth that there is an approximately 40% discordance between what clinical physicians diagnose as causes of death antemortem and what the postmortem diagnoses are” (Lunberg, 1998). This is a pretty shocking statistic: in 4 out of 10 deaths there is a disagreement between what physicians think is the cause of death prior to autopsy, and autopsy findings.[2]

Egads. Is there any solution to the doctor debacle? Walker proposes computer-aided diagnosis:

For example, in a well-known 1971 study, a computer diagnostic system was pitted against experienced physicians in the diagnosis of acute abdominal pain: computer diagnosis was 91.1% accurate compared to 79.7% for experienced physicians (de Dombal et. al., 1972). In another study, computer diagnosis matched that of neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons and general practitioners in overall average in diagnosing lower back pain. While humans surpassed computers in non-critical cases, computers surpassed humans in diagnosing more critical spinal symptoms in which quick intervention is correlated with better outcomes (Bounds et. al., 1998).

The X-Prize Foundation (famous for spurring the privatization of space flight) agrees with Walker. The foundation is developing a new prize: the “AI Physician X Prize, which will be won by the first team to build an artificial intelligence system that can offer a medical diagnosis as good as or better than a diagnosis from a group of 10 board-certified doctors.”[3] Ten doctors – forget a second opinion, every diagnosis would come with a tenth opinion!

And where would one keep such an artificial intelligence? Why in a smartphone, of course. A hand-held computer used to diagnose medical issues: that sounds suspiciously like something Dr. Bev Crusher might be using on the USS Enterprise; namely a tricorder. Or, as Dilbert creator Scott Adams calls it, an exobrain.[4] My iPhone already has access to Wikipedia, WebMD, the Mayo Clinic and a free app for the University of Maryland Medical System’s medical encyclopedia. In a pinch I could probably use it to help in an emergency until professionals arrived. My knowledge and intelligence is expanded instantly by virtue of owning a hand-held computer with a wireless data signal.

Now imagine an app as smart and accurate as a panel of ten doctors in the hands of a trained MD or EMT, emphasis on the “trained.” Walker’s essay focuses on allowing patients to self-diagnose, but the huge benefit would be for professional diagnoses. Instead of being required to memorize thousands of potential diseases and syndromes, each with their own fickle and bizarre permutations, a doctor’s two primary goals would become 1) ensuring accurate, exhaustive entry of symptoms into the tricorder and 2) giving comprehensive, patient oriented care. Diagnoses, particularly esoteric ones, would become the prerogative of the device, instead of certain hobbled, cantankerous MDs named “House.” In addition to the symptoms entered by the doctor, the tricorder would have access to the patient’s entire medical history — including reoccurring issues, worsening conditions, potential genetic dispositions, and a plethora of other minutia — that could be the difference between sending someone home with “drink fluids and come back if it gets worse” and hospitalization. Furthermore, long, infection-prone hospital stays for “observation” would be reduced or even eliminated thanks to better initial diagnoses.

With so much potential to help, the tricorder may become an ever-present part of the doctor’s uniform, just as the stethoscope did in a previous era.

1. “Doctors don’t rat out their incompetent colleagues,” Salon
2. “Uninsured, Heal Thyself” JET Press
3. “The Next Five Years of the X-Prize” CNET
4. “Exobrain” Dilbert Blog


An Active Orangutan Burns Fewer Calories Than a Lazy Human | 80beats

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orangutanWhen an orangutan swings through the trees like an acrobat in its rainforest habitat, it’s burning fewer calories than a human couch potato.

A new study by biological anthropologist Herman Pontzer has found that oragutans use less energy, pound-for-pound, than any other mammal–except for that all-time champion of metabolic lethargy, the tree sloth.

“You and I sitting in front of our computers use more energy each day than these orangutans that are walking around, and climbing around and socializing around their big enclosures,” Pontzer says. [NPR]

Pontzer worked with captive orangutans kept by the non-profit Great Ape Trust; the cooperative animals drank water that contained heavy isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen, and peed in cups for analysis. The researchers then checked the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen isotopes–the oxygen levels reflected how much CO2 the primate had breathed out during physical exertion, and allowed researchers to determine how many calories the orangutan burned.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a 250-pound male orangutan consumed 2,000 calories a day, which is 20 percent less than a typical human male. The two 120-pound females burned 1,600 calories a day.

Dr. Pontzer said the orangutans may have evolved this parsimonious metabolism to avoid starving when the ripe fruits that they eat periodically become scarce in their native rainforests. The evolutionary tradeoff is that orangutans grow slowly and reproduce at a low rate. [The New York Times]

For more on this story, see Ed Yong’s post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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80beats: Happy News: New Population of Endangered Orangutans Found in Borneo
80beats: Orangutans Are Threatened With Extinction as Habitat Shrinks

Image: flickr / ltshears


Spirit Doesn’t Return NASA’s Calls; Rover Might Be Gone for Good | 80beats

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spirit-tracks425It’s hard to say goodbye to old friends. We’ve known since the springtime that NASA’s Spirit rover, which roamed the surface of Mars for more than six years, was probably doomed to a frozen death. But in the last week, NASA has repeatedly called the rover, hoping that the endurance explorer somehow managed to conserve enough power during the martian winter to respond.

So far, no luck. Spirit has not phoned home.

Spirit’s been on Mars since January 2004 and already survived previous winters, which run from May through November. With sunlight reaching Spirit at a weak angle, the rover hibernates and uses the scant solar power to recharge batteries and heat itself to –40 degrees [Scientific American].

But this winter it could not. With a wheel caught in the loose martian terrain, Spirit could not drive to an opportune position to capture some sunlight. As a result, the rover probably dropped to -67 degrees during the brutal winter on the red planet, too cold for its heaters or machinery to function.

This looks like the end of the line. In January, after months of fruitless attempts to extricate Spirit from its quagmire, NASA scientists conceded that the rover would rove no more. Now, NASA says, it would be a shock if Spirit manages to wake up and answer hails from Earth. Its creators will keep trying.

“This has been a long winter for Spirit and a long wait for us,” said Steve Squyres, the Cornell astronomer and chief scientist for both rovers. “Even if we never heard from Spirit again, I think her scientific legacy would be secure” [San Francisco Chronicle].

That’s putting it humbly on Squyres’ part. Spirit turned an expected Mars mission lifetime of 90 days into six years, a 24-fold improvement. Spirit provided invaluable evidence supporting the case that our planetary neighbor was once hospitable for life, and snapped more than 100,000 pictures. You can see some of its best in our photo gallery.

And Spirit’s twin rover, Opportunity, still survives.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Those Mars Rovers Keep on Going and Going…
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Image: NASA/JPL