The BBC ran a story recently about how the Chinese government (or some subsets of it at least) has decided it quite likes Christianity after all. This comment piece from the Guardian discusses the report, and adds some more details. It ends with this:
On its current trajectory and with state backing, as the former Time magazine Beijing chief David Aikman notes, within three decades there may be nearly 400 million Christians in China. The future of Christianity may well lie in the east.
I can safely predict there will be argument about this amongst the sweary, teenage boy libertarians over at Catallaxy:
TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.
The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.
It’s quite surprising, isn’t it, that the purpose of Russian “numbers stations” is still not known for sure. According to Gizmodo, the numbers have changed recently. As I imagine a lot fewer people now spend time listening to the shortwave band than when I was a youngster, perhaps fewer people know about them?
Discover magazine has just put online an article from April about quantum experiments that some physicists take as confirming the idea that the future influences the past, and it’s a great read.
I was particularly interested in the discussion of what this means for free will, to be found on the second page of the article. I’m not sure that reading this extract will make complete sense without reading what precedes it, but here goes:
The Rochester experiments seem to demonstrate that actions carried out in the future—in the final, postselection step—ripple back in time to influence and amplify the results measured in the earlier, intermediate step. Does this mean that when the intermediate step is carried out, the future is set and the experimenter has no choice but to perform the later, postselection measurement? It seems not. Even in instances where the final step is abandoned, Tollaksen has found, the intermediate weak measurement remains amplified, though now with no future cause to explain its magnitude at all.
I put it to Tollaksen straight: This finding seems to make a mockery of everything we have discussed so far.
Tollaksen is smiling; this is clearly an argument he has been through many times. The result of that single experiment may be the same, he explains, but remember, the power of weak measurements lies in their repetition. No single measurement can ever be taken alone to convey any meaning about the state of reality. Their inherent error is too large. “Your pointer will still read an amplified result, but now you cannot interpret it as having been caused by anything other than noise or a blip in the apparatus,” he says.
…
The error range in single intermediate weak measurements that are not followed up by the required postselection will always be just enough to dismiss the bizarre result as a mistake.
Tollaksen sums up this confounding argument with one of his favorite quotes, from the ancient Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva: “All is foreseen; but freedom of choice is given.” Or as Tollaksen puts it, “I can have my cake and eat it too.” He laughs.
Here, finally, is the answer to Aharonov’s opening question: What does God gain by playing dice with the universe? Why must the quantum world always retain a degree of fuzziness when we try to look at it through the time slice of the present? That loophole is needed so that the future can exert an overall pull on the present, without ever being caught in the act of doing it in any particular instance.
“The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake,” Aharonov says.
I can’t think right now if there is a word for it theologically, but doesn’t this sound a lot like the idea that God does indeed influence the world, but only in ways that can never be clearly identified as such? This was what God said at the end of my favourite episode of Futurama. I suppose it’s like saying that the God of the gaps will always have a gap in which He can be concealed; it’s inherent in the nature of the universe.
Atheists will say “what a cop out”, but the quantum world seems so weird, I don’t think they’re really in a position to rule anything out.
The idea of backward causation is also relevant to Tipler’s Omega Point, in that the end state of the universe (essentially, eternal God) determines the beginning and what goes on in between. That Tipler manages to cram the miracles of Jesus into that as a necessary element is the stretch that nearly no one can swallow, but the big picture an eternal superintelligence pulling the universe towards it retains a deep appeal.
UPDATE: There was another recent paper on arXiv about quantum entanglement as a measure free will; but I find it rather hard to follow, even in this explanation of the paper.
In May, I posted extracts from Discover magazine about the surprisingly big problem of cleaning up American houses that had been used for illegal methamphetamine production.
It seems the problem is cropping up closer to home, as these comments from an Australian group indicate:
“In New Zealand, they have recently torn down several houses where drugs were made because they were so polluted it would be hazardous for anyone to live there afterwards.
“So this is also a serious issue for landlords, who can find themselves facing legal action, clean-up costs of $150,000 or more, a huge drop in property values or even their building being razed to the ground, as a result of an activity which they knew nothing about.”“Individuals who are exposed to drug lab contamination may experience dizziness, headaches and reactions, chemical burns, lung damage, and nerve damage,” he adds.
The most at-risk populations are drug ‘cooks’, and subsequent residents or neighbours of labs – but police, fire fighters, environmental inspectors and other public servants may also be exposed.
I recently noted a new paper on arXiv that had an intriguing title, and Max Tegmark as co-author, but I didn’t really know what it was about.
Now, New Scientist has an article explaining it. Pretty interesting.
More details here.A trial is underway at University College London Hospitals in UK to establish whether the drug 'Exenatide' could be used to treat patients with the progressive neurological condition.
A synthetic version of this drug, originally found in the saliva of the Gila monster, is already an approved treatment for patients with diabetes.
However, laboratory evidence suggests it could also arrest the neurodegenerative process that causes Parkinson’s disease - potentially leading to a cure. Four independent groups around the world (including colleagues at the School of Pharmacy, London), have shown that this drug can improve symptoms of Parkinson’s and rescue dying cells in five different rodent models of the disease.
Recently, I referred to the interesting Foreign Correspondent episode that looked at ethnic Koreans living in Japan, and the tensions that continue between the two countries.
Now, there’s a good article in The Japan Times about the relationship, looking at recent apologies from Japan (there have been more than I realised) and why it is they don’t seem to be making much difference. Here are some interesting points:
The article does make the point that it doesn't help that apologies are often criticised by nutty Japanese nationalists, but also other politicians who seem to just be acting opportunistically.It is 65 years since colonial rule ended, but the scars of the past have not healed and bilateral relations remain vexed by history. Numerous apologies by Japanese politicians, and one by Emperor Akihito in 1990, have been undone by discordant voices of denial and unrepentant justification. These mixed messages reflect a lack of consensus in Japan about its colonial era. They also help explain why Koreans remain seething and indignant, unconvinced by Japan's sincerity and unwilling to extend a hand to the perpetrator…
Christian Caryl, contributing editor to the journal Foreign Policy, argues that, ". . . part of the problem is a Korean nationalism that is built around a deep-seated notion of Korean victimhood. Koreans need to get over this if they're ever going to have a healthy relationship with their neighbors."…
As the victims, the Korean governments are in a position to decide how to deal with the colonial past, and they see few incentives in reconciliation. Given that apologies are offered, but shunned, and gestures of contrition never quite measure up, the odds against reconciliation are high…
The perception gap remains a chasm, with a recent NHK/KBS poll indicating that 62 percent of Japanese have positive attitudes toward South Korea, while 70 percent of South Koreans have negative attitudes toward Japan. It is revealing that Japanese associate South Korea with a now-popular soap-opera actor, while South Koreans cite Hirobumi Ito when they think of Japan; light-hearted pop versus heavy history.
....dozens of people in Nanjing were hospitalized with strange symptoms of unbearable muscle pains after eating crayfish since July. The doctor’s diagnosis was rhabdomyolysis (the destruction or degeneration of muscle tissue) serious cases even cause kidney damage. The speculation was that the “shrimp washing powder” (洗虾粉) which was popularly used by the sellers to make the crayfish look spanky fresh and clean could be the root cause.
Today, John Webb at the University of South Wales, one of the leading proponents of the varying constant idea, and a few cobbers say they have new evidence from the Very Large Telescope in Chile that the fine structure constant was different when the universe was younger.If the work holds up, this is big news.But get this. While data from the Keck telescope indicate the fine structure constant was once smaller, the data from the Very Large Telescope indicates the opposite, that the fine structure constant was once larger. That's significant because Keck looks out into the northern hemsiphere, while the VLT looks south
This means that in one direction, the fine structure constant was once smaller and in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. And here we are in the middle, where the constant as it is (about 1/137.03599...)...
The implication from Webb and co's data is that the fine structure constant is continuously varying throughout space and is merely fine-tuned for life in this corner of the cosmos: the universe's habitable zone. Elsewhere, presumably well beyond the universe we can see, this constant is entirely different.
That's likely to put the cat among the pigeons.
Toub's parents .... actively brought their Jungian practice into their parenting technique. There was a lot of dream analysis in the Toub household, of course, and also exercises in the Jungian technique of "active imagination," which Toub explains is "deliberately exploring one's imagination and fantasies by … acting them out verbally or physically to read the message that one's unconscious is trying to communicate." In one memorable scene, Toub's mother encouraged him to "be" an erection in order to help him get over a bout of teenage impotence. To accomplish this, she took young Micah to a local park and had him pretend to be his own boner. "Your name is not Micah, you are not a human being," she told him. "You are an erection. What words come into your head?" He visualized himself as a "victorious penis," running around the park triumphantly.[*] Laugh away, but the treatment worked: Micah is no longer plagued by an uncooperative member.Apart from the therapy, I am surprised by two things: a. a teenager can suffer impotence? and b. a teenager would tell his parents he is suffering impotence.
So, back to Per’s lab. He has various engineering models set up to test movement of TRISO pebble fuel through a fluoride salt coolant, whereby the pebbles are inserted in the inlet pipes and rise up through the reactor module over time, and then are put back through 5 or 6 times. This allows for very high burnup — exceeding 50 %, high power density due to the heat capacity of the liquid salt, and high temperatures thanks to the durability of the pebbles. This is a big (potential) advantage over the current Pebble Bed Modular Reactor technology (PBMR), because in that design, the gas coolant has a very low power density. He’s flipped the problem on its head. The reactor also has various inherent safety design features, such as control rods that sink naturally in response to elevated coolant temperature, thereby passively regulating reactivity. Very safe!Of course, this does not sound as modular as the South African design was intended to be, but it is still being explored as means of making cheaper nuclear designs than the current designs. (The article explains that the cost of new nuclear is still providing prohibitive for its expansion in the US.)
The most serious cyber attack on the US military's networks came from a tainted flash drive in 2008, forcing the Pentagon to review its digital security, a top US defense official said Wednesday.The thumb drive, which was inserted in a military laptop in the Mideast, contained malicious code that "spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.
The code was placed on the drive by "a foreign intelligence agency," Lynn wrote.
"It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary."
Previous media reports speculated that the attack may have originated from Russia.
Shaikh Mohammad Al Munjed, a Syrian scholar living in Saudi Arabia, said that Mickey Mouse should be killed because he is a mouse and mice are considered unclean in Islam.I take it that Disney Riyadh won't be opening any time soon.
Wednesday 23 August 1944 began like any other day in the sleepy Lancashire village of Freckleton. Situated on the banks of the River Ribble, once the traditional haunt of smugglers, during the Second World War it played host to a large contingent of American airmen, based mostly at the neighbouring Warton aerodrome.
At its heart lay Holy Trinity primary school where 176 children, many of them evacuees, were in their second day of a new term....
At 10.30am, an American Liberator Bomber 42-50291 took off from Warton on a routine test flight. Eleven minutes in, a huge explosion, thought to have been sparked by a bolt of lightning, tore the huge plane apart. Large parts of the fuselage rained down on the village, hitting the school and a neighbouring snack bar. In the ensuing inferno, 61 people were killed, including 38 members of that infant class; it was the greatest loss of civilian life outside London during the Second World War.
A disturbing article is here at Slate about how popular the use of surrogacy in India has become as a way for poor, often illiterate, women to make a large amount of money:
It is not uncommon for surrogates to authorize contracts with a thumbprint as opposed to a signature because they are illiterate. Even those who are literate often aren't able to read the contracts, which tend to be written in English. Lack of technological understanding among rural Indians also breeds misconceptions about surrogacy. Many, for example, thought that it would be necessary to sleep with another man in order to conceive. Even the pricing structure of surrogacy perpetuates social inequality: Many religious Indian surrogacy clients would prefer for their child to be birthed by an upper-caste brahmin, so high-born surrogates can get paid up to double.
And how about this as an example of the appalling excuse making that some in the reproductive technology business undertake:
Going back a few months, I never got around to posting about the Melbourne woman who was off to Thailand to have sex selecting IVF to get a girl. I doubt she had much public sympathy: oh, except probably from some in the IVF industry. As was noted in Eureka Street in April, before that Melbourne mother's case was publicized:The country is romanced by the idea of selling human capital as its next great commodity. So surrogacy resonates not as an old problem of exploiting the poor but as an inevitable part of the "new India," where the locals provide much needed services for the new global economy. This kind of forward-thinking economic liberation dovetails with an ideology of personal freedom. "I think women should be free to choose what they do with their bodies," says Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, a fertility specialist in Mumbai. "We shouldn't treat them as stupid just because they are poor."
In recent weeks, several reports have appeared in the media that Australia's ban on couples using IVF to choose the sex of their children for social reasons or to balance their families might soon be lifted.Most stories quoted 'IVF pioneer' Professor Gab Kovacs, who is said to be 'leading the charge' or 'leading the lobby'. A number of other fertility doctors are also involved.
This seems to be a pre-emptive attempt to sway public opinion. The inquiry has not yet commenced. And supporters of this view know that many of us are not comfortable about parents choosing the sex of their children. So ahead of time, they're trying to change our minds.
Lots of jokes to be made at the expense of this article about research into using urine to generate useful amounts of electricity.
Scientists have warned that the world's most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle.
The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas – by far the biggest store of helium in the world – must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price.
The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky.
Further down, though, the article says all the helium may be gone within 100 years.
So how much should a helium balloon cost?:
Professor Richardson believes the price for helium should rise by between 20- and 50-fold to make recycling more worthwhile. Nasa, for instance, makes no attempt to recycle the helium used to clean is rocket fuel tanks, one of the single biggest uses of the gas.
Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about $100 (£75) to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain.
Soon it'll be hydrogen balloons for the kiddies, but only if their parents don't smoke.
Here’s a good article on the very surprising (apparent) finding that solar neutrinos – or another mystery particle from the sun - affect radioactive decay on Earth. (I’m sure I mentioned this here before a long time ago.) Much work remains to be done, though.
As far as horrible hospital accidents go, this one is spectacularly bad:
Grace Wang's spinal canal was injected with powerful antiseptic instead of anaesthetic, in what should have been a routine epidural to ease the pain of her first child's birth.
The Herald understand the two substances had been transferred to separate metal dishes on the sterile table, contravening the standard practice of drawing them directly from their packaging into a syringe to avoid confusion.
The devastating medical mistake - inconceivable in its magnitude - has poisoned her nervous system, leaving the 32-year-old distressed, confused, in shocking pain and unable to walk or even sit.
Nature reports:
The capacity of plants to act as a carbon sink could be on the decline.
As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, the amount of atmospheric carbon being converted into plant biomass has increased in step. However, in a paper published today in Science, ecologists Maosheng Zhao and Steve Running at the University of Montana in Missoula report a surprising reversal of this trend over the last decade, despite its having been the warmest on record.
The reason appears to be drier conditions in the Southern Hemisphere.
While it appears the seed of the father-child bond is planted by supplemental neurons in a new dad, it seems a child, on the other hand, may be born with a brain that expects this bond to form in the first place.All quite interesting. And you can also expect people who don't give a toss about who gets to make babies via reproductive technology to have a problem with it.To prove this, a few recent studies turned to a rodent that employs a remarkably familiar nest structure. Degu rats are biparental animals, which means parenting duties are split between the mothers and father. Degu fathers behave just like human fathers. They spend the early days of their pups’ lives helping with basic care, like warming and grooming. And as the pups get older, the degu fathers begin actively playing with their toddler offspring.
Researchers reasoned that absent fathers in the degu nests would create a true social and emotional void for the offspring, just as a missing dad would impact the dynamic of a human family. They found that if a rodent father remained in the nest with his pups – presumably due to the newfound bond with his offspring – his babies’ brains developed normally. But if the father was removed from the nest shortly after the birth of his pups, his newborns’ brains started to break down at the level of synapses, which are short chemical junctions in the brain that allow brain cells to communicate with each other.
Research trials by Dr Karin Ried and her colleagues from the University of Adelaide's Discipline of General Practice show that garlic could be used as an adjunct to conventional drugs for hypertension.Sounds like a pretty good result. But how does aged garlic extract make me smell?However, raw or cooked garlic, and garlic powder are not as effective in treating high blood pressure as aged garlic extract.
In a 12-week trial involving 50 people, Dr Karin Ried's team found that those with systolic blood pressure above 140 who took aged garlic extract capsules experienced an average systolic blood pressure 10.2mmHg lower than the control group, who took a placebo.
Story here.A study on mental health issues shows suicide and depression are more prevalent in the medical profession than in the general public.
Research commissioned by the national depression initiative Beyond Blue has found women in the profession are two-and-a-half times more likely to commit suicide.
The study - to be presented in Adelaide today - also suggests rates of suicide for men in the medical professional are 25 per cent higher than the general public.
Ladyzhenskiy and Kaukonen had made it through to the final ahead of more than 130 other participants, but six minutes into the contest, judges noticed something was wrong with the Russian, and dragged both competitors from the sauna.* watch some video of the aftermath of a huge mudslip/flood in a part of China.
Both middle-aged men were seen to have severe burns on their bodies and were given first aid after they collapsed.
Claims that children are starving, or "failing to thrive", were contained in a submission to the inquiry in Darwin by child protection staff from the Northern Territory. They said resources allocated to indigenous communities were "grossly inadequate" and the spectacle of children who were failing to thrive was, to them, familiar.The Darwin-based team covers a vast area and looks after 14,000 people, but has to make do with four welfare workers and four Aboriginal community workers. That level of staffing, combined with a "fly-in, fly-out approach", allows for "little more than superficial child protection responses", the inquiry submission said.
Staff also complained about the "incredible" volume of paperwork they had to plough through, saying: "We spend more time sitting at a computer than we do with our clients and their families."...
Meanwhile, Alice Springs Hospital has told the inquiry it is used by child protection workers as a "storehouse" for children awaiting foster placement. "[We are] an acute care facility, we are not able to provide appropriate supervision of children and their families," the hospital's submission said.
Dan Baschiera, a veteran social worker, told the inquiry he had seen child protection staff fresh from years of study and training "burn up" after a few months working in Aboriginal welfare. He accused the Northern Territory government of starving the child protection system of funds.
"Wild swimming" is apparently becoming popular in cold, polluted British waterways. I did notice that Griff Rhys Jones seemed unusually keen on swimming in any murky brown stuff in his recent TV series about British rivers. Odd people.
The Christian Science Monitor asks the question "is the moon really a 'been there done that' world?"
The answer, of course, is "no". There was a forum at NASA last month which went into the details of why, and you can read about it at the link.
Kerney reported that these algae are, in fact, commonly located inside cells all over the spotted salamander's body. Moreover, there are signs that intracellular algae may be directly providing the products of photosynthesis — oxygen and carbohydrate — to the salamander cells that encapsulate them.This reminds me of the greenish, genetically engineered super bodies that were given to the aging soldiers in John Scalzi's "Old Man's War". If you're going to get into transhumanism, then incorporating chlorophyll would seem to be a good idea.
I know very little about how the International Space Station works, despite my interest in all things spacey, but they have a cooling system that has gone on the blink:
The crew of the International Space Station have been forced to reduce power after half the cooling system suddenly shut down over the weekend.
Nasa officials insisted the three Americans and three Russians aboard were not in danger.
Urgent spacewalk repairs are being discussed for this week…
Flight controllers tried to restart the disabled ammonia pump early on Sunday but the circuit breaker tripped again.
Any repairs later this week almost certainly will involve replacing the faulty ammonia pump, a difficult job that would require two spacewalks, AP adds.
Two spare pumps are stored on the outside of the station.
China Hush is a good quality blog that seems to have a new post almost every day about some odd or unusual story from China, so I’ll add it to the blogroll.
Two recent examples of its content: the proposed “straddling bus”concept which, if ever implemented, would make the morning drive alone its route pretty disconcerting; and the jarringly cutesy animated abortion ad that shows that China and huge slabs of the West are, at least in certain aspects, still culturally very far apart.
In Japan, eel is seen as an energy reviving summer food. This Japan Times blog post notes that no one is sure how this idea developed, although one rather mundane theory is that it was an early marketing ploy by the fishmongers of the Edo period who were having trouble “moving” their eel catch. I hope the true reason is at least a little more romantic.
Anyhow, the other reason the article is blogworthy is because it discusses eel farming . (Most eel sold in Japan is farmed.) It had never occurred to me before that the odd life cycle of the eel does not make it an ideal candidate for farming:
So that's how they do it. But it would be having a significant impact on eel numbers in the natural waterways of Japan, wouldn't it?It’s impossible to grow unagi from eggs because despite the fact that unagi is designated as a fresh water fish, it lays its eggs in the ocean. (Anago, another eel species that is a popular dish in Japan, live in seawater their whole lives.) Their life cycle is the opposite of salmon, which lay eggs in freshwater but live their lives in the sea. In fact, no one knows precisely where unagi lay their eggs, though the most common theory is some place in the vicinity of the Marianas. After hatching the fry make their way back to Japan waterways and are caught in nets. These fry are then sold to unagi farms where they are raised to adulthood.
I missed this story when it came out in May, but I heard it being discussed on the radio today.
In mice at least, eating a common soil bacteria seems to make them learn faster. From the Science Daily report:
In the radio interview today, the researcher said they really have no idea whether the same thing happens in humans. But all the same, it's an intriguing idea that being too hygienic may not only be bad for allergies, but might make learning slower too."Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature," says Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks.
Previous research studies on M. vaccae showed that heat-killed bacteria injected into mice stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety.
"Since serotonin plays a role in learning we wondered if live M. vaccae could improve learning in mice," says Matthews.
Matthews and Jenks fed live bacteria to mice and assessed their ability to navigate a maze compared to control mice that were not fed the bacteria.
"We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice," says Matthews.
Simon Dexter, a consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Meeta's surgeon, said that although it was a major operation it was possible to live without a stomach.
That’s from a BBC story about a couple of sisters in England who, due to their genetic susceptibility to stomach cancer, had theirs removed as a precaution. Unpleasant.
Can you ask a pig if his glass is half full?
Quite a charming bit of research here:
In an experiment reminiscent of Pavlov's dogs, the Newcastle team taught the pigs to associate a note on a glockenspiel with a treat -- an apple -- and a dog training 'clicker' with something unpleasant -- in this case rustling a plastic bag.
The next step was to place half the pigs in an enriched environment -- more space, freedom to roam in straw and play with 'pig' toys -- while the other half were placed in a smaller, boring environment- no straw and only one non-interactive toy.
The team then played an ambiguous noise -- a squeak -- and studied how the pigs responded. Dr Douglas said the results were compelling.
"We found that almost without exception, the pigs in the enriched environment were optimistic about what this new noise could mean and approached expecting to get the treat," she said. "In contrast, the pigs in the boring environment were pessimistic about this new strange noise and, fearing it might be the mildly unpleasant plastic bag, did not approach for a treat.
To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable, the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later (when Jim Hansen in 1988 famously stated that “global warming is here”).He wasn't the first to predict warming from CO2, though:
Broecker was not the first to predict CO2-induced warming. In 1965, an expert report to US President Lyndon B. Johnson had warned: “By the year 2000, the increase in carbon dioxide will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate.” And in 1972, a more specific prediction similar to Broecker’s was published by the eminent atmospheric scientist J.S. Sawyer in Nature (for a history in a nutshell, see my newspaper column here).For all the skeptics who thought it was only global cooling being considered in the mid 70's, this is well worth reading.The innovation of Broecker’s article – apart from introducing the term “global warming” – was in combining estimates of CO2 warming with natural variability. His main thesis was that a natural climatic cooling
The latter turned out to be correct.has, over the last three decades, more than compensated for the warming effect produced by the CO2 [....] The present natural cooling will, however, bottom out during the next decade or so. Once this happens, the CO2 effect will tend to become a significant factor and by the first decade of the next century we may experience global temperatures warmer than any in the last 1000 years.
It took at least 25,000 years for the new acidity levels reached in the surface waters to transfer to deeper waters, according to the research—and the ocean took 75,000 years to reach its peak acidity for that episode, as well as at least 160,000 years to recover. The length of this episode derives "most probably because several CO2 pulses [volcanic eruptions] contributed to ocean acidification," Erba says. Further, she plans to examine other high CO2 events in the geologic record to see "if the same causes—excess CO2, global warming, ocean acidification—trigger similar effects on marine calcifiers at different times."Here's the crux:
But the 25,000-year time lag between acidification of the surface waters and deeper waters is mysterious, points out geoscientist Timothy Bralower of The Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in this study. "In the modern ocean, a similar input of carbon would involve a lag on the order of centuries," he notes. "So something is very different." And the nannoconids begin to disappear even before the fossil record indicates lighter volcanic carbon isotopes—in other words, presumably before the actual acidification.
"The current rate of ocean acidification is about a hundred times faster than the most rapid events" in the geologic past, notes marine geologist William Howard of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center in Hobart, Tasmania. Plus, the direct impacts of global warming may complicate the picture—just as modern coral suffer from increased bleaching thanks to warmer ocean temperatures as well as the reduced carbonate exoskeleton–building capacity brought on by ocean acidification. Bralower adds: "The big question is whether modern species will be able to adapt to what I expect will be much more rapid pH reduction in coming centuries."
Something to worry about? Well, yes:Phytoplankton activity fluctuates widely according to season and location, making long-term monitoring of trends difficult. An earlier study2, based on satellite observations of ocean colour, suggested a link between climate variability and ocean productivity, but this was limited to observations from 1997 to 2006. Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and his team have now combined satellite-derived observations of phytoplankton with historical shipboard measurements stretching back to the pioneering days of oceanography.
The research reveals an unsettling centennial downwards trend, superimposed on shorter-term variability. The scientists found that the average global phytoplankton concentration in the upper ocean currently declines by around 1% per year. Since 1950 alone, algal biomass decreased by around 40%, probably in response to ocean warming — and the decline has gathered pace in recent years.
"Clearly, 40% is a huge number," says Paul Falkowski, an oceanographer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "This implies that the entire ocean system is out of steady state, slowing down.
"This is severely disquieting," adds Victor Smetacek, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. "One must really digest the very magnitude of this decline and its possible implications."The culprit is believed to be ocean warming:
In most regions tested, the phytoplankton decline seems to be the result of a 0.5–1.0 °C warming of the upper ocean over the past century. The warming leads to enhanced vertical 'stratification' of ocean layers, thus limiting the supply of nutrients from deeper waters to the surface.No one is pointing the finger at ocean acidification yet, and (from memory) experiments with bubbling CO2 through phytoplankton have had mixed results. But there was this story recently that increased acidification may affect the availability of iron, which phytoplankton need to grow well. (There is more detail on that study at my earlier post.) So, I wonder if acidification over the last century is part of the explanation.But ocean warming does not explain reduced productivity in regions, including the Arctic Ocean, where algal growth is mainly constrained by sunlight. So scientists must try to find out what other drivers, such as changes in wind and ocean circulation, might force the decline, says Falkowski.
The New York Times reports on a lot of work being done to genetically alter algae to make it better as a potential large scale source of biofuel. This is being taken very seriously:
“There are probably well over 100 academic efforts to use genetic engineering to optimize biofuel production from algae,” said Matthew C. Posewitz, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines, who has written a review of the field. “There’s just intense interest globally.”Algae are attracting attention because the strains can potentially produce 10 or more times more fuel per acre than the corn used to make ethanol or the soybeans used to make biodiesel. Moreover, algae might be grown on arid land and brackish water, so that fuel production would not compete with food production. And algae are voracious consumers of carbon dioxide, potentially helping to keep some of this greenhouse gas from contributing to global warming.
But some people are a little concerned:
At a meeting this month of President Obama’s new bioethics commission, Allison A. Snow, an ecologist at Ohio State University, testified that a “worst-case hypothetical scenario” would be that algae engineered to be extremely hardy might escape into the environment, displace other species and cause algal overgrowths that deprive waters of oxygen, killing fish.
And I guess I didn’t realise how important the humble green scum really is:
“About 40 percent of the oxygen that you and I are breathing right now comes from the algae in the oceans,” the genetic scientist J. Craig Venter said at a Congressional hearing in May. “We don’t want to mess up that process.”
Sea surface temperatures in the Red Sea are routinely very high, I believe, but there are corals there that cope nonetheless. There’s a convincing sounding study in Science that indicates their tolerance is approaching its limits:
In other coral news, it's reported today that seaweed is encroaching on a significant number of reefs in the Great Barrier Reef, but the reason is said to be poor water quality. However, I think it’s also worth noting that ocean acidification would be likely to increase that problem.Sea surface temperature (SST) across much of the tropics has increased by 0.4° to 1°C since the mid-1970s. A parallel increase in the frequency and extent of coral bleaching and mortality has fueled concern that climate change poses a major threat to the survival of coral reef ecosystems worldwide. Here we show that steadily rising SSTs, not ocean acidification, are already driving dramatic changes in the growth of an important reef-building coral in the central Red Sea. Three-dimensional computed tomography analyses of the massive coral Diploastrea heliopora reveal that skeletal growth of apparently healthy colonies has declined by 30% since 1998. The same corals responded to a short-lived warm event in 1941/1942, but recovered within 3 years as the ocean cooled. Combining our data with climate model simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we predict that should the current warming trend continue, this coral could cease growing altogether by 2070.
As reported in the Geelong Advertiser:
A "witch" told a traffic cop she was above the law because she was "from another world" before dragging him at high speed down a busy street.
"Your laws and penalties don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you," Eilish De Avalon said, before driving off with Sen-Constable Andrew Logan’s arm caught in her driver's side door, the Geelong Advertiser reports.
The officer was left seriously injured in the incident after being dragged nearly 200m.
De Avalon, who also told police she "had a universal name that is not recognised here", pleaded guilty in the Geelong Magistrates’ Court
And what does this local witch from another world do in her spare time?:
De Avalon, 40, a marriage celebrant who is also a self-confessed witch from the Geelong suburb of Highton
There’s a pretty good essay in the NYT about how whether it is right to give up on free will as a result of the experiments which show that an outsider who can read a brain state correctly can know a person’s decision before the person knows it.
Kant gets invoked to argue that free will is still there, and that the free will conundrum basically arises from not realising the limits of reason. (I think that’s a fair summary, anyway.)
All very interesting.
Tim Colebatch provides does a good summary of why a large number of voters feel very disappointed by all parties this election.
I also see that Tony Abbott has gone into “dog whistle” mode well and truly on the Julia as a single woman issue. I can’t see this working for him.
According to this report, a prominent anti-vaccination group in New South Wales is not only spreading their mis-information via the Web; they are actively pursuing those who have suffered a tragedy:
When their four-week-old baby daughter Dana died from whooping cough Toni and David McCaffery sought love and healing to ease their grief.
Instead, they say they were subjected to a campaign of harassment and abuse at the hands of anti-vaccination campaigners, a group who were yesterday labelled a serious threat to the public's health and safety….
Its investigation was sparked by two complaints, one from Toni and David McCaffery, whose four-week-old daughter Dana died from whooping cough last year.
The couple, from Lennox Head, allege they were subjected to months of harassment and abuse by Ms Dorey and anti-vaccination campaigners, accusing them of lying about the cause of their daughter's death. They received anonymous letters and emails that said whooping cough was not fatal and vaccinations were not needed.
Mrs McCaffery, whose daughter was too young to be vaccinated when she caught whooping cough, said Ms Dorey also tried to get her baby's medical records from the hospital without permission. ''Instead of love and healing in the weeks after Dana's death, we got ugliness … it has been terrible,'' she said.
It doesn’t explain why the parents were in contact with the group in the first place, but still this sounds like an appalling story.
I mentioned this anti-vaccination group late last year after they appeared on the 7.30 Report under a post headed “Immunisation Dills”. It deserves the upgrade to “Dangerous Nuts”.
There’s a pretty big story out about how Australian based researchers have made some fundamental advances in understanding Alzheimer disease, and have been able to treat it in mice. (Yes, I know, stories like this about potential new treatments for various diseases in humans come out all the time, but this one does sound distinctly more important, it seems to me.)
Bring on the cure, please.
* Tried to make a cream and tomato pasta sauce, but using mostly low fat evaporated milk instead of cream. (Hey, my wife fed me pork belly the previous two nights – there has to be the occasional attempt at low fat cooking while my middle age spread continues its winter growth.) It didn’t work properly – the milk seemed to separate into solids or something, although the taste wasn’t bad. More investigation into evaporated milk recipes needed.
* Oh no! Robin Hood series 3 ended on Saturday night, leading to tears not by the kids, but from the parents. (I had actually shed a tear at the end of series 2 as well.) It really was a quality family show – great production values, good acting, action every episode, sometimes funny, all violence bloodless, and characters believable enough to upset you when they unexpectedly die. (It was pretty good at the unexpected death.) It will be missed.
* The debate between Gillard and Abbott on Sunday night (pretty much a draw I thought, although I was not sitting watching it every minute) has led to another surge in Gillard earlobe Googlers coming to this blog via my my 2007 post-election night comment about it. (Over a thousand a day.) Even Channel 9 has noted that her earlobes, which looked particularly large during the debate, had evidently become a distraction to many people on Twitter. There is a facebook page about it (nothing to do with me), which seems also to have been created immediately after the 2007 election. I’m not sure, but I think my mention might be a day or so earlier than the creation of the Facebook page. Hence I am waiting for Annabel Crabb to interview me about being the first blogger (I think) to be silly enough to note it.
