Admission of a creepy practice

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China admits death row organ use

According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.

The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.

The truth behind Andrew's holiday

What's this? Andrew Bolt unexpectedly up and left for a month long holiday in Europe to (ostensibly) celebrate his 50th birthday.

Yet at the very same time:

Britain's climate campers set up their annual protest camp yesterday on Blackheath, the historic London open space that was key in the peasants' revolt.

The 1,000-plus green activists are camped this morning on the fields where Wat Tyler's peasant army assembled for its assault on The City of London in June 1381. And they are planning their own assault – on what they see as the companies, institutions and government departments helping to cause global warming (or not doing enough to stop it).

Co-incidence? In my semi-comedic fantasies, Andrew mixes it up with a bunch of semi-feral climate change advocates, either as a convert or a spy.

Anyhow, his column on turning 50 contained a pleasing humility, I thought. The only odd thing is how it doesn't seem to extend to the prospect that his opinion on climate change might be wrong.

100% female domination

Ant has given up sex completely, researchers say

Add this to the list of things I didn't know:

The complete asexuality of a widespread fungus-gardening ant, the only ant species in the world known to have dispensed with males entirely, has been confirmed by a team of Texas and Brazilian researchers.

Most social insects—the wasps, ants and bees—are relatively used to daily life without males. Their colonies are well run by swarms of sterile sisters lorded over by an egg-laying queen. But, eventually, all social insect species have the ability to produce a crop of males who go forth in the world to fertilize new queens and propagate.

Queens of the ant Mycocepurus smithii reproduce without fertilization and males appear to be completely absent, report Christian Rabeling, Ulrich Mueller and their Brazilian colleagues in PLoS ONE this week.

"Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant," says Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behavior graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. "Asexual species don't mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don't generally persist for very long over evolutionary time."

If I was in a wittier mood, I guess I could come up with some comment about what a completely female ant society must be like to live in. But I'm not.

On Venezuela

Venezuela: The true cost of cheap gas | csmonitor.com

The Christian Science Monitor has a short item on the cost of gasoline in Venezuela:

Gasoline doesn’t flow from fountains in Venezuela, but it might as well. At 4 cents a gallon, the country has the cheapest gas in the world: Bottled water is 67 times more expensive.

But cheap gas comes at a cost, mainly for the government. The Chávez government is believed to be subsidizing consumption to the tune of $8 billion a year.

Chavez may be left wing, but he obviously hasn't yet caught on with the idea that carbon should have a price..

A few weeks ago, there was a whole half hour about the country on Foreign Correspondent. I didn't see all, but it was very interesting. It certainly showed it as a dirt poor country.

People need gravity to reproduce?

Egg tests find space may be tough place for humans to conceive babies | The Japan Times Online

It is a fascinating topic if you have an interest in the long term prospects for humanity to expand off-planet: how will low gravity affect reproduction.

If this Japanese mouse study is anything to go by, sex in zero-gee might be athletic fun, but it may be bad for fertile eggs:

...the group reported that the growth of fertile eggs slows in a near-zero-gravity environment, lowering the birthrate by half when the eggs are put back into the wombs of mice.

The eggs of humans, as a mammal, could face the same problem, the scientists said...

"If we find out how much gravity is needed for a (human) fertile egg to grow, we may be able to know if a baby can be born at a lunar base," said Teruhiko Wakayama of Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, who headed the joint group with Hiroshima University.

What I'm most curious to know is whether mice (or humans) conceived and born on the Moon will look different and be capable of adapting to full Earth gravity. The suspicion could be that a low gravity human would grow tall and thin, but nature has a way of confounding such predictions, so maybe they would be small instead. As someone somewhere has suggested before, maybe grey aliens are the time travelling descendants of off-planet humanity...

Getting fat from fasting

Gulfnews: Warning against unhealthy eating habits after fasting

I think it has been reported often that the weird eating habits that the month of Ramadan fasting induces often leads to weight increase, which seems a little bit inconsistent with the point of the exercise. As the Gulf News article above notes:

People tend to get more obese and diabetic due to irregular eating and overeating after ending the fast, a senior doctor from the Ministry of Health warned, advising people to eat healthy during the Holy Month.

Fasting during Ramadan can improve a person's health, but if the correct diet is not followed, can possibly worsen it, it warns. The deciding factor is not the fast itself, but rather what is consumed in the non-fasting hours, the Ministry said.

Quite.

But what about this new-age-ish claimed health benefit for Ramadan fasting:

Dr Prem Jagyasi, managing director of ExHealth, the organisers of the initiative, said Ramadan is a great opportunity to focus on bringing back a balanced and healthy lifestyle in people's lives who do not normally watch their eating habits. "Ramadan requires to give the stomach a break, and by doing so one will be able to break down and expel the collected toxins from body," he said, but notes that it is very important to understand the proper practice of eating healthy.

Is there any scientific justification at all for believing fasting eliminates "toxins" from the body? I would be surprised if there was.

The unlikely economics of carbon capture

Carbon capture project in West Virginia illustrates obstacles to 'clean' coal -- latimes.com

AEP executives estimate that the cost of carbon capture for a modest-size coal plant of about 235 megawatts would start at $700 million. That works out to about $100 for a ton of carbon dioxide, far above the projections made by the Environmental Protection Agency about prices under a cap-and-trade scheme similar to one passed by the House in June. MIT put the cost of carbon capture and storage at $50 to $70 a ton. (The Waxman-Markey bill would give the first six gigawatts of plants -- equal to about seven average-size plants -- a $90-per-ton subsidy in the form of free allowances.)

Capture-and-storage devices also require large amounts of energy. The Alstom approach uses about 15% of the power plant's energy output; other processes use as much as 30%. That means the utility must buy other energy sources to cover the shortfall. (The energy lost is part of the $700-million cost, AEP executives said.)

Obama is apparently being advised that "There is no credible pathway towards prudent greenhouse gas stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction from existing coal power plants."

I can't see it working.

Do not provoke the cows

Hoofed and dangerous: Britain's killer cows

Four people have been trampled to death by cows in just over eight weeks this summer, prompting British farmers and the Ramblers Association to warn yesterday of the potential dangers.

The spate of incidents is regarded as highly unusual; in the past eight years there have only been 18 deaths in total caused by cattle of all kinds – including incidents involving bulls, which have always been known to present risks.

When chickens ruled the earth

Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.

Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

I didn't think much was known about how to "flip" genetic levers, let alone specific ones.

I can't imagine the likes of PETA being too impressed with this, if it will involve lots of deformed chicks being born.

A quick quote

The 10 most historically inaccurate movies - Times Online

Mel Gibson movies keep featuring in this list, and I like this line from the article about The Patriot:

Gibson (rugby) tackles history again with his turn as an honest farmer drawn into the American Revolutionary War, which historian David Hackett Fischer claimed in the New York Times “is to history as Godzilla was to biology.”

Goldilocks revised

Anne Fine deplores 'gritty realism' of modern children's books - Times Online

So, one English writer of children's fiction says too much of it is too dark and depressing.

Another [Children's Laureate (!) Anthony Browne] disagrees, and tells us about his worryingly re-imagined Goldilocks:

“There are both types of endings, happier and unhappier. I prefer open endings. I don’t think we are living in an age of depressing, dark endings. If you look at Jacqueline Wilson, she does deal in gritty realism, but her books don’t lack aspiration.”

He recently changed the ending to his forthcoming book — Me and You, a retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in which Goldilocks comes from an impoverished background — so that the ending was less miserable. “My original version had Goldilocks being chased out of the bears’ house and her ending up on bleak, dark streets. I decided to give it a more ambiguous ending, so now she is running toward something that may or may not be her mother.”

So, I suppose her impoverished background explains why she had to go into the bears' house in search of food? Here I thought kids liked to think she was just a naughty girl.

And what is this about her running towards "something" that might be her mother? Does he intend the book to be some sort of psychological test where you can judge your child's outlook by what they think the ending means?

Sack him, whoever has the job of appointing Children's Laureate.

Khatastrophe

Is Yemen Chewing Itself to Death? - TIME

Well, I knew little of the habit of khat chewing until reading the above fascinating article. Apparently, Yemen is hooked on this legal-for-Muslims alcohol substitute:

Khat is popular in many countries of the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, but in Yemen it's a full-blown national addiction. As much as 90% of men and 1 in 4 women in Yemen are estimated to chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as the khat slowly breaks down into the saliva and enters the bloodstream. The newcomer to Yemen's ancient capital can't miss the spectacle of almost an entire adult population presenting cheeks bulging with cud, leaving behind green confetti of discarded leaves and branches. ...

At around $5 for a bag (the amount typically consumed by a single regular user in a day) it's an expensive habit in a country where about 45% of the population lives below the poverty line. (Most families spend more money on khat than on food, according to government figures.)...

"You sit up discussing all your problems and think you've solved everything, but in fact you haven't done anything in the last four hours, because you've just been chewing khat and all your problems actually got worse," says Adel al-Shujaa, a professor of political science at Sana'a University and the head of the Yemen Without Khat Association. Plus, he says, "all the decisions you've made are bad because you've made them while on khat."

And there are other problems, like the water it diverts from useful things, such as growing food. What a problem.

RealClimate looks into Plimer's questions

RealClimate: Plimer’s homework assignment

A detailed examination here of Ian Plimer's questions to George Monbiot, for those who are following the story.

Andrew Bolt seems to be avoiding it, for one.

Kennedy strikes a pose

St Mary's in Exile of the Trades and Labor Council has had a new website up for a few weeks now, but they seem very slow to post new videos of the weekly liturgies. It wouldn't be because, as far as I can guess from the last one I viewed, congregation numbers are dwindling somewhat?

Anyhow, for more amusement, have a look here to see Peter Kennedy in full Christ-like pose in a photographic work entered in the Blake prize for religious art. George Pell has noted "There is almost an element of kitsch about it", and he's not far wrong.

For more self-aggrandisement from the supposed leadership of the group, have a look at Terry Fitzpatrick's article in July Green Left Weekly:

On April 19, a huge mob of St Mary’s people made a pilgrimage out of a church and into the Trades and Labor Council (TLC) building, home of the Queensland Council of Unions.

They walked out of the church to the TLC, 200 metres down the road in silent vigil with candles and lanterns, banners and balloons - not unlike the Jews of the Old Testament escaping from the slavery of the Egyptians to the liberation of the Promised Land (minus the balloons).

As for the Church they didn't want to be told they were no longer a part of:

We too feel liberated from the shackles of a failing institution caught up in dogmas and creeds that belong to another age. We felt it was time to take a stand from the constant bullying we have experienced for many years.

He then goes on to list the things for which they have been "bullied": blessing gays and lesbian relationships, not using "sexist" language, signing a treaty with local aborigines.

With so much mistreatment, why did they ever want to stay?

Well deserved

Regular marijuana usage robs men of sexual highs - New Scientist

Stoners may be trading sexual highs for the chemical kind. Males who smoke marijuana daily are four times more likely to have trouble reaching orgasm than men who don't inhale, finds a new study of 8,656 Aussies...

Even though many male smokers experienced sexual problems, they reported more partners than non-smokers. Marijuana users were twice as likely to have had two or more sex partners in the previous year than men who didn't smoke pot.

Pitts' team found an even stronger trend for increased sexual activity among female smokers, who were also seven times more likely to have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection in the last year than non-smokers. However, female smokers had no more problems in the bedroom than abstainers, Pitts' team found.

It's interesting to read the comments that follow the story, many of which are somewhat amusing:

Perhaps stoners are just twats and that is why these problems occur. Yeah - from those I've known that hypothesis fits the data pretty well. I never met a stoner who wasn't a total wanker. Someone needs to do the necessary research to confirm it.

And:

Here are my (unscientific) theories

1) more partners

the stoners just can't be bothered to put up with each other's crap all the time and thus split more readily

2)trouble reaching orgasm

the stoner just can't stop thinking about that new cushion recently purchased, how do they make them that fluffy!?