Brave new world indeed

Ministers admit failure over cutting ‘shameful’ teenage pregnancies - Times Online

Ministers accept that they cannot meet Tony Blair’s target, set in 1999, of halving pregnancies among under-18s by 2012. Figures today will show that Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe.

About 40,000 such girls, or 40 per 1,000, become pregnant each year — a modest fall from the 1998 tally of 46.6 per 1,000. Back then Mr Blair called Britain’s record shameful.

So what great new ideas does the government have to reduce teenage pregnancies?:

Among plans to be announced today will be more access to long-acting contraception, such as implants and injections, and phone texts to remind girls to use contraceptives.

I reckon if Huxley had put this in his novel Brave New World, people would have thought it an appropriate part of his satire.

Some people in Britain have a better idea:

But critics say far more needs to be done to deter young people from having sex, rather than providing them with ever more free condoms and access to the contraceptive pill. The average age at which young people first have sex is 16, compared with almost 18 in the Netherlands, which has the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy.

I am surprised that no one is looking at the entire culture, where TV popular with teenagers features sex regularly. According to this report a couple of years ago, Sex and the City can be linked to higher rates of teenage pregnancy. However, I reckon it is the Channel 4 shows like Shameless, and that teenage soap featuring a lot of sex (the name of which escapes me for the moment) have as much to do with it as any American sitcom marketed for adults.

The sad story of the pebble bed reactor

Pebble-bed nuclear reactor gets pulled : Nature News

South Africa has stopped funding for the development of its own pebble bed reactor. (Actually, I thought there was a recent announcement of some energy funding to SA from Obama, and that it might have been going to help with the pebble bed demonstration reactor. But maybe that was just my guess.)

Anyhow, Nature explains what went wrong with the project in South Africa:

Runaway costs and technical problems helped to doom the project, says Thomas. "In 1998, they were saying that they would have the demo plant online in 2003" at a cost of 2 billion rands, he says. "The final estimate was that the demo plant would be online in 2018 and it would cost 30 billion rands." Furthermore, he adds, the PBMR has never been held to account for why costs rose every year, why the completion date was continually pushed back or the nature of its design problems.

In a final twist, the PBMR announced last year that it was indefinitely shelving plans to build a demonstration plant. The programme's demise will not help South Africa's goal of doubling its 35,000-megawatt power-generating capacity by 2025.

One problem was that the design became too ambitious, says John Walmsley, past president of the South African branch of the Nuclear Institute, a professional society for nuclear engineers. The PBMR hoped to push the reactor's operating temperature as high as possible to enable not just electricity generation, but also 'process heat' applications such as turning coal into liquid fuels, he says. It also aimed to boost the power output to the very limits of the design to make the reactor more economical. "They tried to build a BMW when they maybe should have started with a Morris Minor," he says.

Even the passive safety feature of the design may have been overstated, it appears:

Although many scientists had hoped that the safety system of the pebble-bed design would win over opponents of nuclear power, a 2008 report from the Jülich Research Centre cast doubt on those claims, suggesting that core temperatures could rise even higher than the safe threshold.

Tsinghua University in Beijing now hosts the only operational prototype pebble-bed reactor, although similar reactors are being developed in the United States and the Netherlands. But the PBMR's problems are not unique, says Thomas. "Every nuclear nation in the world has had a programme to commercialize this type of reactor, and they all got nowhere."

Well, I'm not giving up yet, as long as some company somewhere is still looking at them.

Too good to be true?

Will Bloom box replace power grid? Details on Wednesday

A bit of a publicity splash is starting for a fuel cell that (allegedly) has already been used by some companies and works well.

It is said to run on natural gas, bio-gas and solar energy (?).

However, as I've noted before, Japan has been quietly deploying natural gas fuel cells for houses for a couple of years. I assume this American version is meant to be significantly better. This part sounds a bit optimistic:

Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes - each the size of a grapefruit - could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box. Although currently a commercial unit costs $700,000-$800,000 each, Sridhar hopes to manufacture home units that cost less than $3,000 in five to 10 years.

Elsewhere, the article indicates that the amount of gas used by one of the commercially trialled one is half that which would be used if the gas was used in a normal power station. Interesting, but we will see.

Laptop, textbook, pistol

Colorado students fight for gun rights - Americas, World - The Independent

What seemed like common sense to some is nothing less than an assault on the US Constitution to others, which is why a governors meeting at Colorado State University today to approve a ban on students bearing concealed weapons on its main campus in Fort Collins is likely to be rowdy.

Preventing bloodshed is the first thing on the board's mind. It is three years since the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech that took the lives of 32 students and staff and just under two weeks since Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama, allegedly shot six of her colleagues, killing three of them.

Yet there has been such a push-back against the plan that the board may defer a decision today to await further public comment.

According to the article, "the student's governing body voted overwhelmingly to resist the gun ban." Sounds like student unionism in the US is a very different creature from student unionism here.

This part is also surprising:

Since the Virginia shootings, state legislatures across the US have debated a variety of laws concerning guns in lecture halls, but few have taken significant action. The most recent big change came in Utah in 2004, which voted to lift a decades-old gun ban for the 44,000-strong University of Utah.

Even if you allow any student with a gun licence to bring it to campus, just how many would do it as a precautionary measure for the next student/lecturer massacre? How many times have we ever read of individual with their own concealed weapon taking decisive action against a workplace/school/university shooting?

Dubious at best

Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend

According to the article, dogs have a very high "carbon footprint", but don't think your other pets get off lightly:

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones.

I can imagine someone somewhere telling the kids "it's the plasma, or the hamsters; one of them has to go." The trauma that could cause...

Cultural issues (cont.)

I didn't catch all of Four Corners last night about the tradition of "boy play" of Afghanistan, but it certainly was a remarkable show, painting a picture of pretty routine paedophilia between older men and young teenage boys in the north of the country. (My post yesterday mentioned the Pashtans and their routine homosexuality in the south. Seems there is little escaping it.)

There seems to be virtually none of the secrecy that men with such interests in the West keep. Who knew that Ancient Greece was alive and well just down the road and around the corner? I had thought that talk of Arab/Muslim countries where interest in boys was high had probably been exaggerated; now that generous view seems wrong.

The overall impression was not so much shock; more that this was a really weird culture. I mean, it would appear that the standard wedding feast entertainment for men is to sit in a room and watch a 15 year old boy dance; although fully clothed, this appears to hold much erotic interest for the men. (The younger boys watching just look rather puzzled.) Is this what happens as a result of centuries of the subjugation of, and separation from, women?

The height of modernity is apparently to ask your wife if you can have a boy to live in the house in the spare room. Of course, traditionalists couldn' t care less about the wife's views.

I also can't help feeling how good this must make the young, conservative Marines from mid-West America feel when they are trying to save the country from the bad guys. A greater cultural divide would be harder to imagine.

More on dealing with waste

Technology Review: GE Hitachi's Answer to Nuclear Waste

Rather than update my previous post on the topic, I'll just park this here. They are still talking reactors with sodium: an idea even I feel nervous about.

Burning the forests by proxy

Yet another depressing story about forests and palm oil noted in this blog post from the AAAS meeting:

Holly Gibbs, a researcher at Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, also showed data that attempts to help clarify one aspect of the climate debate. Two papers published last year suggested that clearing tropical forests to plant biofuel crops might actually worsen climate change, but that planting biofuels crops on "degraded" land - such as abandoned agricultural land - offers a net benefit to climate. Gibbs analyzed satellite images taken from 1980 to 2000 to try to answer the question of whether tropical crops are largely being planted on deforested or degraded land. She found that the majority of new crops were planted on freshly deforested rather than degraded land.

Gibbs said she could not tell from her data whether the new crops were planted for food or fuel. But she added, "What we know is that biofuell use is definitely fueling deforestation." She said when biofuel prices increase, the amount of deforestation increases as well. She said she would personally estimate that between one-third to two-thirds of deforestation over the past couple of years has been due to the planting of biofuel crops.

I guess that in the argument about the role the market should play in plans to reduce CO2, this example would indicate that direct action is better in some cases.

Another depressing drugs story

The 10p cocaine by-product turning Argentina's slum children into the living dead

Here's the story of a drug that is causing mayhem in the poor neighbourhoods of Argentina:

A toxic and highly addictive mixture of raw cocaine base cut with chemicals, glue, crushed glass and rat poison, paco is the curse of Argentina's urban poor. And consumption of this bastardised, low-grade drug is eating away at the vitality and hope of the most deprived neighbourhood areas of the capital.

Essentially a chemical waste product, paco is what remains from the narco-kitchens producing cocaine bound for US and European markets. Since its appearance on the streets of Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, the drug has taken a deadly grip in slums such as Itatí. ­Levels of addiction rose by more than 200% in the first part of the decade and more than 400,000 doses are now being consumed daily.

Users are witheringly referred to as the muertos vivientes – the living dead – of Buenos Aires. Addictive after one or two hits, the drug systematically destroys the nervous system. Users quickly become skeletal and ravaged, resorting to crime, violence and prostitution to feed their habits. Enormous numbers die in short order.

If there's enough money to be made from selling this to the very poor, I imagine that the old "just legalise drugs" argument may not cut it with this one.

Had I read this before?

AAAS 2010 Annual Meeting News

Bisphenol A has been under investigation for all sort of possible endocrine interference, but I am not sure if I had heard this before (the link is to a discussion just held at the AAAS meeting in the States):

In an interview with Science Update, AAAS's 60-second radio show, neuroendocrinologist Heather Patisaul of North Carolina State University says bisphenol A exposure disrupts reproductive development in both rats and humans.

"What happens with our rats is they go through puberty too early," Patisaul said, "and this mirrors what we’re seeing in girls in the U.S., where the age of puberty is getting lower."

Her concern is also:

The experimental tools and approaches that have traditionally been used by toxicologists to screen compounds for estrogenic effects are not sensitive enough or appropriately geared to detect these subtle types of changes. Therefore, to adequately conduct human risk assessment, it is imperative that endocrine disruptor screening paradigms be updated to more comprehensively examine the impact of these types of compounds.

All a bit of a worry.

Only in Japan

Could 'Godzilla cherry blossom' save Japanese culture? | The Japan Times Online

Japan nuclear scientists have used cyclotron to irradiate the famous cherry blossom tree to see if they could turn up useful mutations.

It seems they have, making one which can bloom more than once a year.

Problem is, this could cause cultural mayhem, given the amount of partying that happens during cherry blossom season.

Interestingly, though, they are blooming earlier every year:

Last year the "blossom front" (constantly reported on television weather programs) reached Tokyo five days ahead of schedule at the start of April — the fourth year in a row that it has been early.

Cultural issues

A couple of weeks ago, Fox News carried a story which started:

An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns -- though they seem to be in complete denial about it.

The study, obtained by Fox News, found that Pashtun men commonly have sex with other men, admire other men physically, have sexual relationships with boys and shun women both socially and sexually -- yet they completely reject the label of "homosexual." The research was conducted as part of a longstanding effort to better understand Afghan culture and improve Western interaction with the local people.

The research unit, which was attached to a Marine battalion in southern Afghanistan, acknowledged that the behavior of some Afghan men has left Western forces "frequently confused."

Well that's all very interesting, I thought. What would they think of openly homosexual Western soldiers, then? Share some understanding, or hate them for being "gay"? In any event, it seemed odd that no other big news outlet talked about the study. And it is Fox News after all. Could their reporting be trusted?

Well, it would appear so. I see on Four Corners tonight they have a whole show on boy sex slaves of Afghanistan.

What an odd country.

Bye bye David

The last two Doctor Who episodes featuring David Tenant were distinctly underwhelming, I thought. I don't think it's good writing when, in about 130 minutes of television, you only have the plot explained at about the 80 minute mark.

In fact, it's pretty clear that Russell T Davies stayed on about a season too long. (I never took to Donna.)

It will be interesting to see where the series goes from here, though. I do hope we get an end to things like the Doctor playing cupid to gay guys, which was one weird little aspect of last night's show.

Imaginary eye witnesses to history

Doubts Raised on Book’s Tale of Atom Bomb - NYTimes.com

It appears certain that the late Joseph Fuoco, written up in a new book on Hiroshima as a witness to the dropping of the atomic bomb, was not on the bombing run at all. (He was on the recon trips before it, but there is very strong evidence that he was not on the actual bombing run.)

Apparently, the claim to have been on one of the planes involved is quite common:

Mr. Gackenbach, the flight’s navigator, said the misrepresentations of Mr. Fuoco were unusual only in that they showed up in a book. He said many former servicemen had falsely claimed to have flown over Hiroshima on the famous bombing run.

If all of them had actually been there, Mr. Gackenbach added, the aircraft “could never have taken off.”

How odd.

Burying your problems

Climate Feedback: Gut reactions to carbon storage

Annoying, this interesting post at the Nature Climate Feedback blog* has a couple of links to paywall protected articles in Nature about CO2 sequestration. (If I had any influence at all in the world of science, I would start a campaign to have all the major science journals make all climate change papers and article available for free as a public service on a vital issue.)

Anyhow, the post notes that residents in both Europe and the USA are protesting carbon sequestration near their homes; while other people want it to be buried on their land. (Why I don't know; can they make money from it?)

The post contains this observation:

At current rates of progress, asking about your gut reaction to practical carbon storage is a purely hypothetical question. But the schedule that the International Energy Agency have set the industry is staggering. By 2050, the volume of liquid carbon dioxide that must be injected underground for permanent storage each year would be three times the annual amount of petroleum we currently use (85 million barrels).

I remain very skeptical of the benefits of even attempting this.

*by the way, has anyone ever found a harder website to understand than the Nature.com site? I found this Feedback blog some weeks ago, didn't bookmark it, then took ages to re-locate it.

Problems with new nuclear

Scientific American talks about the problems with fast neutron reactors.

I haven't paid much attention to the issues with this type of reactor, which are supposed to help with reducing the disposal problem. But combining sodium and nuclear reactors not only sounds dangerous; it's been proved dangerous:

The most prevalent type of fast-neutron reactor, so-called because the neutrons used to initiate the fission chain reaction are traveling faster than neutrons moderated by water in conventional nuclear reactors, operate at temperatures as high as 550 degrees Celsius and use liquid sodium instead of water as a coolant. Sodium burns explosively when exposed to either air or water, necessitating elaborate safety controls. Nevertheless, as far back as 1951 at Idaho National Laboratory, such a sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor produced electricity.

But attempts to make that technology commercial have largely failed, mostly because of difficulties with controlling sodium fires and the steam generators that transfer heat from the sodium to water. Japan's Monju sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor caught fire in 1995—and has just received permission to resume operation this month after years of technical difficulties in repairing it, along with legal challenges to its restart. The French Superphenix sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor operated successfully for more than a decade—but only produced electricity 7 percent of the time, "one of the lowest load factors in nuclear history," said nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider, an IPFM member during the call. An accident at the plant cost one engineer his life and injured four other people when a leftover tank with roughly 100 kilograms of sodium residue exploded, according to Schneider.

It's not like they haven't tried to improve them:

As far back as 1956, Adm. Hyman Rickover, who oversaw both the Navy's nuclear-propulsion efforts as well as the dawn of the civilian nuclear power industry, cited such sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors as "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair." That judgment remains despite six decades and $100 billion of global effort, according to physicist Michael Dittmar of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who wrote, "ideas about near-future commercial fission breeder reactors are nothing but wishful thinking" in a November 2009 analysis.

"For that $100 billion we did learn some things," remarked physicist Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, during the IPFM call. "We learned that fast reactors were going to cost substantially more than light-water reactors…[and]…that, relative to thermal reactors, they're not very reliable."

The article goes on to note that Bill Gates has been promoting a new type of reactor, the travelling wave reactor, which would have cores that contain fuel for 30 years. Trouble is, the materials needed for that aren't developed yet.

Thorium breeder reactors get a bit of a pessimistic hit too:

Wrapping highly fissile plutonium in a thorium blanket could produce enough nuclear fuel indefinitely, according to the vision laid out by the architect of India's nuclear program, physicist Homi J. Bhabha, in 1954. The Indian government is currently building such a prototype fast breeder reactor, despite limited success with a precursor, said Princeton physicist M. V. Ramana during the IPFM call. "The cost of electricity is 80 percent higher than from heavy-water reactors," he added. Uranium prices would need to increase 15-fold from current levels of roughly $80 per kilogram to make it economically attractive.

Nothing with nuclear is terribly easy, it seems.

It's also interesting to note that a French nuclear company has bought a major US solar thermal company. Maybe it pays to diversify.

How not to do tourism

Insensitivity makes waves with Japanese tourists

Most of the observations in this article about why Japanese tourism to Australia has dropped off seems true. Some of the points make are a bit amusing:

BEFORE Noriko Mochizuki travelled to Australia, she had heard about koalas, kangaroos, beaches, and strange men in cars who killed backpackers.

By the time she returns home to Tokyo, the 25-year-old will tell her friends that - the infamous Ivan Milat backpacker murders aside - Australians are relaxed, kind and sometimes very rude.

''Sometimes you go to buy something at a coffee shop and they don't want to understand or they just ignore you,'' she said during a surfing lesson with Surfs Up near Cronulla.

''The customer service is much, much better in Japan.''

Unfortunately, the customer service in Japan is probably the best in the world, so most Japanese travelling need to take that into account. (But I think most do to an extent.)

As for Australia's attempts to attract tourists again:

Professor Orito said Tourism Australia had done nothing to help itself with the disastrous 'So where the bloody hell are you?' advertising blitz, "whose meaning was lost on the Japanese".

"The campaign last year based on the movie Australia was an even bigger flop."

The problem has been compounded by a series of misguided tourism campaigns, which culminated last year in the ''Aussie Oji" competition, designed to lure Japanese women to Australia to look for their oji, or prince - a message a Japanese tourism expert described as "insensitive''.

One Japanese tourism operator in the Gold Coast said there was no point offering constructive criticism to the Australian tourism industry "because they ignore our complaints about the treatment of tourists. Nothing is going to change."

I think everyone would have to agree that the current New Zealand tourism campaign in Australia is really very good. Why can that little place manage it while we've been failing for more than a decade now?

You don't see that every day...

Have a look at this fascinating sky effect caused during a recent NASA rocket launch. (It happens around the 1.52 mark.):



It is apparently caused by acoustic shock wave travelling through a "sun dog". Looks cool whatever it was.

Drive by wire

Should we be worried that our cars are controlled by software? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise the extent to which cars had become "drive by wire" until the recent Toyota problems. This article explains all.

Can kitchen gadgets get any sillier?

Autonomous Saucier – auto-stir bot makes for perfect sauces

And here I thought that a cheese heater was about as over-specialised as a kitchen device could possibly be.