Working with bear

In one of the silliest posts ever seen at Watts Up With That, Anthony Watts recently criticised a Nissan electric car ad for making a polar bear look cute and (literally) cuddly.  Watts seemed to fear it would cause some people who happened to find themselves near a real live polar bear to put themselves in danger by trying to hug one, and put up videos of polar bears attacking people to show just how misleading the ad is. 

As Joe Romm wrote, we can now presumably wait for Watts’ denunciation of the creators of Yogi, Smokey and other fictional bears (those in the outrageously inaccurate The Golden Compass come to mind) for creating a public safety hazard.

In any event, this is just a preamble to show the video of how they made the Nissan ad.  They actually used a live polar bear more than I thought:

Screening simplified

It’s hard to keep up with the controversy over wide scale PSA screening for prostate cancer, and whether it causes more harm than good.

My general impression is that there is pretty good evidence for the nay-sayers (see this brief report last year), yet you still get things opening like a new Prostate Screening clinic in Brisbane just a couple of months ago, so clearly some think promoting widespread screening is worthwhile (although perhaps mainly for the clinic’s pockets?)

Anyhow, this report from the Guardian indicates that maybe you get just as well by getting just one PSA test done at the right age:

Professor Philipp Dahm and colleagues at the University of Florida reviewed six previous screening trials involving 387,286 participants.

They found routine screening aided the diagnosis of prostate cancer at an earlier stage, but did not have a significant impact on death rates and raised the risk of over-treatment.

A second study headed by Professor Hans Lilja, showed a single "prostate-specific antigen" (PSA) level test at age 60 strongly predicted a man's risk of diagnosis and death from prostate cancer.

The team found 90% of prostate cancer deaths occurred in men with the highest PSA levels at age 60, while men with average or low PSA levels had negligible rates of prostate cancer or death by age 85.

The findings suggested at least half of men aged 60 and above might be exempted from further prostate cancer screening.

Sounds reasonable.

A warning for the eyes

The ABC’s Dr Norman Swan has written a first hand account of his recurring bouts of retinal detachment, and it’s well worth reading just to be aware of what to look out for.   (Swan himself didn’t pay enough attention to the warning signs the first time he had it.)

He mentions that the short sited are more likely to get it.   I’ll be keeping it in mind.

Even more about ancient beer

Further to my recent post about ancient beer in Israel and elsewhere, here's a pretty fascinating story about how it seems beer drinking Nubians were getting hefty doses of antibiotic from their beer:

Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline — an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.

At first, he assumed that some kind of contamination had occurred.

"Imagine if you're unwrapping a mummy, and all of a sudden, you see a pair of sunglasses on it," says Armelagos. "Initially, we thought it was a product of modern technology."

His team's first report about the finding, bolstered by even more evidence and published in Science in 1980, was met with lots of scepticism. For the new study, he got help dissolving bone samples and extracting tetracycline from them, clearly showing that the antibiotic was deposited into and embedded within the bone, not a result of contamination from the environment.

The analyses also showed that ancient Nubians were consuming large doses of tetracycline — more than is commonly prescribed today as a daily dose for controlling infections from bad acne. The team, including chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, reported their results in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The theory is that it was from grain used for beer making that was contaminated with tetracycline producing mold.

In my previous post it was mentioned how some anthropologists believed beer drinking was very important in the development of human society. Well, if beer gave other tribes healthy doses of antibiotics, it probably can't hurt that theory.

Pork wars

The New York Times reports on serious efforts underway to reduce the amount of antibiotics fed to pigs as a precautionary measure (and to make them fatten up faster). As the article notes, medical scientists have been warning about the dangers of this practice for decades (for making drug resistant microbes that are hard to treat in humans), but only now is the FDA making a strong move against it. Yet the pork industry and some vets are still resisting.

I wonder what the position is in Australia.

Up close and personal with the bonobo

Last night’s Foreign Correspondent was initially about the bonobos in the Congo, and was interesting for several different reasons:

* I didn’t realise before, but the famously pan-sexual primates are pretty ugly. The female genitalia and backside look as if they are permanently engorged and virtually dragging on the ground, and even the males seem to have a more prominent penis than do regular chimps or gorillas. But apart from that, even their face and head shape are a bit different from regular chimps, and not for the better.

* The show continued the “bonobos are the peaceful hippies of the jungle” meme, seemingly indicating they are vegetarians and do nothing nasty. But in fact, as I’ve noted before, they do eat other primates and mammals from time to time. Just because they seem to spend half their day having sex and are run by the women doesn’t mean they are the Bob Browns of the animal kingdom.

* The second half of the show concentrated on the people who live near the bonobos, and the efforts to improve their living conditions. Conditions in the Congo do look extremely basic. A “new”medical clinic featured in the show with dirt floors and an operating table (of sorts) that looked like it had been salvaged from a car wrecker’s yard. The amount of monkey meat on sale in the towns was pretty disturbing too.

If you can put up with the monkey sex that is briefly featured, it’s worth watching.

Tiny electric plane

Have a look at this tiny French airplane and its cute l'il battery powered engines that still manage to make it fly and sound like a mosquito:



Not that it has much range yet, but I am still surprised it flies at all. More details at Popular Science.

Babies via courier

I know this sort of thing has been around for a while, but I am still surprised at the number of women happy to avoid the whole outrageously complicated and icky business (that was sarcasm) of actually meeting someone they like and trust enough to be the father of their child. Instead, it's the livestock option: anonymously inseminated via courier. The details are in this story of the prosecution of an illegal business in Britain:

Two businessmen earned £250,000 through an illegal fertility company providing women with access to sperm donors, a court heard today.

In the first case of its kind, a jury was told that Nigel Woodforth, 43, ran the firm from the basement of his home in Reading, Berkshire, with 49-year-old Ricky Gage.

Nearly 800 women signed up to use the online service provided by the company, operating under various names including Sperm Direct Limited and First4Fertility.

Their website introduced would-be donors to women trying to conceive, Southwark crown court in London was told.

Philip Bennetts, prosecuting, said: "In short, the website introduced men who wished to supply sperm to women who wished to use the sperm to impregnate themselves in order to have a child."

The women, having paid an £80 joining fee and £300 to use the service, would then choose from a list of men before the sperm was delivered to their homes through a courier company at £150 per delivery.

To put it mildly, this does not speak well of modern attitudes to child bearing and raising.

Surprising medical fact of the day

Big baby boys are more likely to be earlier maturing, bed hopping young adults, so it seems. But the main surprise is this:

"Most people are unaware that male infants in the first six months of life produce testosterone at approximately the same level as an adult male," said Christopher W. Kuzawa, associate professor of anthropology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and author of the study. "We looked at weight gain during this particular window of early life development, because testosterone is very high at this age and helps shape the differences between males and females."

Clearly, internet porn filters are needed from a very early age.

Oceans not understood

Nature has a brief report on a new study which shows that the global "conveyor belt" circulation of ocean water is more complicated than previously thought. This would seem to be relevant to the issue of where ocean heat is going.

Hawking, God, etc

I haven't really bothered talking about the Hawking comments on "physics shows there is no need for God" because anyone who knew about Mr H knew that he never believed in God, and the statement was a mere publicity blurb for a book.

But there are a few commentary pieces on Hawking and the book which are worth following:

* Paul Davies, who has also made more than a few dollars by talking about God and physics, is always worth reading.

* Roger Penrose, despite getting on in the years, talks about the book and some past big statements made by SH.

* Peter Woit, whose site Not Even Wrong is always pointing out that media releases claiming that some scientist has just found a possible way to test string theory are invariably wrong, looks at the book and strongly criticizes the scientific position Hawking seems to have put himself in. He also makes it sound like it definitely not going to be a best seller.

Smarter than the average economist?

Nicholas Gruen seems a nice enough guy, for a (no doubt well paid) chess playing economist who writes easily mocked boring articles on how exciting Web2 and Gov2 are. (Just go through Club Troppo to see what I mean.)

But, it amuses me to see that I seemingly can outsmart him when it comes to Tiger Airlines. As I recently noted, my family and I have triumphed in 3 return trips with the rule-ridden discount airline over the last few years, all the time watching only other people (like Nicholas) lose their temper and arguing at the check in desk.

Politics, politics

Gosh there is an unusual amount of noteworthy political commentary in the papers today:

1.   News Limited is no doubt disappointed that it didn’t persuade the public with its “Coalition for government” post election campaign.   Shanahan has to sheepishly concede that Newspoll indicates a large majority of voters approve of the independents going for Labor.

2.  Niki Savva usually provides fair commentary (not that I agree with all of it), and today she makes some recommendations to Tony Abbott about cutting dead wood, and reinstating Turnbull to finance.   Fair enough, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s a hell of a lot of dead wood to be pruned.

3.  Michael Stutchbury explains why a carbon tax is a better idea than all the mixed direct action steps that Labor has imposed (and more of which we would have had under Liberals.)   This makes sense, and again shows how bad an idea it was for Abbott to promise to never introduce any carbon pricing.    If he doesn’t change that line, it’s hard to see why he should ever be  seen to have economic credibility.

4.  Meanwhile, over at Fairfax, Maxine McKew writes an article that promotes a higher density, more populous, Sydney on environmental and economic grounds, and in doing so shows some smarts which she failed to do while she was an MP.  Too late now, Maxine.

The science of mice handling advances

Nature reports on a study about the best way to pick up a lab mouse:

Picking up mice at the base of the tail is standard practice in laboratory research, but whether this is the best method is unclear. Researchers now suggest that cupping a mouse in the hand or carrying it in a small tunnel reduces stress and encourages cooperation.

I like that last bit about mouse co-operation. Has a pharmaceutical company ever had a meeting in which its scientists said to them "sorry the new drug tests failed, but you know we're not entirely sure the mice were co-operating"?

It is, however, a little surprising to me that these science types haven't tried to standardize mice handling before:

"The paper has made me rethink some of the things we do," says Scott Russo, a behavioural neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. His lab members routinely clutch mice by the tail, even though they investigate the effect of stress on anxiety, depression and addiction. "Tail handling could absolutely influence the effects we observe," he says. Anxiety behaviour in mice is notoriously inconsistent — it fluctuates across strains, and even across days, he says. "If this is a way to reduce inter-experimental variability, this would be a very important finding."

Just not cricket

Odd story for the day:  cricket farming is in crisis. 

Just thought you should know.

Flying humour

Given that my main birthday gift featured all the equipment I need to become a Microsoft Flight Simulator tragic (thank you, kind wife) I found this video quite amusing:

Information of uncertain significance

I've always liked this They Might be Giants song, but there are only audience videoed live versions on Youtube with dubious sound quality, and you can't hear the lyrics clearly. So instead, let's listen to a recently posted ukulele version, with a vocal performance which I find oddly endearing. (It's not great, but may still be better than what I could achieve):



Thanks faceless singer.

By the way, the song is particularly apt for today, which may, or may not, record my entry into my 6th decade (yes, yikes!), depending on whether you are counting in Earth or Mars years. On the upside, I feel much wiser and benevolent already. On the downside, I did have to pluck hair from my ears on Thursday, extract nose hair yesterday, and shave the odd patches of hair on my shoulders this morning.

Relax: death by rogue planet kinda unlikely

As it happens, my wife and son were watching 2012 last weekend. (I was moving in and out of the room, but from what I saw, it did look every bit as silly and bad as I expected.)

Of course, I have reassured the son that it's just a silly story and the science in it is just ridiculous. He doesn't seem concerned. Now I can show him a paper by (I think) an astronomer, inspired by some of the apocalyptic theories about what might happen in 2012, with the great title:

Is it plausible to expect a close encounter of the Earth with a yet undiscovered astronomical object in the next few years?

Short answer: no.

Actually, it is interesting to note from the paper that there has been a fair bit of work on what might be lurking around in interstellar space. I was aware of "brown dwarfs" possibly being loose out there, but didn't know (or had forgotten about) the possibility of rogue planets that could unexpected wander into a solar system:

Concerning the existence of free-floating planets of smaller mass, Stevenson (1999)
noted that, under certain circumstances, Earth-sized solid bodies wandering in the
interstellar space after being ejected during the formation of their parent stellar systems may sustain forms of life. Again as a consequence of three-body interactions with Jovian gas giants, Debes & Sigurdsson (2007) have recently shown that during planet formation a non-negligible fraction of terrestrial-sized planets with lunar-sized companions will likely be ejected into interstellar space with the companion bound to the planet. Debes & Sigurdsson (2007) yield a total number of free-floating binary planets in the Galaxy as large as 7×108. At present, no planets like them have yet been detected. Proposed microlensing surveys of next generation will be sensitive to free-floating terrestrial planets (Bennett & Rhie 2002); under certain circumstances, they may be able to yield 10100 detections of Earth-mass free-floating planets (Bennett & Rhie 2002). One to a few detections could be made with all-sky IR surveys (Debes & Sigurdsson 2007).

Anyhow, the paper goes on to list the reasons why we would already know about it if something was about to zoom into the solar system by 2012.

What a relief. :)

A kind of vindication, and vague reason for optimism

Here's a slightly altered version of something I just posted at Catallaxy:

Over at Skeptical Science, Roger Pielke Snr (quite a favourite of climate change skeptics for many a year) been actively commenting in a recent post which criticised him for overstating the case on what’s been happening with ocean warming since 2004. (He says there is none; everyone else says there is no reason to be so confident based on the short timeframe and doubts about the adequacy of the measuring system).

Most interestingly, at two different points he says:

“Thus to conclude that I have ever not been concerned about the addition of CO2 and how it affects the climate system misrepresents my perspective. I am particularly concerned with respect to the biogeochemical effects of added CO2.” and

“In terms of CO2, we do not even need to discuss global warming to be concerned by uncontrolled increases in its atmospheric concentration. We see directly from observations of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 that humans are increasing its levels. If global warming were not occurring at all, we should still be concerned.”

Which is what I have been saying since, oh, 14 Nov 2006. (Although I have been persuaded since then that AGW itself is also a serious concern.)

I note that Pielke does not make it clear what biogeochemical effect he is talking about: the one I have concentrated on is ocean acidification, but I can't see that he has ever made reference to it at his blog. Is there another that he is referencing? He does talk about biogeochemical effects in relation to anthrogenic land cover change, but it doesn't sound as if this paper talks about CO2 causing biogeochemical effects.

So what his precise concerns are remains a bit of a mystery to me, but certainly I still believe that, like his son, he is being disingenuous by letting his warming skepticism (or in his son's case, glee over IPCC mistakes) be promoted all over the blogosphere and thus encourage policy inaction on CO2, when in fact he claims it's a "reason to be concerned."

Meanwhile, I see that a new study that did the exercise of looking at what would happen to CO2 levels and temperature if you never built another CO2 emitting device. The answer is a bit surprising:

The researchers found that atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ would stabilize at less than 430 parts per million (ppm) and the increase of global mean temperatures since preindustrial time would be less than 1.3°C (2.3°F).

"The answer surprised us," says Davis. "Going into this study, we thought that existing sources of CO2 emissions would be enough to push us beyond 450 ppm and 2°C warming." In light of common benchmarks of 450 ppm and 2°C, these results indicate that the devices whose emissions will cause the worst impacts have yet to be built.

Of course, it's impossible to turn off the new CO2 making device switch, but it does emphasise that aggressive action on CO2 production has a vague chance of working to limit temperature increases.

Not keeping it nice

What's the latest trend in England? Old people getting STD's:

The figures showed that 45 to 64-year-olds saw the biggest rise in syphilis, herpes, chlamydia and genital warts between 2000 and 2009. They also saw the second-biggest rise in gonorrhea cases, beaten only by the over 65s.

Cases of syphilis in 45 to 64 year-olds rose ten-fold from just 52 in 2000 to 503 in 2009. In the over 65s, cases more than quadrupled from just 7 in 2000 to 32 in 2009.

Gonorrhea fell in all age groups between 2000 and 2009 except for the over 45s.

Whatever happened to "no sex please, we're British"?

I was also surprised to read recently that a very popular show there is a medical reality one called "Embarrassing Bodies" in which people, for some reason I find hard to fathom, are happy to come on and show their oozy, swollen, warty crevices and appendages on national TV. One of the doctor stars says:

"I didn't think piles and verrucas would be exciting to a Channel 4 audience," he says, "but I soon realised that people hadn't seen the novelty of haemorrhoids before, because we're usually pretty crap about talking about this stuff. Yes it's a bit gross, but we never treat it in a sensationalistic way...."

As the Guardian article (which I am quoting from) notes, while the show may encourage some people with conditions that really deserve treatment to go to their doctor, there are concerns that the show's attitude to plastic surgery is not helpful:

One of the surgeries Jessen recommended on an episode in 2008 was a patient's labioplasty. In her book Living Dolls, Natasha Walter details how uneasy this made her feel. "[In this episode] a young woman consulted a doctor about the fact that her labia minora extended slightly beyond her labia majora and that this caused her embarrassment. Instead of reassuring her that this was entirely normal, the doctor recommended, and carried out, surgery on her labia. The comments left on the programme's website showed how this decision to carry out plastic surgery to fit a young woman's body to a so-called norm made other young women feel intensely anxious. 'I'm 15 and I thought I was fine, but since I've watched the programme I've become worried, as mine seem larger than the girl who had hers made surgically smaller! It doesn't make any difference to my life, but I worry now that when I'm older and start having sex I might have problems!' one girl said.

There are plenty of gross and normally private things to be seen on the show's website. (Including vulva, penis and breast galleries over which 15 year old teenagers can either feel encouraged, or, just as likely, fret.)

Look, I obviously can't say that the show is all bad for the reason already mentioned; and I don't think I count as prudish about non-sexual nudity. (See my previous comments about Japan.) But it still seems that the show is a symptom of a distinct change in the British psyche over the last 40 years or so from instinctive reserve to exhibitionism. How else can you read comments like this (from the Guardian again):

Natasha, who wants to talk about irritable bowel syndrome. Her boyfriend, Peter, waits patiently by the fence. "We love the show," he tells me. "My mother died of skin cancer this year and the programme showed me the warning signs to look out for. Plus all the blokes with their tackle out – they ask questions I wouldn't dare!"...

Kelly Coulter, who's brought her 18-month-old son to the truckstop to talk about a problem with his gums, says she'd "absolutely get my breasts out on the show if I was guaranteed a boob job". ....

Rosie and Kelly are 13 years old, and so excited to be in the presence of Dr Christian that they're quivering, visibly. .... they're recalling their favourite episode from the three series so far. Was it the episode with the interior designer's oversized labia? Was it the one about the woman with the udder-like breasts? The one with Christina's anal warts? They remember all of those, but their favourite was the episode where Dr Christian stood in a locker room to compare the penis sizes of a whole rugby team.

I'm glad it's a version of reality TV that has not caught on here.