A disturbing sight

Several people in New Jersey claimed they saw a person falling from the sky with no parachute, but an extensive police search has turned up no evidence, NBC Philadelphia reported.

Witness Kelly Hale and two of her co-workers at Shore Veterinarians in Egg Harbor Township said they watched from their office windows as a human fell head-first from the sky on Tuesday.

But there were no reports of missing skydivers.

That report was from MSNBC, and as far as I can tell, no body (or explanation) has been found yet.  Sites like Gawker are making jokes about it. but I’m not sure that’s appropriate unless it was a dummy.

Melbourne UFO mystery

Last night, I caught up with Westall '66, a documentary first shown a few months ago on the Sci Fi Channel about a pretty intriguing UFO "close encounter" in the Melbourne suburb of Westall in 1966, when I were but a lad.

I’ve read a fair few UFO books over the years, but this case had escaped my attention. A large number of high school children saw a classic flying saucer disc shaped thing hovering beside their school. It came down behind some trees, apparently landed, then took off again, leaving at high speed according to some. It is said to have left a grass swirl on the ground.

It seems only one teacher is around who saw it too. His report is apparently a little different in some detail, and for some reason he declined to appear in the documentary. I suspect part of his story is a muddle with some more mundane aerial action from the not too distant airport. (See my link to a skeptic’s take on the events below.) Yet he apparently also claims to have been threatened by a couple of military visitors to not talk about it.

However, the documentary turned up a couple of other, off school, adult witnesses who saw the disc, and their version of events does not seem to differ significantly from the students.

Witnesses say that military personnel turned up very quickly after the sighting, and apparently insisted on taking the camera of the one teacher who took photos. More than one student say they were under distinct pressure to not publicise the sighting, and they were adamant it was not a balloon (the explanation suggested in The Age the next day) or any known type of aircraft.

Nearly all of the witnesses in the documentary come across as quite credible and genuinely puzzled about what happened.

An army historian on the show made the good point that the quick appearance of the military at the scene is strong evidence that they had pre-knowledge of what was seen. (An extensive search of Australian defence force files has never found any material relevant to the case.) He seemed inclined to think it might have been an experimental craft, presumably that had got into trouble. (That would make more sense than a deliberate test of a secret craft over the suburbs of Melbourne. )

What a puzzle! You would think there must be some of the military people involved out there still who could shed some light on the defence involvement. If it was a balloon and there is no mystery, surely they could confirm that. It's hard to imagine why a top secret balloon would be landing in Melbourne, given that all US enemies were up in the Northern Hemisphere (and perhaps harder to see how it could take off at high speed after landing.)

A skeptical take on the event can be found here, but it’s not actually clear if the writer had seen the documentary before writing it. When you see the documentary, it makes some of his arguments seem implausible. He emphasises the fallibility of memory a great deal, but the documentary covers enough different (and newly found) witnesses to persuade that they can’t all have become so muddled.

A Facebook page created by the doco makers indicates some further information will be forthcoming (including the location of a girl who fainted and was taken away, never to be seen again by a fellow student!) (I am guessing that will have a mundane explanation.)

Anyway, it’s a great local mystery, and let’s hope its solved one way or another.

Transgenic fish - is this strictly necessary?

New Scientist has an article about transgenic salmon and other fish, and the care that has to be taken to make sure they don't escape with unforeseen consequences to the wild population.

It also mentions how China has done a lot of work on transgenic fish too, including on carp. (Hmm, yes, like the world is crying out for a bigger muddy tasting fish. In fact, if it's China involved in anything to do with food safety, I think we can work on the assumption that it's dangerous.)

I'm just skeptical that this is worth all the effort. Inserting genes into plants is one thing that is uncertain enough. Directly mucking around with the genes of animals, and then having to take steps to sterilize them because you don't really know what would happen if they escape, just doesn't inspire me with confidence.

Taxes and politics

So, BHP has come out and said that it wants Australia to have a carbon price, even before there is any international agreement regarding same. As Mark Davis points out in The Age, given that Garnaut has changed his position, this means a carbon tax instead of an ETS. As the Greens seem to favour a tax too, there does seem a real hope that the complicated ETS of questionable value may be replaced with something better. Who said this election result was a disaster? (I’m looking at you, jtfsoon.)

Davis also points out that Turnbull sounding all responsible and economically reasonable on broadband sort of highlights the fact that it is his party that is the economically unreasonable on carbon pricing.

There is one other aspect of the current situation which I think is pretty remarkable: BHP also agreed in principle with Labor for a mining profits tax. So, now we have big business accepting taxes that aren’t in their direct interests, but are regarded by most economists (I think that applies to the mining profits tax) as beneficial to the nation.

And the party and leader opposed to these tax changes: the Coalition under Tony Abbott.

Labor may have a problem with the way it spends money, but it’s currently the party that makes more sense about taxes.*

* The same can be said about the Democrats and Republicans at the moment.

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: