A surprise from the bottle

This is quite a surprising finding, I reckon:

Mothers who drink alcohol while they are pregnant may be damaging the fertility of their future sons, according to new research to be presented at the 26th annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Rome today (Tuesday 29 June). Doctors in Denmark found that if mothers had drunk 4.5 or more drinks a week while pregnant, then the sperm concentration of their sons, measured about 20 years later, was a third lower in comparison to men who were not exposed to alcohol while in the womb.

The researcher is happy to be cautious about this study, though:

However, because this is an observational study we cannot say for certain that the alcohol causes the lower sperm concentrations. It is possible that drinking alcohol during pregnancy has a harmful effect on the foetal semen-producing tissue in the testes – and thereby on semen quality in later life – but our study is the first of its kind, and more research within this area is needed before any causal link can be established or safe drinking limits proposed.

But, if it turns out to be true, it might be the (or at least part of the) answer to the question of why semen quality seems to have been on the decline globally in recent years:

"If further research shows that maternal alcohol consumption is a cause of reduced semen concentration in male offspring, then we are a bit closer to an explanation of why semen quality may have decreased during the last decades and why it differs between populations. If exposure to alcohol in foetal life causes poor semen quality in adult life, we would expect that populations with many pregnant women drinking, possibly heavily, in pregnancy would have lower fertility in comparison with populations of where pregnant women do not drink."

Purple health

BBC News - Nitrate content 'behind benefits of beetroot juice'

A study in the US journal Hypertension found that blood pressure was reduced within 24 hours in people who drank beetroot juice or took nitrate tablets.

The higher the blood pressure, the greater the impact of the nitrates.

This research suggests there is hope of using a more "natural" approach to bring down blood pressure. Nitrates are found in a number of vegetables.

A previous study found that drinking a pint of beetroot juice lowered blood pressure significantly in people with normal blood pressure.

I'm not entirely sure I would enjoy drinking a pint of beetroot juice, but this must be good news for any farmer that particularly enjoys growing this vegetable.

Good old Bettina

Bettina Arndt (who, incidentally, has been married twice herself) comes out with a rather conservative take on the question of the role model effect of Julia Gillard being in a de facto relationship.   I agree with all of it.  Some extracts:

It's fine for Gillard - a 48-year-old woman - to live with her bloke. Yet as a popular role model for women, her lifestyle choice may influence other women into making big mistakes about their lives.

Cohabitation produces two groups of losers among women and children. Most women want to have children - Gillard is an exception - and some miss out after wasting their primary reproductive years in a succession of live-in relationships which look hopeful but go nowhere, leaving them childless and partnerless as they hit 40….

While the de facto lifestyle leads some women to miss out on having children, others are taking the risk of becoming parents despite these unstable relationships. A growing proportion of children is now born to de facto couples - up from less than 3 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 2000, according to data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey.

It is often assumed these children will provide the glue to keep de facto relationships together, but sadly this is not so. David de Vaus, a sociology professor from La Trobe University, found cohabiting couples who have children are more like to break up than married parents, increasing their risk of the negative impacts of family breakdown.

She then makes this good point:

 Politicians today rarely question social trends, even when all the evidence is they are having negative social consequences. John Howard was the rare exception, when he went into bat for a child's rights to a father in the debate over single mothers and IVF.

Yes, I used to like that about John Howard. We all knew Paul Keating was personally conservative on the matter of gay marriage, for example, but he was politically constrained from saying it out loud. No such problem for John Howard.

As for Julia:  I think it is fair to say that very few people would take her relationship status as a reason for not voting for her.  However, it should be no shock, and a matter of social benefit, if she did marry her partner now or soon after winning an election.  I mean, she would be simply following a pattern that many others have, and I don’t see that it should be seen as a betrayal of feminist principles.    The fact that it would annoy some feminists is just an added benefit as far as I am concerned.

Richo agrees with me

Graham Richardson writes scathingly of K Rudd, the former PM now ordered to take a rest by Dr Julia*:

YOU didn't need a poll to know this tax was going down like a shower of the proverbial. Everybody from Julia Gillard down told Kevin Rudd the resource super profits tax was killing him and the government. But he wouldn't listen. He never listened. This genius actually believed he was the font of all wisdom.

No one moved against Rudd merely because he treated colleagues with total disdain. But it ensured that when the challenge came, success could be achieved at record pace. The margin, had a ballot occurred, would have been embarrassingly large. Faction leaders didn't make caucus members hate Rudd; no, that was all Kevin's own work.

Hate, by the way, was the right description. From lowly backbenchers to cabinet ministers, I have never come across such loathing towards a leader before, let alone a leader who achieved the biggest swing to Labor since World War II at the 2007 election.

*  I wish someone would tell him to take a break from twittering, too.  All normal people over 50 should have the appropriately disdainful attitude to that silly use of the internet, but I’ll take it as a sign of vanity that Kevin doesn’t stop.

Still witty after all these years

Steve Martin can still be amusing, as evidenced by this video from earlier this year:

Kant and rats

Hmm.  Kant keeps making an appearance in stuff I read lately.  Here he is again, in the context of new science about how rat brains get spatial cognition.  Cool.

Bunyip tales

A somewhat interesting article appeared in The Age recently about the Australian aborigines mythological bunyip.   I don’t recall reading this specific theory before:

Australian Museum naturalist George Bennett was first to suggest formally (in 1871) that the bunyip might be an indigenous cultural memory of extinct Australian megafauna, passed down through oral tradition. By 1991, the authors of Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia were postulating that, "When confronted with the remains of some of the now extinct Australian marsupials, Aborigines would often identify them as the bunyip."

And in 1998, geologist Greg McNamara told Australian Geo-graphic magazine his theory that the remembered bunyip was actually a prehistoric turtle, Meiolania prisca, "a most impressive beast" up to two metres long with a metre-long, bony club tail and curved 25-centimetre horns.

More Crowe stories

Maybe it's a bit unfair to keep repeating stories of stupid or strange things Russell Crowe has said or done, but it is fun. Today from The Age, it's Russell the film critic:

Howden reveals that Crowe had been originally ‘‘earmarked’’ to play the title role in Shakespeare in Love (1998), but then had problems with the script and decided not to be involved. Which is any actor’s prerogative, of course. But then Crowe continues: ‘‘I was f---ing right about that movie too. It was a 100 per cent f---ing home run, except the central character of William Shakespeare was not a f---ing writer ... He was some prissy pretty boy. What the f---? That’s so disrespectful.’’

LOL, as they say.

Very droll

Dating site RSVP has come up with an ad for our dear departed Prime Minister Rudd. The humour is pretty gentle, but it's a good idea. Click to see the first part below, or go to the link to see it all.

Even worse than salt and vinegar

Lung-on-a-chip | Science | guardian.co.uk

Space weather and you

Quite a surprise here as to how the sun may affect electronics to a much greater degree than previously realised:

Relatively minor space storms now appear to be behind a range of mysterious mishaps - railway signals malfunctioning in Archangel province in north-western Russia, for example, between 2000 and 2005. A study led by Eugenia Eroshenko of the Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation in Troitsk, Russia, examined episodes when signals turned red for minutes or even hours though the track ahead was clear, then spontaneously reverted to green.

Eroshenko's team found that 16 malfunctions of this sort observed between 2000 and 2005 coincided with space storms (Advances in Space Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2010.05.017). "We were surprised by such a clear correlation," Eroshenko says…

As for transformers:

Intense power surges due to big space storms can heat transformers enough within minutes to damage the insulation needed to prevent short circuits, which can cause them to explode.

More recently, there are signs that transformers can be destroyed by smaller currents over a period of hours or more. A long-lasting 2003 space storm delivered only relatively low-intensity currents to the South African power grid, but damaged several transformers anyway, notes US-based storm analysis consultant John Kappenman.

What next? Tin foil hats work too?

The results are preliminary, but appear in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry (sounds legit):

Applying magnets to the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers helps them understand what is said to them. The finding by Italian scientsts, who conducted a randomised controlled trial of the treatment, suggests that magnets may alter "cortical activity" in the brain, readjusting unhealthy patterns caused by disease or damage. The study was small, involving just 10 patients, and the results are preliminary.

Surprising, but it's not as if it was just a matter of putting magnets in a headband:

For the latest study, Maria Costelli and colleagues applied repetitive TMS – a rapid succession of magnetic pulses – to the prefrontal lobes of the Alzheimer's patients for 25 minutes at a time. Half the patients received daily doses five days a week for four weeks and half received a dummy treatment for two weeks followed by two weeks of TMS. Tests showed that those who had the full course of TMS had significantly higher scores on comprehension of what was said to them – up from 66 per cent to 77 per cent. The improvement was still evident eight weeks after treatment. The authors say the technique did not affect other language abilities or other cognitive functions, including memory, which suggests that it is "specific to the language domain of the brain when applied to the prefrontal lobes".

Half my wish fulfilled

Recently, I indicated that my depression over what looked like the coming appalling electoral choice between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott would be resolved if Labor installed Gillard as Leader, and the Liberals went back toTurnbull.

Well, looks like half of my wish has come true.

Basically, Rudd suddenly imploded because he is a two-faced, control freak, vain, celebrity-seeking, boss-from-hell, media tart of a politician who was only installed as leader as a result of his smiley Sunrise appearances which gave Labor the feeling that he was just the right person to not scare the voters from blasting Howard out of the chair which he had unwisely decided to keep for one election too many. There always existed plenty of evidence for all of this; it is amazing that it took the public as long as it did to turn on him (and even now, that it has not turned as completely as it could,) but it is not really that surprising that Labor turned on him at the first possible opportunity.

Now, how am I to hope for Abbott to lose his position? The only way I see is for him to (literally) be caught with his pants down somewhere with someone other than his wife.* It's possible; I should never give up hope!

* Now that I think about it, I speculated once or twice on this blog during Rudd's puzzling rise to power that this was how he might come to grief too, but it was only with his ETS backflip that we all realised he had no testicles anyway. Maybe I'm just longing for another scandal as good as the Gareth Evans/ Cheryl Kernot one.

Odd headline of the day

French cannibal ate cellmate's lung in 'cry for help'

Bad Republican!

How Time and Life magazines helped turn America on to LSD. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Well, that's interesting! I didn't know that the Time and Life magazine co-founder and his wife (Henry and Clare Luce) were right into LSD, and this explains why those conservative magazines gave oddly sympathetic coverage of the drug in the late 50's and into the 1960's.

One pleasing strange aspect of this:

Clare's acid trips, which she recorded in her papers now at the Library of Congress, were of the garden variety. She sorts mosaic glass by her swimming pool. She entertains herself looking through a kaleidoscope. During a March 11, 1959, trip, Richard Nixon telephoned Clare at her Phoenix home. An active Republican who served in Congress and as an ambassador, Clare declined to speak to Nixon. How history might have changed if she had shared a little acid with him!

It could have been a stranger conversation than the one Nixon had with Elvis.

It’s ours, all ours

In what would probably be a rare bit of good news for Australian professional astronomers:

MORE than 35 years after Prince Charles opened Australia's biggest optical telescope - a joint venture between our two nations to explore the southern skies - we are bidding goodbye to the Brits.

From next month, the Anglo-Australian Observatory near the NSW town of Coonabarabran will become the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Its director, Matthew Colless, said the decades of collaboration with Britain had led to many big discoveries about the universe, including a measurement of the matter it contains.

But 100 per cent ownership of the observatory's four-metre telescope, which is still ranked highly in the world, would open up new opportunities for research in the coming decade.

I’ve been there once in the late 1980’s, and I recall it as having a pretty good visitor centre. Somewhere in a drawer I probably have a photo, but here’s one from the web.

Cheap real estate in Japan

We all saw on TV last year how you could buy abandoned houses in many parts of the US for a song. Unfortunately, it looked like many had been thoroughly vandalised, and were in neighbourhoods which might take a decade or so to feel safe and inhabited again. A house for a couple of thousand dollars in such a situation is not such a bargain.

But Japan is a different kettle of fish. (That’s a particularly apt expression for that country, come to think of it.)

Population decline has already set in, and about the only places growing are the big cities due to people leaving the rural areas. I had been wondering if bargains in housing were to be had, and this fascinating article claims that there are:

So just how many vacant properties are there in Japan? According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry in 2008, there were an amazing 4.127 million unoccupied housing units, up 451,900 from 2003.

Some of these are old decaying abandoned homes which you wouldn’t want anyway, but it is still a big number, and it’s only likely to get bigger. The article goes on to provide a website which lists properties for sale as a result of tax foreclosures, but unfortunately it is in Japanese only, and is not exactly what you would call a glossy looking real estate site.

There is one major cultural difference about Japan which is odd to Westerners: except for apartments, modern Japanese do not expect houses to last long:

One reason why foreigners are a good fit to solve the vacant housing problem is that they are more willing to live in older properties and to perform their own maintenance. Japanese have been educated over the last 50 years that housing older than 25 years old should be demolished and rebuilt, leading people to really only want to buy new places. I know this firsthand, after a relative bought a countryside property, built a substantial Japanese-style post-and-beam house on the land (and which will last another 50 to 100 years), but being told by the bank several years ago that the house itself is now considered to already have zero value!

Some suggest that the Japanese expectation for the life of a house is affected by the number of earthquakes it might be expected to endure. But I am sure it is more than that. I was recently speaking to a Japanese couple, now Australian residents, who explained how surprised they were to find that renovated older homes (particularly in the Queenslander style) in Brisbane were expensive and highly valued. I think there is an idea that houses carry any bad luck that happened in them into the future.

Lots of websites say that there is no equivalent to our Foreign Investment Review Board restrictions on foreign purchase of real estate in Japan. (They also say that dealing with real estate agents may not be easy, but the article I linked to says there is a move afoot to encourage real estate agents to be helpful to foreign investors.)

All of this certainly suggests that you don’t buy a house in Japan with an expectation of making capital gain. But the idea of having a holiday home in the very pretty countryside of Japan might be a quite viable option for foreigners in the future.

Cheap books, electronic and otherwise

E-reader prices have taken a tumble in America due to the success of the iPad.

Recently I saw at Dymocks the Kobo e-reader for $199, but they have sold out and you have to place them on order.   I thought the screen was a bit small though, but then I thought the same when I saw a Kindle.

Anyhow, I’ll still wait for the next generation of them before buying.  I’m currently getting plenty of cheap reading by going to the Lifeline Bookfest held every 6 months in Brisbane’s convention centre. 

In January, as I have reported here before, I got Clive James’ first volume of autobiography which I had been wanting to read for years.   This time (on the Queens Birthday weekend) I got the second volume.  I am also getting more Graham Greene, including his autobiography, and he is difficult to find anywhere other than second hand book stores.

One thing you do learn from going to the Lifeline book sale is this:  there are a hell of a lot of Bryce Courtney novels sold in Australia.  Unfortunately, he has no appeal to me at all.

For readers outside of Brisbane who may not understand the size of this Lifeline second hand book sale, here’s a photo from the Brisbane Times which gives a good indication:

We like out second hand books in Brisbane.

Lucky planet

Summer solstice: Did a rampaging planet create Earth's seasons? - CSMonitor.com

Of course I knew of the idea that it was a collision that formed the Moon, but I either didn't know (or had forgotten) that it may also have given us the Earth's very convenient axis tilt that gives us the seasons:

Without that tilt, we might've ended up with more seasons than we could deal with over the course of Earth's history, suggests Neil Comins, an astronomer at the University of Maine. He's written substantially on what alternate Earths might be like and how hospitable they would be for the emergence of life.

The collision thought to have generated the tilt also created the moon, which is responsible for stabilizing Earth's spin axis. Without a moon, "the Earth spinning on its axis is an unstable system in which the tilt goes from straight up and down to far closer to the plain of it orbit than the axis is today," he says.

At its most extreme, this could leave Earth orbiting the sun and spinning on its axis like a chicken roasting on a spit with head and tail alternately aimed at the fire, rather than cooking the bird broadside. Earthlings from one pole to the equator would be in darkness during the solstice, while the other half would be in toasty sunlight. The poles would swap lighting conditions at the next solstice.

Moreover, the moon's presence and its effect on the oceans act as a brake on Earth's rotation rate. By some estimates one turn of the Earth on its axis some 4.5 billion years ago would have taken 6.5 hours, versus 24 today. No moon means a far more speedy cosmic rotisserie.

I don't think the importance of the moon in keeping the axis tilt stable was something that I realised before. Very neat.

Impressive

BBC News - Tornado rips roof off sports arena in Montana

Some pretty impressive video here of tornado damage. Two things of note: the amount of rubbish a tornado can keep suspended in the air for a long time, and the cars and trucks that seem to be passing by quite close to it. (I would be speeding away as fast as possible, but these vehicles don't seem to be in that much of a hurry.)