I’m going to buy me a nice big straw hat, lots of sunscreen, and lose enough weight to look good in my new swimsuits. Because I’m hoping Mr. Gore is right and I’ll have beach front property here in Missouri in a few months. Why not celebrate the Earth getting warmer when the alternative is that it will get colder, and I know which one of the two I prefer. Even if you think that global warming has something to do with what people are doing (and I don’t), I figure that since it’s taken us decades to put carbon dixoide into the atmosphere it will take decades to get it back out which means it’s going to be around a while so you might as well enjoy the ride.
Archive for category Science
… And Love Global Warming
Jun 29
Less Is More
Jun 23
How is the brain and the military alike? Less is more. By that I mean for the brain, it isn’t about working hard, its about working efficiently, since studies show the better a person is at a task, the less the brain works to perform it. And for the military, it isn’t about bringing more firepower, it’s about putting minimum firepower precisely on the target — again, it’s not about working hard, its about working efficiently.
And I don’t think those are the only two areas where this applies.
Genetic Screening
Jun 19
I’m a firm believer that human life starts at conception, and I’m the father of a daughter who had two congenital heart defects, one life threatening — coarctation of the aorta — and one not — VSD. Erin had an operation when 3 months old to remove the constricted section, and had a balloon angioplasty when 2 to break up the scar tissue that was causing a recurrance. We worried that our next child would also have heart defects. So I greet this news with mostly joy and only slight trepidation: New genetic testing of In Vitro Fertilized embryos can detect genetic diseases.
Such testing could help reduce, or even possibly eliminate a lot of genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Such testing could bring great peace of mine to anxious parents. Hence the joy. Of course the question immediately arises for me what happens to the embryo’s that test positive. And one wonders how far do we go – do parents select embryos based on other characteristics, such as eye color? Hence the trepidation. I’m not one to stop a good because a bad may come later, especially when we can draw a line later against the bad. So I’m not too worried about what might happen years from now. But I am concerned with what happens now, namely what happens to the embryos. I can’t imagine requiring a parents to have a child we know has a terrible disease, and yet just as I can’t kill children once born with a terrible disease, I’m against destroying the embryo. So would it be too much to ask to hold onto the embryo until they can be cured — until their genetic defects can be repaired? I don’t think so.
It’s just not possible to overstate the importance of intestinal bacteria to your well being. Part of that is simply a fine economy – why should your cells do what 3 pounds of bacteria can acomplish in your gut. The other part is that one dies without the other. Scientists have had a hard time investigating the full toxonomy of your gut flora, mainly because they don’t live well outside you. But scientists have developed a way to find out what’s in there, and the answer is one hell of a lot: more than 60,000 genes (or twice the human genome) and thousands of different strains of bacteria and archaea. So how did they manage to collect this treasure trove?
Rather than struggling to grow the body’s myriad microbes and testing their ability to perform various biochemical reactions — the methods scientists traditionally use to classify bacteria — the team used tiny molecular probes resembling DNA Velcro to retrieve tens of thousands of snippets of bacterial DNA from smidgeons of the intestinal output of two volunteers.
I guess that means they found a way to take the DNA directly from turds without trying to grow any more. Or even worse perhaps, they inserted the probes up into the intestines themselves. Science isn’t always pretty.
My problem isn’t that I eat too much, it’s that my gut bacteria are too efficient. Researchers (from right here in St. Louis) say that the amount of calories you actually extract from food depends on what’s living in your gut. My next question would be how much of what’s in you depends on what’s in your parents? I can just imagine that in the future, we’ll be imbibing different mixtures of gut flora to lose weight or bulk up.
And how about downing a nice mixture of whipworm eggs and gatorade? Yum, yum, but even better than the taste is that it might help people with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s. The theory is the worms give your immune system something to do and so it leave the rest of you alone. Needless to say kids, don’t try this at home, wait for an FDA approved treatment.
Avian Flu Transmission
Mar 23
Why is the bird flu that has us all so worried not transmitted human to human (yet)? The virus doesn’t bind to receptors in the upper respitory tract (i.e. nose and throat) and instead binds to receptors deep in the respitory tract (think lung, specifically alveoli). So scientists will now start monitoring for any changes in the virus’s ability to latch on and invade upper respitory tract cells, which would mean easy human to human transmission. Whether such a shift is detected in the lab before people start dropping like, well, birds, is more than an academic question.
In a study with 504 women, researchers at the University of Liverpool led by Dr. Diane Scutt found that a difference in breast size was linked to an increased risk of cancer in a fairly linear way, with every 100 milliliters of difference equating to an increase in the risk of cancer of 50 percent. The average breast size is approximately 500 milliliters, so we’re talking fairly sizable differences here.
You can tell the caliber of the news organization by the headline (and photo) they chose to run with this subject:
BBC: “Uneven breasts linked to cancer”
Daily Mail: “Uneven breasts may increase cancer risk”
Xinhua: “Breast asymmetry may increase cancer risk in women”
Atlanta Constitution Journal: “Asymmetrical Breasts May Raise Cancer Risk”
Elites TV: “Study: Breast Size Matters When It Comes To Cancer”
Glasgow Daily Record: “MATCHING BREASTS ARE BEST”
The Sun (UK): “Lopsided boob risk”
Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences claims that our current global warming is due to changes in the level of atmospheric water amounts caused by the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908. Hmmm.
Bacteria Numbers
Mar 1
A school girl did a wonderful science project – comparing the number of bacteria in the ice they serve you versus the number in their toilet water at fast food restaurants. Her answer is quite unappetizing as she discovered that in most (70%) locations there were more in the ice than there were in the water. Ugh. I do remember that when I was in Pakistan the leader of a detachment of seabees building terrorist defenses at the American Consulate told me how he was fanatic about keeping ice machines clean and disinfected because they could cause illness pretty easily. And don’t even get me started on soft-serve ice cream dispensers.
Beware the people who compare the number of bacteria on some surface to the number of bacteria on a toilet seat — they are misleading you with that comparison because the toilet seat has the fewest number of bacteria of any location in a bathroom – mainly because peoples butts and thighs (and yes, urine) don’t have a lot of bacteria on them, and the (toilet) seats are routinely disinfected. And besides, you can only get skin type infections in the parts of your body that come into contact with the seat, at least if you’re using the toilet properly that is. Generally, toilet seats are down right sterile compared to most other surfaces you regularly come into contact with. If the number of bacteria bug you, stay off the floor of a public restroom.
But the important thing isn’t numbers, but variety of bacteria. For instance, should you be grossed out by that figure of 3 million bacteria on a computer keyboard? Well, when you consider that your very own personal body has 10 times more bacteria than you have cells, or a whopping 100 trillion (give or take a few trillion), that 3 million on the keyboard is insignificant. What matters is if there are any pathogens and your own general health since a lot of stuff that is normally harmless will turn on you if you let your guard down. It doesn’t take many salmonella to ruin your day.
The best defense against bacterial invaders are clean hands and clean food. The 100 trillion that are already there will take care of the stragglers.
Not All Side Affects Are Bad
Feb 24
Viagra, its not just for erecitile dysfunction anymore. Researchers investigating Crohn’s disease have uncovered evidence that it may be caused by an excess of bacteria allowed to flourish due to a sluggish immune system and they speculate that viagra could improve the blood flow to the intestine (I guess it isn’t site specific) which would help clear the bacteria.
Coming on the heels of the discovery that rifaximin, an antibiotic used to treat diarrhea, also works for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it would appear that intestinal bacteria are like women: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
Too Good to Be True
Dec 5
Moderate consumption of alcohol reduces the odds of obesity. So maybe those beer adds where whippet thin yuppies meet to run and then have a light beer aftwards isn’t so far fetched after all.
Maybe this is just good news for me, given as how I have far more than I want, but research by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine indicates that stem cells from hair follicles help heal skin.
I sit on the pinnacle of happiness because I said “I do” 17 years ago.. Or in the words of a researcher “Some commitment appears to be good, but more commitment appears to be even better”, and marriage is a the top of the committment heap.
