Where Is My Cold Vaccination?

Posted: 12/29/2015

Recently, we learnt about a 100% vaccination against the Ebola virus and the approval of a Dengue fever vaccination in Mexico. We are now capable of curing HIV Aids, soon perhaps even 100%.

What I find hard to believe is that we still do not have a very effective flu vaccination (not to mention that the manufacture of this vaccination is awful) and no cold vaccination at all available. Yes, I understand that these plagues are not very deadly, but they are frequent, affecting probably 100s of millions of people every year and they are very annoying not to mention e.g. a drag on business.

NPS Ruins The Casa Grande Ruins National Monument

Posted: 12/27/2015

Trigger

We have recently visited the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Arizona for the first time. I had very mixed impressions of this site managed by the National Park Service!

This is not the first time that I thought that the National Park Service is doing a rather mediocre job managing various sites. Big Government agencies are often underperforming or should not be in business at all!

Notes

1. The Casa Grande Ruins became the first prehistoric and cultural reserve in the U.S. by order of President Harrison in 1892. “It was then re-designated a national monument by President Woodrow Wilson on August 3, 1918.”
2. For several decades now only the main building is covered by a large shelter roof to protect it from rain and sunshine, but the other buildings surrounding the main ruin of the same settlement are not protected by shelter roofs or anything. Thus, the other buildings are allowed to be washed away over time. This is simply unacceptable!
3. There are dozens of pigeons living and nesting inside the Casa Grande Ruins. There are large areas thickly covered in bird poop throughout the main ruin. This is truly disgusting and probably detrimental to the ruins. When I asked the NPS staff at the entrance about this and why there is not a net over the ruins to prevent these pigeons from living there, they kind of shrugged their shoulders and hinted that there were also owls living under the sheltered roof. So to protect these owls, the NPS allows pigeons to ruin the ruins? How stupid and inept is that?
4. It was also not clear to me or might be mistaken, but it appears there are no archeological work done at this site anymore. If true, why?
5. Perhaps, had these ruins be left to the state of Arizona or the native peoples they would have been preserved much better

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (22)

Posted: 12/27/2015

1. What the mites on your face say about where you came from (“Now, a new study shows that people of different ancestry carry different subgroups of the bugs, and that the mites’ distribution throughout the global population may even reflect how our species has migrated and evolved over the course of history. … The researchers also found that each individual’s mite population was stable over time periods as long as 3 years—even in people who had moved to new regions of the world with different dominant clades. Furthermore, the mite profiles appear to be passed across generations—a second generation person of African descent living in Europe will most likely retain the mites of her ancestors, rather than acquire a European profile.”)
   Here is another article on same subject: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/your-hair-mites-are-so-loyal-their-dna-reflects-your-ancestry-180957545
2. THIS PILL MAY BE A CURE FOR RADIATION POISONING Chemist Rebecca Abergel and her colleagues have found a way to remove radioactive contaminants from the body. Now they are trying to put their solution in a pill. (“Abergel and her team at Berkeley have made a chelator that binds to actinides — without interfering with other metals that we need in our bodies, such as zinc or iron.”)
3. A brain link to autism  Scientists find neurotransmitter that ties in with disorder’s behavior (“Using a visual test that prompts different reactions in autistic and normal brains, …, was able to show that those differences were associated with a breakdown in the signaling pathway used by GABA, one of the brain’s chief inhibitory neurotransmitters. … This theory that the GABA signaling pathway plays a role in autism has been shown in animal models, but until now we never had evidence for it actually causing autistic differences in humans.
   To find that evidence, Robertson and colleagues went searching for an easily replicable test that produced consistently different results in people with and without autism, and found it in what visual neuroscientists call binocular rivalry. Normally, she said, the brain is presented with two slightly different images — one from each eye — that it averages to create the single image we see. The binocular-rivalry test, however, forces each eye to take in very different images, with surprising results. ... “Where the average person might rock back and forth between the two images every three seconds, an autistic person might take twice as long,” she said. “They spend the same amount of time in the steady state, where they see only one image, as the average person. It just takes them longer to switch between them, and the second image is not as deeply suppressed.”)
4. Scripps Florida Compound Successfully Targets Hard-to-Treat Breast Cancer (“The study points to an enzyme called casein kinase 1δ (CK1δ), a critical regulator of growth, as a novel and highly vulnerable therapeutic target. Increased CK1δ expression is common to breast cancer, including the difficult-to-treat subtype called “triple negative breast cancer” (those cancers not driven by estrogen, progesterone, or the HER-2/neu gene), affecting 10 to 20 percent of breast cancer patients. … Our findings confirm that aberrant CK1δ regulation promotes tumor growth in breast cancers by activating the protein β-catenin,” …  “The best news, however, is that we have been able to treat CK1δ-expressing breast cancers with a highly selective and potent CK1δ inhibitor developed … that triggers rapid tumor cell death.”)
5. Clouds may hide water on alien worlds (“Now, a team of astronomers using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have gathered enough data to compare 10 large exoplanets, finding a range of atmosphere types, and to propose a solution to an early mystery of exoplanet atmospheres: why some don’t seem to have enough water. … A team led by David Sing of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom has carried out detailed studies at optical and infrared wavelengths on eight of those new exoplanets, adding to the data already obtained on the original two. As they report online today in Nature, the distant planets clearly contain water and some are cloudy. Moreover, the strength of the water signature depends on the amount of clouds, suggesting that the hazy planets may be concealing water.”)
6. Cancer Cells Can't Proliferate and Invade at the Same Time The new findings could inform cancer treatments, which typically target only cells that are dividing
7. Cracking cocaine’s secret to sneaking into the brain (“Up until now, it was though that cocaine had to be deprotonated to penetrate the blood–brain barrier. McLain and her team uncovered that conformation and hydration were far more significant. Rather surprisingly, a water mediated internal hydrogen bond appears to pull cocaine into a formation that shields its hydrophilic regions.”)
8. http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/11/anti-alzheimer-s-gene-may-have-led-rise-grandparents
9. http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2015/12/what-mites-your-face-say-about-where-you-came
10. X-ray vision? New technology making it a reality for $300 (“A group of researchers … has developed software that uses variations in radio signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls and track their movements.”)
11. Research Confirms a Link between Intelligence and Life Expectancy The reasons are unclear, but higher IQ is correlated with longer life span (Who would have guessed!)
12. New Drug Is First to Treat Progressive Multiple Sclerosis Studies show that ocrelizumab works for both the relapsing and progressive forms of MS
13. In Pursuit of AIDS Vaccine, Team Sheds Light on Antibody Origins (“The images in the new study showed that the PGT121 family of antibodies starts its attack by grabbing onto one of the glycans, (called the N332 glycan) as well as a short segment of the HIV Envelope glycoprotein (called the GDIR motif), turning them into binding partners. … Interestingly, if researchers remove the N137 glycan from HIV, the antibodies immediately behave as well-trained antibodies and don’t require a two-year boot camp.”)
14. Light Chips Could Mean More Energy-Efficient Data Centers For the first time, researchers have used existing manufacturing technology to make a complex processor that uses energy-efficient optical connections. (“Now a prototype described in the journal Nature offers a promising and practical approach. The electronic-optical microprocessor, developed by a group of researchers at MIT, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, integrates over 70 million transistors and 850 optical components. The system uses optical fibers, transmitters, and receivers to send data between a processor chip and a memory chip.”)
15. Genome misfolding unearthed as new path to cancer IDH mutations disrupt how the genome folds, bringing together disparate genes and regulatory controls to spur cancer growth (“By studying brain tumors that carry mutations in the isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) genes, the team uncovered some unusual changes in the instructions for how the genome folds up on itself. Those changes target key parts of the genome, called insulators, which physically prevent genes in one region from interacting with the control switches and genes that lie in neighboring regions. When these insulators run amok in IDH-mutant tumors, they allow a potent growth factor gene to fall under the control of an always-on gene switch, forming a powerful, cancer-promoting combination.”)
16. Virus particles engineered to hold enzymes that generate carbon-free hydrogen fuel (Note to author/journalist of this article: hydrogen is carbon-free!)
17. Study reveals arms race between Ebola virus and bats, waged for millions of years
18. Seabed-Mining Robots Will Dig for Gold in Hydrothermal Vents  Nautilus Minerals will test its gear on the ocean floor in 2016 (Will deep sea mining finally become reality after several failed attempts)
19. Entangling Different Kinds of Atoms Could Be the Way Forward for Quantum Computers (“The NIST group reported in the journal Nature that they successfully entangled magnesium ions and beryllium ions, and used the entangled pair to demonstrate two key quantum logic operations—CNOT and SWAP gates. The scientists at Oxford obtained a similar result with ions of calcium-40 and calcium-43, and also performed tests proving that showed that the pair were properly entangled.”)
20. Flexible Optogenetics Implants Hack the Sense of Pain (“The new demonstration represents a huge step forward for optogenetics technology: A futuristic field of science that hacks nerve cells by genetically changing them to become responsive to light. Until now, the rigid electronic components of such implants limited their placement inside living bodies. The newest generation of stretchy, wireless electronic implants bypasses those old limitations with flexible implants that can control pain signals in the main leg nerve and spinal cord of genetically-engineered mice. ”)

On Julius Rosenwald

Posted: 12/27/2015

Trigger

Recently read An Unsung Hero of Black Education Businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald helped build thousands of quality elementary schools in the segregated South. This is another extraordinary, little known story about how American Jews and Black Americans collaborated. I do not remember having ever heard or read about Julius Rosenberg before. I have not yet seen the eponymous documentary yet.

I have written a number of critical posts here on the so called Civil Rights movement, which, in my opinion, was more like a second Civil War waged on the South. The story of Julius Rosenberg is another proof that massive Big Government intervention was not necessary at all to improve the lives of Black Americans.

Notes

1. Julius Rosenberg was one of the exceptional entrepreneurs of the U.S. See e.g. his story here. “After World War I, Sears was in dire financial shape and Rosenwald brought Sears back from the brink of bankruptcy by pledging some $21 million of his personal fortune, in cash, stock and other assets to rescue the company.”
   “Rosenwald insisted that the company's primary goal must be responsibility to the customer. He established the "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" pledge and conducted his business dealings by the creed "Sell honest merchandise for less money and more people will buy."”
2. “Of all his philanthropic efforts, Rosenwald was most famous for the more than 5,000 "Rosenwald schools" he established throughout the South for poor, rural black youth, and the 4,000 libraries he added to existing schools. The network of new public schools subsequently employed more than 14,000 teachers.”. “The buildings had modern lighting and sanitation. Classrooms had adequate supplies of books and desks and blackboards. The teachers were better trained and better paid.”
3. Reportedly, it was Paul J. Sachs (of Goldman Sachs fame) who introduced Julius Rosenberg to e.g. Booker T. Washington.
4. Julius Rosenberg served on the board of the Tuskegee Institute from 1912 until his death 1932
5. “He established his Rosenwald Fund in 1917 for "the well-being of mankind." Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, the Rosenwald Fund was intended to use all of its funds for philanthropic purposes. As a result, the fund was completely spent by 1948.” Did Rosenberg anticipate so early the thorny issue of original donor intent or followed the idea of giving while living and sunsetting?
6. “Julius Rosenwald supported the Wabash Avenue YMCA (Chicago), opened in 1914, which would later become an historic landmark. The Wabash "Y" greatly aided blacks' integration into Chicago during the Great Migration. It is still operating today.”
7. The argument that Julius Rosenberg promoted racially segregated schooling is phony at best in my opinion. “In reality, Rosenwald and Washington did both. Throughout his career, Washington funded legal challenges to racial discrimination. And Rosenwald financed a third of the litigation costs in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared public-school segregation unconstitutional. But the larger point is that both men realized that poor blacks at the time needed good teachers and quality schools, not white classmates.”
8. “The Rosenwald Fund also made fellowship grants directly to African-American artists, writers, researchers and intellectuals between 1928 and 1948. Civil rights leader Julian Bond, ... Hundreds of grants were disbursed to artists, writers and other cultural figures, many of whom became prominent or already were, including photographer Gordon Parks Jr., Elizabeth Catlett, poet Claude McKay, Dr. Charles Drew, Augusta Savage, anthropologist and dancer Katherine Dunham, singer Marian Anderson, writer Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and poets Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Rita Dove. Fellowships of around $1,000 to $2,000 were given out yearly to applicants and were usually designed to be open-ended; the Foundation requested but did not require grantees to report back on what they accomplished with the support.”
9. “Black communities raised more than $4.7 million to aid in construction, plus often donating land and labor. These schools became known as "Rosenwald Schools." By 1932, the facilities could accommodate one- third of all African-American children in Southern schools. Research has found that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural Southern blacks in this period. This research also found significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and Northern migration, with gains highest in the most disadvantaged counties.”
   This is probably one of the most overlooked and underreported facts that Black Americans themselves did so much to improve their situation without Big Government!

Profile Of A German Career Politician

Posted: 12/19/2015

Why is representative democracy so much in decline in the West in the eyes of its citizens? Why are serious reforms like more individual liberty and responsibility; small and limited government; and strict term limits for all in public office urgent and necessary?

Take Andrea Nahles, for example, she was born in 1970 and is a far lefty German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Since late 2013, she is the Federal Minister Of Labor and Social Affairs in the cabinet of chancellor Angela Merkel.

Like many other German Baby Boomers, she studied German literature (Germanistik) for 10 years at a German university. She began her political career at the age of 18 and since then has never done anything else than work on her political career. At the age of 28, she became a member of the German parliament and has been a member ever since except for 3 years. She has probably never worked in the private sector in her life.

Most recently, she came out with new labor market regulations that are obsolete and contrary to the needs of the 21st century to please labor unions etc. She has it completely backwards.

How it is possible that this largely unaccomplished and economic illiterate career politician can become the labor minister of one of the leading economies of the world is beyond comprehension.

She is by far not the only career politician with a similar profile in Western democracies!

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (21)

Posted: 12/16/2015

1. The most likely spots for life in the Milky Way (“So in the new study ... focused on the regions far from a galaxy’s center. They used computer simulations to model an entire Milky Way–like galaxy and its neighbors, the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. They then simulated the distribution of gas, stars, and planetary systems within those whorls of stars. Finally, they allowed these galaxies to evolve over billions of years, while mapping out their evolving habitable zones. “We’re the first to look at how the history of galaxies affects their habitability,” … that potentially habitable planets are more likely to remain so if they form in areas far from dense conglomerations of stars, where more supernova explosions occur. The results indicate that for the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies, the most dangerous regions are in the galactic centers, whereas the more diffuse spiral arms pose fewer hazards and are therefore more hospitable to life. Earth lies near the inner edge of this habitable zone.”)
2. Super Spiral Galaxies Amaze Astronomers A new breed of giants raises questions about how the biggest galaxies arise (“But as Ogle's team reports in work submitted to The Astrophysical Journal last month, three percent of the most luminous galaxies they found are actually spirals. "They look like normal spiral galaxies, but until you quantify how far away they are, you don't realize how big and bright they are," Ogle says. "I think that's probably why people didn't notice them before." His sample shows 53 spiral galaxies with luminosities between eight and 14 L*. The largest super spiral, located in the constellation Hercules, possesses a disk of stars 440,000 light-years across, four times the size of the Milky Way's stellar disk.”)
3. Speedy DNA nanomachines are on a roll (“Now, scientists in the US have developed a DNA roller that is 1000 times faster than most synthetic DNA-based motors and can also pinpoint single mutations. … Known as a ‘burnt-bridge’ mechanism, the DNA will subsequently look for new RNA to bind to. This simple reaction is what causes the ball to roll, with an average velocity of up to 1.9µm per minute. It’s so effective that the team were able to flip the sample upside-down and the ball still rolls at the same speed – inertia or gravity plays no part. … Although such a roller will move in a self-avoiding and random manner, never crossing its former path, it can also travel in a straight line when two balls are joined together. ‘It’s the first example of doing ballistic or linear motion without an external field [or] force,’ Salaita says. The roller is also capable of detecting single base mutations. ‘We saw that they … have specific velocities and it turns out the speed of the motor depends on the rate of DNA and RNA binding, and the rate of the enzyme destroying the RNA,’ he adds. ‘If you have a single base mutation in the RNA, that leads to a change in the velocity of the motor.’”)
4. The Hunt for Alien Molecules Astrochemists are discovering many compounds in the cosmos that cannot exist on Earth (Good overview article)
5. New camera makes methane visible
6. Super-repellent coating ready in seconds (“In recent years, several strategies have been attempted to prepare omniphobic surfaces that repel both polar and apolar liquids. However, they are complex owing to the challenge of creating surfaces with ultra-low contact angle hysteresis, which is what causes liquids to bead and easily slide off a surface. One method is to covalently attach flexible groups onto smooth surfaces to create a slippery liquid-like layer. But this approach is usually time-consuming and involves complicated synthetic chemistry. Now, Liming Wang and Thomas McCarthy at the University of Massachusetts, US, have devised a way to create such smooth and slippery coatings without complex synthetic chemistry and long reaction times. Their method so simple it involves just one step and takes minutes to achieve at room temperature.”)
7. This Gadget Can Tell What’s Wrong with Your Air Conditioner by Listening to It Augury’s gadget and iPhone app pay attention to ultrasonic sounds and vibrations to figure out what’s wrong with air conditioners and other big machines.
8. Turning Red Blood Cells into Versatile Drug Carriers A startup aims to treat hard-to-treat diseases with genetically modified blood cells. (“Genetically engineering red blood cells to turn them into drug-delivery vehicles could open the door to a vast number of new therapies. And since mature red cells don’t carry any genetic material, they would also carry fewer safety risks than other gene and cell therapies. That’s the idea behind the technology unveiled today by Rubius, an 18-month-old company founded by Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rubius’s first drug will be for phenylketonuria, or PKU, a devastating genetic disorder that renders people with the disease unable to digest the amino acid phenylalanine, which is found in most high-protein foods.”)
9. For Cocaine Addicts, Treatment with Magnets May Stop Craving Can magnetic stimulation of the brain shake drug users out of their habits? (“Now the results of the study, involving 29 cocaine addicts seeking treatment at a Padua clinic, are out. They suggest that the magnetic stimulation treatment significantly reduced both cocaine use and cravings. Stefano says his desire for cocaine diminished dramatically after several sessions under the magnet. … The findings, presented in the European journal Neuropsychopharmacology ….  are generating optimism among addiction researchers, because there are no effective drug treatments available for cocaine addicts. There is also a theoretical framework to explain why stimulating the brain with magnets might work, since experiments earlier this year produced similar effects in cocaine-addicted rats. ... Invented in the 1980s, TMS has grown in popularity in recent years and was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for depression in 2008. The exact mechanism by which it works is not fully understood. But addiction appears to establish signaling patterns in the brain that compel people to compulsively seek the drug, and applying TMS could disrupt the pattern, just as noise can interfere with a radio signal.”)
10. New Sepsis Detector Shrinks the Diagnosis from Days to Hours Sepsis affects more than a million people every year in the U.S. alone, and diagnosis can take five days. A new tool cuts the time to five hours.
11. Healthy or sick? Tiny cell bubbles may hold the answer (“In a new study, published in Current Biology, Rutgers scientists isolated and profiled these sub-micron sized cells, known as extracellular vesicles (EVs) in adult C. elegans and identified 335 genes that provide significant information about the biology of EVs and their relationship to human diseases. ... determined that 10 percent of the 335 identified genes in the roundworm regulate the formation, release, and possible function of the EVs. Understanding how EVs are made, dispersed and communicate with other cells can shed light on the difference between EVs carrying sickness or health. ... For decades scientists believed that the EV material released by some human cells - which can only be seen through high-tech electron microscopes - was nothing more than biological debris. ... But Barr said using C. elegans, which have many genes similar to humans, Rutgers scientists have identified new pathways that could control the production of EVs and the cargo they carry, including the proteins responsible for polycystic kidney disease, the most commonly inherited disease in humans. The polycystic kidney disease gene products are secreted in tiny EVs from both humans and worms and no one knows why these proteins are in the EVs, she said.”)
12. Researchers Take a Step Toward Vocal Cord Transplants An achievement in tissue engineering suggests that people with damaged vocal cords could eventually get new ones. (“The researchers implanted the engineered tissue into a larynx that had been taken from a dog and had one of its vocal cords removed. They demonstrated that the lab-made tissue vibrates and sounds like healthy tissue. (Click on the video below to hear the sound the tissue makes when researchers push air through the larynx.) Further tests in mice showed that the tissue elicited a minimal immune response, raising the researchers’ hopes that such implants could eventually work in people.”)
13. Study Reveals Potential Treatment for Life-Threatening Viral Infections (“Scientists ... have shown for the first time how a previously unknown process works to promote infection in a number of dangerous viruses, including dengue, West Nile and Ebola.
    The new study also points to a potential treatment, an experimental antibiotic that appears to inhibit infection by these deadly viruses, all of which lack vaccines and treatments. ... “Most of these viruses use a specific molecule to enter cells,” …  “In the new study, we were able to show how a second molecule plays a major and previously unknown role in that process. We also show an antibiotic called duramycin inhibits the actions of this molecule.”)
14. A sound idea for treating lung disease (“They electrically stimulated a circuit on top of a piezoelectric lithium niobate chip, triggering 'nano-earthquakes' known surface acoustic waves (SAWs). These waves are like small earthquakes travelling only along the surface of the chip, creating vibrations that consequently turn a stem cell solution into an aerosol. … SAWs operate at sufficiently high frequencies (10–100MHz) to nebulise the cells over a much shorter period compared to conventional nebulisers, eliminating the risk of lysis or denaturisation. Their device also enables the nebulisation of cells at very low power, only 1.5W, meaning it can be battery powered and about the size of a mobile phone.”)
15. Cockroach swarming pheromones produced by gut bacteria
16. Study points to metal powders as potential replacement for fossil fuels
17. Researchers confirm original blood vessels in 80 million-year-old fossil
18. Spin current on topological insulator detected electrically at room temperature (“Topological insulators are insulators inside the bulk, but are conducting on their surfaces with less resistance than the conventional materials. This is possible due to their uniquely strong interaction between electrons' spin and orbital angular momentum with their time reversal symmetry. The interaction is so strong that the spin angular momentum of the electrons is locked perpendicular to their momentum, and generates a spontaneous spin polarized current on the surfaces of topological insulators by applying an electric field.”)
19. Physicists investigate unusual form of quantum mechanics (“However, a few exotic quantum systems cannot be represented by wave functions, and so do not obey the associative property but instead are described by nonassociative algebra. One example of a nonassociative quantum system is a group of magnetic monopoles, which are hypothetical magnetic particles that have only a north or a south pole, not both like ordinary magnets.
    One of the intriguing consequences of the nonassociative property in quantum mechanics is a "triple" uncertainty relation. "The usual uncertainty relation limits the precision of simultaneous measurements of position and momentum," ... "The triple one limits the precision of simultaneous measurements of all three components of the momentum vector, provided there are magnetic monopoles.”)
20. Scientists Find Protein 'Talks' to Wrong Partners in Cystic Fibrosis (“By removing this chatter, researchers partially restored the protein’s normal function. The findings suggest that therapies could one day treat the root cause of cystic fibrosis, not just the symptoms.”)