When Will The Genes Of Human Existential Threat Be Discovered?

Posted: 9/25/2015

Trigger

Yesterday, I listened as usual to National Public Radio while on my commute to work. Well, NPR interviewed an environmentalism expert on climate change in conjunction with the pope visit to the U.S. This man kept repeating at least three times or so during this short interview what an existential threat climate change was to humans.

Positive Gene Editing

If we only could identify and modify the genes responsible for why so many humans are afflicted by perceived and excessive existential threats, we could finally put all these doomsayers out of business.

The corollary would be to identify and strengthen the genes responsible for human optimism and ingenuity.

Not Every Black Church Shooter Is White

Posted: 9/23/2015

Trigger

Just read Police: Man Suspected in Church Shooting Upset Over Breakup. I saw another article about this crime. Neither the racial affiliation of the perpetrator nor of the churchgoers is really mentioned in this article.

Here is another news article regarding this even by Yahoo News. At least this article mentions that “was visited by President Barack Obama this year for its significance in the civil rights struggle”.

The Racial Identity Concealed

ABC as well as another major news source (forgot which one) leave it to the reader to guess the race of the shooter. The other source at least showed a picture of the suspect. Is this just a coincidence? Doubt it!

Apparently, this shooting does not fit the official narrative!

The Fed Is A Bunch Of Cowards

Published: 9/17/2015

Today, the Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen again failed to raise interest rates. The cowards at the Fed could not even raise it by 25 basis points to finally start the process towards higher interest rates.

I have blogged here many times about the irresponsible and reckless monetary policy pursued by Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and now Janet Yellen. So I will not repeat myself.

Latest Polar Bear Propaganda Photo

Posted: 9/18/2015 Updated: 9/19/2015

Update Of 9/19/2015

After I wrote my blog post, I discovered that National Review also had a critical article about this picture here. In this article, they were arguing this could be an ill or injured polar bear or that there always exist emaciated looking members of any animal population.

Trigger

This photo, which was recently widely distributed on social media.

Here is a brief article about this picture The Polar Bear Photo Seen around the World. According to this article the photographer is identified as Kerstin Langenberger. The photographer is a German female. Here is her story about the picture in German language (here is the english version). She also claims she had seen other starving and starved to death polar bears.

Propaganda Photo

Most likely this is just one more of the many propaganda photos of polar bear plight.

I did not see exactly when and where this photo was taken. The photographer claims it was taken on the island of Spitsbergen (Svalbard) archipelago, but she does not say in her online story when she took this photo. Where there any witnesses present when this photo was taken? Was this bear just returning from hibernation and therefore not well fed?

The photographer studied environmentalism and is affiliated with Greenpeace according to her website.

According to Wikipedia about 3,000 polar bears live on that archipelago and they are a major tourist attraction. Could it be an overpopulation of polar bears?

Note On PBS Robert F. Kennedy Documentary

Posted: 9/16/2015

Trigger

Just watched American Experience Robert F Kennedy PBS Documentary. I would definitely recommend this documentary.

Sirhan Sirhan

The documentary spent only about 1-2 minutes on the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as if it was just another killing in the 1960s. We only learn the name of the assassin and where it happened. Nothing else. This is lousy work by the creators of this documentary.

That the assassin is still alive and serving his prison term the viewer would never know. The killer was born in Jerusalem. He is a Jordanian citizen. His assassination is perhaps one of the first major terrorist acts of Arabs/Muslims against Western countries, predating the 1972 Olympic Games massacre of Israeli athletes.

When reading some of the detailed circumstances of RFK’s murder one wonders how the assassin knew where RFK would be at that time since his path inside the hotel to the next event were changed ad hoc.

Did the killer really act alone?

Recycling Of Carbon Dioxide From Air Is Imminent

Posted: 9/13/2015

Trigger

Just read Feature: Conjuring chemical cornucopias out of thin air. This is not the first time I read about research aiming at removing CO2 out of the air and transforming it into useful molecules or precursors etc.

This challenge for human ingenuity is about to be solved as will be the production of carbon based fuels making the extraction of fossil fuels superfluous in the near future.

Salient Quotes

1. “Last month, for example, Stuart Licht, a chemist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues reported in Nano Letters that they had developed a version of their solar reactor technology (see main story) that can take CO2 out of the air and convert it into solid carbon nanofibers.”
2. “A small New Jersey–based company called Liquid Light is working to commercialize technology for converting CO2 into ethylene glycol, a commodity chemical with a $27 billion annual market.”
3. “Another company, Skyonic, recently opened a demonstration plant in Texas that turns CO2 into baking soda, hydrochloric acid, and bleach.”

Fascinating Documentary About New South African Hominides

Posted: 9/13/2015

Trigger

Just watched NOVA Dawn of Humanity presented by PBS and National Geographic.

It’s absolutely fascinating how to watch these latest, greatest discoveries of new hominids in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa as they happened. The viewer witnesses spectacular science unfolding right in front of the eyes as if the viewer is part of the expedition.

Social media were employed by the lead scientist Lee Berger to find tiny archaeologists for the three week project to dig up the bones of the Rising Star cave. 50 some people applied  immediately hailing from all over the world of which were many (petite) women.

Earliest Human Burial?

Nobody can be sure at this point, but the many humanoid bones found deep inside the Rising Star cave without the presence of any other animal bones suggest this was perhaps even a burial place perhaps dating up to 2 million years old.

Europeans Ban Cloning Of Farm Animals Nonsense

Posted: 9/12/2015

Trigger

Just read E.U. parliament votes to ban cloning of farm animals

We read “The European Parliament today [9/8/2015] voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals as well as the sale of cloned livestock, their offspring, and products derived from them. The measure, which passed by a large margin, goes beyond a directive proposed by the European Commission in 2013, which would have implemented a provisional ban on the cloning of just five species: cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses.” (emphasis added).

European Luddites

The ban by the European Parliament “does not cover cloning for research purposes, nor does it prevent efforts to clone endangered species.” I presume, it does not cover pets either. 

Do these European fools still believe Europe is the center of the world? Another bout of navel gazing by Europeans.  Do they believe the rest of the world will stand still now?

“Companies in the United States and in China are cloning livestock for breeding and for research purposes, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found no significant differences between healthy clones and healthy animals from conventional breeding. It considers meat and other products form clones to be as safe as that from other farm animals.”

Latest Blunders Of European Foreign Policy

Posted: 9/11/2015

The Refugee Crisis

Why did the European countries threaten to punish airlines and probably ship operators with fines if they carried refugees to Europe as reported? Most of the harrowing losses of lives in the Mediterranean Sea would not have happened if would be refugees just boarded a plane or a ship to Europe for a few hundred dollars.

Why did the European countries not do more to establish and finance safe zones for displaced or internal refugees in Syria? Why did European countries refuse to intervene more forcefully in Syria to get rid of dictator Assad? Because of Putin?

Why did European countries not do more to establish and finance refugee camps in neighboring countries?

Why did European countries not allow for refugees to apply for asylum closer to the areas of conflict like Syria or Afghanistan?

Really Bad Iran Deal

Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are guilty of repeating the appeasement of Munich 1938 called officially “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”

It is just beyond incomprehensible that these three, major  European countries became complicit in this naive and stupid deal.

If any of these foolish European politicians had any vision they would have insisted e.g. that Iran first signs a peace treaty with Israel since Iran claims to pursue nuclear power for purely peaceful reasons. In particular I blame the German foreign minister Frank Steinmeier, who I think is a really dull knife in the kitchen drawer.

Abandoning Afghanistan, Iraq, And Libya

It’s bad enough if a socialist community organizer in the White House withdraws all troops in a hurry from these hot spots. For the European countries it was another abject abdication of responsibility and an enormous complicity in foolishness.

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (16)

Posted: 9/8/2015

1. A Red Flag for a Neurodegenerative Disease That May Be Transmissible Animal experiments show how a just-discovered prion triggers a rare Parkinson’s-like disease (“Scientists claim to have discovered the first new human prion in almost 50 years. ... The resulting illness in this case is multiple system atrophy (MSA), a neurodegenerative disease similar to Parkinson's. The study, published August 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds weight to the idea that many neurodegenerative diseases are caused by prions.”)
2. Metasurface Optics for Better Cellphone Cameras and 3-D Displays (“Engineers at the California Institute of Technology have created a metasurface out of tiny pillars of silicon that act as waveguides for light. The way they arrange the pillars allows them to control the phase of light passing through the surface; this ability gives them control over how the light is focused, as well as its polarization, which is important for uses such as liquid crystal displays and 3-D glasses. Metasurfaces are structured planes so thin that they count as being two-dimensional; their periodic designs manipulate light in unusual ways. … The metasurface could provide the optics for an LCD to create a 3-D display viewable from many angles without glasses.What’s more, all of this can be done using the same lithography techniques used to build computer chips, doing away with individual fabrication and manual alignment of components.”)
3. Synthetic Life Seeks Work A startup company says it is expanding the language of DNA to create new tools for drug discovery.
4. The Next Great GMO Debate Deep inside its labs, Monsanto is learning how to modify crops by spraying them with RNA rather than tinkering with their genes. (“The experiment took advantage of a mechanism called RNA interference. It’s a way to temporarily turn off the activity of any gene. In this case, the gene being shut down was one vital to the insect’s survival.”)
5. Meltdown-Proof Nuclear Reactors Get a Safety Check in Europe Researchers say they could build a prototype of a molten salt reactor, a safer, cleaner nuclear power option, in 10 years.
6. Antimatter 'surfs' to higher energies on a plasma wave (I think, the title is kind of misleading! This is more about the next generation of powerful electron-positron colliders. “A new technique that accelerates positrons much more efficiently than conventional particle accelerators has been unveiled at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US. The technology has the potential to make future positron accelerators more powerful yet more compact, and could also be used to boost the maximum collision energy of existing electron/positron colliders. … One such method is "plasma wakefield acceleration", which was first demonstrated in 2007 and involves firing bunches of electrons into a plasma. An initial "drive" bunch repels the free electrons in the plasma, and this creates a charge-density wave. A second, trailing bunch of electrons "surfs" this wave and gains energy very rapidly. In 2014 Sebastien Corde and researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, and international colleagues, accelerated electrons through a gradient of 4.4 GeV/m using this method. ”)
7. Nanotubes energize laser-accelerated ions (“An international research team has used carbon nanotubes to enhance the efficiency of laser acceleration, bringing table-top sources for carbon-ion therapy a step closer to reality. ”)
8. Arizona’s virgin ant queens could shed light on the predictability of evolution (“To cope, the now-isolated [ant] colonies evolved an identical strategy: The queens lost their wings. New research shows that these parallel adaptations could shed light on a longstanding debate on the predictability of evolution. … For example, the expression of a key gene involved in cell differentiation varied in each of the populations. Other genetic changes repeated themselves in each group, presumably because there are a limited number of ways to make wingless queens. For example, four genes involved in wing patterning all had similarly changed patterns of expression. This is the first study in wild populations to show that adaptation to climate change is a “mosaic” of random and predictable genetic changes”)
9. 'Decorated' graphene is a superconductor (“Damascelli and co-workers prepared their samples by growing layers of graphene on silicon-carbide substrates, and then very precisely depositing lithium atoms onto the graphene – a process known as "decorating" – in a vacuum at 8 K.
   The team then studied the properties of the samples using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, which exploits the photoelectric effect to measure the momentum and kinetic energy of electrons in a solid. ... an effect that they attributed to enhanced electron–phonon coupling. Crucially, they also showed that this greater coupling leads to superconductivity by identifying an energy gap between the material's conducting and non-conducting electrons – which is the energy needed to break Cooper pairs. At 0.9 meV, the measured value of this gap implies a transition temperature of about 5.9 K – as compared with Profeta and colleagues' prediction of up to about 8 K.”)
10. Wasps drink special nectar to self-medicate (“Wasps can tell when a parasite infiltrates their body, ... they seek out a type of nectar that’s ... a pretty potent antiparasite medicine, says Discover magazine. The collection of compounds responsible for the decline in parasites (including nicotine) can cut the infection by 50%”)
11. Physicists claim 'loophole-free' Bell-violation experiment (“The first "loophole-free" measurement of the violation of Bell's inequality by a quantum system has been claimed by physicists in the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. Their experiment involves entangling spins in diamonds separated by 1.28 km and then measuring correlations between the spins. … In this latest work, Ronald Hanson and colleagues at the Delft University of Technology, along with researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona and the diamond-maker Element Six in Oxford, have eliminated what they consider to be the two most significant loopholes that can arise in Bell-violation experiments. Crucially, they have done so simultaneously in one experiment, which had not been done before.”)
12. Scientists Uncover Surprising Mechanism Behind Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (“Now, scientists at TSRI have discovered that the important human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, develops resistance to this drug by “switching on” a previously uncharacterized set of genes. Using DNA sequencing technology, the researchers identified a group of genes that work together to fill in for SPase.
    They found that, in the absence of SPase, a protein called AyrR switches these genes on to produce proteins called AyrA and AyrBC, which can also cleave off the peptide postal-code sequences.”)
13. Study by TSRI and Janssen Makes Major Advance Toward More Effective, Long-Lasting Flu Vaccine (“... found a way to induce antibodies to fight a wide range of influenza subtypes—work that could one day eliminate the need for repeated seasonal flu shots. … Researchers zeroed in on a possible target: a protein on the surface of influenza, called hemagglutinin (HA). HA is present on all subtypes of influenza, providing the key viral “machinery” that enables the virus to enter cells. Most importantly, the long “stem” region of HA, which connects the virus to cells, plays such a crucial role that mutations at the site are unlikely to be passed on.”)
14. Ants have group-level personalities, study shows (“To determine how group behavior might vary between ant colonies, a team of researchers led by Raphaël Boulay, an entomologist at the University of Tours in France, tested the insects in a controlled laboratory environment. They collected 27 colonies of the funnel ant (Aphaenogaster senilis) and had queens rear new workers in the lab. …
    The researchers then observed how each colony foraged for food and explored new environments. They counted the number of ants foraging, exploring, or hiding during set periods of time, and then compared the numbers to measure the boldness, adventurousness, and foraging efforts of each group. They also measured risk tolerance by gradually increasing the temperature of the ants’ foraging area from 26°C to 60°C. …
    When they reviewed their data, the scientists found strong personality differences between colonies, they reported online this month in Behavioral Ecology. Some were bold, adventurous risk-takers with highly active foragers. Others were shy, risk-averse, and fearful of new environments. ”)
15. Massive volcanoes began erupting hundreds of thousands of years before Earth’s largest extinction (“Now, researchers have solved the mystery—using radioactive dating techniques to determine the ages of hundreds of uranium-bearing crystals taken from ancient volcanic rocks collected from sites scattered across a 2.5-million-square-kilometer region of central Russia. Some crystals came from material that had explosively erupted from Earth’s surface and then accumulated in layers hundreds of meters thick ... The earliest phases of the volcanism began about 300,000 years before the onset of the end-of-Permian extinctions, ... All told, an estimated 4 million cubic kilometers of molten material emanated from Siberian peaks and fissures over the course of about 800,000 years, with about two-thirds of that spilling forth before and during the mass extinction. ”)
16. More evidence to support quantum theory’s ‘spooky action at a distance’

Way Too Many And Overpaid Firefighters

Posted: 9/8/2015

Trigger

Just read Fewer fires, so why are there far more firefighters?. The author makes a strong case that e.g. municipalities could save billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money reducing the size of their fire departments.

I apologize that I quote so liberally from the article above, but this article is well written.

Salient Quotes

Emphasis added:

1. “Rapid improvements in fire safety have caused a dramatic drop in the number of blazes, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Buildings are constructed with fire-resistant materials; clothing and curtains are made of flame-retardant fabrics; and municipal laws mandate sprinkler systems and smoke detectors. The striking results: On highways, vehicle fires declined 64 percent from 1980 to 2013. Building fires fell 54 percent during that time. When they break out, sprinkler systems almost always extinguish the flames before firefighters can turn on a hose.
   
   But oddly, as the number of fires has dropped, the ranks of firefighters have continued to grow — significantly. There are half as many fires as there were 30 years ago, but about 50 percent more people are paid to fight them.”
2. “It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that cities began establishing fire departments with full-time staffs, as the cost of firefighting grew and more training was needed to operate new steam engines. The size and complexity of structure fires during the era also demanded more professionalism. Almost all of the nation’s deadliest fires occurred between 1850 and 1950.”
3. “Firefighters responded to 487,500 structure fires across the United States in 2013, which means each of the nation’s 30,000 fire departments saw just one every 22 days, on average. And yet, taxpayers are paying more people to staff these departments 24-7. As a result, the amount of money shelled out for local fire services more than doubled from 1987 to 2011, to $44.8 billion, accounting for inflation.”
4. “Firefighters earned a median salary of $45,250 in 2012, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but overtime can more than double that. In Los Angeles, for example, the average firefighter was paid more than $142,000 in 2013, including overtime and bonuses, the Los Angeles Times reported. Exorbitant overtime costs are fueled by union-negotiated minimum-staffing levels that often mandate four firefighters per engine be on duty at all times, regardless of the cost or workload.”
5. “So “fire” department has become a misnomer. In practice, these agencies have become emergency medical responders. The problem with that? Most communities already have ambulance services, whose staffs are less expensive and more highly trained in medical aid. Many cities mandate that their firefighters be certified EMTs, which requires about 120 to 150 hours of training in basic emergency medical care. That’s far less than the up to 1,800 hours of training for the paramedics who staff emergency medical services. Yet paramedics are cheaper than firefighters, earning a median of $31,020 in 2012.”
6. “Protecting a sizable city with a volunteer force is possible. Since 1930, the city of Pasadena, Tex., has used 200 active and 50 semi-active volunteer firefighters to protect its now more than 150,000 residents. If all towns up to that size moved to all-volunteer forces, the national payroll of career firefighters would be reduced by more than half. Using the median firefighter salary, municipalities would save more than $8.8 billion a year in base pay.”