LJWorld.com

OK maybe not, but a fellow in Santa Fe is suing his neighbor because she refuses to turn of her electronic devices when not in use including WiFi. He claims to be suffering from something called an electromagnetic "allergy". The whole thing reminds me of the controversy about alleged risks to human health associated with living near power lines. People who claim to have electromagnetic "allergies" exhibit a host of vague symptoms. I'm trying to keep an open mind about this but the limited information I have seen on this suggests that this sort of "allergy" is largely psychosomatic. But hey, I'm open minded here. After all other animals are sensitive to magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation so why not people? But does that sensitivity really translate into health risks?

Do electromagnetic "allergies" really exist? Do you think you have this sort of syndrome (a better term than allergy by the way)? Is my new Droid a health risk? Or can I breathe easy and use my G3 and WiFi with impunity?

See this link for details about the man's claim.

It's good to start 2010 on a hopeful note, in this case new clues about the origin of the infectious cancer threatening the Tasmanian Devil.

In addition to the LJW article, readers might want to check out this article in the NYTimes Science section.

The research study's abstract is at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/327/5961/84/

The Science site also has a pod cast with the research study's lead author: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;327/5961/84/DC2

The authors of the report in science suggest that the infectious cancer originated once in a mutated Schwann cell in a devil about 20 years ago. Schwann cells wrap around the axons of many nerve cells and speed up the transmission of nerve signals. The hope is that knowing the origin of the cancer will help in the development of a vaccine to protect the remaining Devils, assuming we can figure out why the devil's immune system doesn't reject the foreign tumor cells.

One thing that strikes me about people's ability to understand science is that people do not have a good grasp of the span of geological time. A good example is in Lee Gerhard's recent opinion piece in the Journal World, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/dec....

Dr. Gehard makes he following claims:

"Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history. "

"Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant. "

Well the first claim is certainly is true, if you for instance inspect this interesting graph:

Geocarb_III-Mine-03.jpg

http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2009/10/climate-change-science-overview.html

But notice the time scale is in millions of years. Indeed if you enlarge the chart and look at the lower right corner where we get to recent history, carbon dioxide levels appear to be higher than at any time in the past 20 million years.

Let's look more closely at recent geological history using ice core data:

icecoredata.jpg

http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/climatechange/figure_1.jpg/image_view

Notice a couple of things. First of all current carbon dioxide concentrations appear way out of line from historical norms over the last 400,000 years. This is relevant because we are subjecting the biosphere to a rapid increase in carbon dioxide not in the evolutionary experience of modern organisms.

Let's turn to Dr. Gehard's second claim of no statistically significant correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide. This has been examined for the ice core data and the correlation between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration turns out to be highly significant. Roughly 89% of the variance in temperature is related to variance in carbon dioxide concentration.

See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6846/full/412523a0.html

Of course correlation does not mean causality as the tobacco companies were once found of reminding us, but this tight relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide is quite striking and needs explaining even if, as could be the case, there is some other factor triggering the initial temperature rise. Perhaps Dr. Gehard means something else by the interesting phrase "temperature change" and perhaps he could explain it here and provide references to this. But from my end his essay merely illustrates how much can be unconsciously obscured by examining a time frame that is not relevant to the problem at hand!

Octopuses have a reputation as being very smart invertebrates. But check out this coconut collecting octopus reported in Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/video.cfm?id=57388094001

The original article's abstract is at http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2809%2901914-9

What makes this interesting is not just the use of the coconut shells as shelter-hermit crabs do something like that with shells-but that the octopus stores them for future use. Also this particular octopus also can walk on two hind legs which leads me to wonder if we are seeing an organism that could replace us assuming we don't muck things up so badly that the only life left consists of the sorts of hardy single celled organisms that existed around 3.5 billion years ago.

We are just beginning to understand the cognitive abilities of these critters. For a good discussion of octopus mental abilities see http://www.thecephalopodpage.org/behavior.php

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oct...

I hate year end reviews, which will probably be doubled in number this year since people have this idea that years that end in nine or zero are somehow important. For those that LIKE year end reviews the NY Times has done all the work for you with the 9th Annual Year in Ideas. This review includes semi serious stuff such as the epidemiology of zombies, and the latest in high fashion "Stiletto Claws", to sobering ideas such as the notion that evolutionary innovations in the biosphere have led to mass extinctions "Life's Greatest Hits" to "Lithium in the Water Supply".

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/

They did miss a few such as iPhones as musical instruments but nobody's perfect.

This is as close to a year end review you will get from me. I promise.

There was an interesting exchange this morning on National Public radio between Steve Levitt of SuperFreakonomics fame and Peter Frumhoff from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Levitt has proposed geo-engineering solutions as a stop gap measure to deal with global warming. The geo-engineering solution they discussed was pumping sulfur dioxide in to the stratosphere. The idea is to increase the amount of sunlight reflected away from the atmosphere. That this could work is well known, since violent volcanic eruptions inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and the atmosphre does indeed cool.

Levitt argues that this geoengineering approach will be cheaper and quicker than spending roughly 2% of GDP to reduce carbon dioxide output. Frumhoff argues that geo-engineering approaches carry significant risks and that we are simply substituting one global experiment with another. Also Frumhoff argues that many geo-engineering approaches don't address the other affects of increasing carbon dioxide concentration such as making the oceans more acid.

Listen to the discussion for yourself at the link below:

This jumping spider is maybe an 1/8" long. It is currently hanging out among my house plants.

The climate noosphere is in an uproar about a bunch of e-mails there were hacked from a global climate site. The e-mails are allegedly from prominent climate scientists and date from the late 1990's. According to this article in the NY Times at least some of the e-mails don't show climate scientists in a very favorable light. For instance one e-mail talks about using a statistical trick, another e-mail calls global warming skeptics "idiots".

Of course skeptics are chortling over what they see as proof that global warming is a hoax and that climate scientists are trying to hide stuff, while the climate scientists involved in the e-mail exchanges seem to view the exchanges as normal give and take between scientists.

I have actually looked at some of the e-mails and quite frankly a lot of it really does look like the kind of give and take that people taking a particular position might have. Somehow I doubt that a similar hack of climate skeptic e-mails would be any different.

It is clear that the scientists involved are aware of the skeptics and how skeptics might react if certain data sets are not properly explained:

"Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don't think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I'd hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!"

Well at any rate, I think this is typical scientific e-mail give and take in a highly politicized arena (been there myself) and I don't think that global warming skeptics should make too much of this stuff. Besides if they are crying foul because some one who disagrees with them in a private e-mail refers to them as idiots then maybe they ought to get thicker skins.

Don't take my word for it. You too can sleuth evil climate scientists e-mail by going to the following site and enter your favorite search term!

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php

Of course I would love to have an equivalent set of e-mails between global warming skeptics - maybe working for a large oil company or perhaps a certain large business group that will go unnamed -and I just bet a little judicious browsing would yield lots of choice quotes. But of course hacking e-mails is wrong, a minor point seems to have been lost in this whole tea pot tempest.

For full disclosure, I have used the word idiot at least 27 times in my e-mail career, all of them of course quite justified.

A few months ago I saw a claim that if theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking were in Britain with its socialized medicine he would have been dead by now. I blew it off as another stupid comment but apparently this comment has gotten repeated all over the web. The problem of course is the it is not true as Larry Krauss reminds us in this article in Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=war-is-peace

So why do people repeat that sort of tripe?

Krauss asks

"What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not."

My thought is that whether we are dealing with health care, global warming or various sorts of social issues, we get an emotional high from thinking we are going to win, pull the wool over our opponent's head. Or maybe repetition of simple nostrums and unexamined falsehoods provides us with a sense of security when dealing with the unknown. Maybe such behavior was at one point adaptive maintaining some sort of group cohesion.

Krauss phrases his arguments with examples from the right, but I don't think people of any ideology are immune to this. As I commented in a post to one of my readers it is if we are stuck in a strange attractor or the sort of cycling that a person's brain might get into when they are depressed and can't get out.

As Krauss so ably observes, quoting apparently from an earlier Krauss commentary:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

So take a look at the Krauss article and let me know what you think. Only be careful. Check your falsehoods at the door.

Even the simplest most every day happenings reveal surprises when seen at a different scale or a different speed. Enjoy this video of falling water drops coalescing with the surface of water. There are at least two effects going on here as the video explains.

Tip of the antennae to Sarah S for the find.