Category Archives: science

current affairs, science

Fukushima Follow-ups

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Just a quick note of a couple of follow-up pieces on the Fukushima accident which appeared this week.

First off there is a WHO report looking at the likely long-term health effects of the accident. I’ve clearly not read the whole report but there is a good summary of the main findings on Nature News here and here. The main thrust is that, as has always been said, the radiation effects on the affected citizens are likely to be negligible and far outweighed by the psychological trauma.

Secondly Robert Cringely in his blog I, Cringely writes about what he sees as the inevitability of a further major accident at Fukushima — and one which may be far worse. Basically his contention is that a further large earthquake is inevitable before the Japanese manage to clean up the exposed fuel rods from Reactor 4. No only is this a huge project in its own right but Cringely maintains it will be made worse by the totally dysfunctional way in which Japanese business works (or rather doesn’t work). It makes chilling reading; let’s just hope he’s wrong.

history, links, science

In Case You Missed …

Another in our occasional series of links to interesting items you may have missed. First several scientific items.

Why is there a universe? Where did it appear from? Sean Carroll investigates.

Singing Mice? Yes they really do sing! And no-one knew until recently.

Next, an interesting summary of the history of the last 200 years in surgery. Just be thankful you live now and not then!

And after all that heavy stuff here are some great examples of the humour of taxonomists. Never let it be sad that scientists are terminally dull.

And finally for the scientific, here’s a report of a rather pretty and extremely rare strawberry blonde leopard (above) spotted in the wild.

Back to the heavy stuff for a minute, here’s an important examination of the interaction of gender and world politics. Seems those countries which are worst on gender equality are also the least stable.

Finally something completely different. Scholars are suggesting that a previously unexamined Elizabethan map of America provides clue to a lost colony.

medical, science

Plastic Animals

Yesterday we took a trip to London’s Natural History Museum. I’ve not been inside the NHM for maybe 50 years although I go past fairly frequently. I left feeling strangely disappointed.

We went mainly to the the latest Gunther von Hagens exhibition, Animals Inside Out, which is a display of his plastination, anatomical and display skills. It is the animal equivalent of the blockbuster Bodyworlds, which I’ve still not managed to see.

Von Hagens’s skills are incredible. And the displays were interesting, revealing and illuminating. They varied from the tiny brain of a hare to a complete giraffe; from a scallop to a shark. The blockbuster pieces had to be the giraffe, an elephant and an entire bull. Oh and this camel which is outside the (paid) exhibition in the impressive Central Hall of NHM underneath the dinosaur’s tail!

Plastinated Camel Plastinated Camel

The actual display pieces were amazing. But having said that I was disappointed. We spent about 45 minutes in the exhibition. I would have liked to spend longer there, and would have done had there been any more to see. The expense of putting on an exhibition like this is immense; GOK how much it costs and how much time it takes to plastinate an ostrich, let alone a bull or a giraffe! But even so I felt the exhibition was a bit thin, both in the number and variety of exhibits and the information provided. I would have liked many more examples.

Especially I would have liked a lot more explanation of what I was looking at. My anatomy is pretty damn good for a non-medic/zoologist/vet. I know where a fish’s gill plates are but does Joey Schoolboy? But I don’t know the detail of how a sheep’s guts are arranged. And I wanted to be told, if only with some labelled diagrams. I felt the explanatory texts were much too terse. OK many people don’t want, and can’t take in, huge amounts of detail. So put that detail in separate panels which they can choose not to read.

Oh, you mean the detail is all in the book of the exhibition? But why do I have to buy the book? OK so it’s only £12.99, but I neither want nor need the book. I wanted to be told what I was looking at! But then the exhibition is only £9 (full price) which I thought very reasonably priced — I’d expected it to be more like £15 or even £20. So I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

After the exhibition we went to the main restaurant for coffee and cake (the NHM has something like four food outlets and as many shops!). This was another depressing experience. The restaurant system is so arcane (and unwelcoming) they have to employ someone full time to explain it to people. The décor was fairly dire. The only saving grace was that the chocolate fudge cake was fairly good.

Then after that I wanted to look at the fishes. What fishes?! The fish displays seem to consist of four wall displays tucked in a blind corridor at the back of nowhere. And totally uninteresting. This was old style museum display at its worst: a selection of almost random exhibits stuck in a case with nothing to make it at all interesting, no obvious variety of different biotypes (marine vs freshwater; tropical vs temperate). The marine invertebrate displays next door were exactly the same: a huge room with very boring displays in wall cases and nothing else.

After that, and looking at the plastinated camel and (over-hyped) dinosaur in the Central Hall my back was complaining so we didn’t investigate further. Maybe we should have done and maybe some of the other displays would have been better, but it didn’t look enticing. So we gave in and came home.

OK so what’s the bottom line?

If you’re interested in the broad ideas of how animals work then do go and see Animals Inside Out. It is worth the admission charge; just don’t expect too much. If you go expecting anatomical detail and explanation, as I did, you’ll be disappointed. And judging by our experience if you go on a mid-week early afternoon during school term the exhibition will be quiet.

As for the rest, frankly I won’t be going back in a hurry.

Sorry guys, but I much expect better of major world museum in this day and age.

medical, quotes, science, thoughts

Gardening the Mind

I came across the following quote from Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight on the interwebs the other day. It seems a good take on personal development and personal responsibility.

I view the garden in my mind as a sacred patch of cosmic real estate that the universe has entrusted me to tend over the years of my lifetime. As an independent agent, I and I alone, in conjunction with the molecular genius of my DNA and the environmental factors I am exposed to, will decorate this space within my cranium. In the early years, I may have minimal input into what circuits grow inside my brain because I am the product of the dirt and seeds I have inherited. But to our good fortune, the genius of our DNA is not a dictator, and thanks to our neurons’ plasticity, the power of thought, and the wonders of modern medicine, very few outcomes are absolute.

Regardless of the garden I have inherited, once I consciously take over the responsibility of tending my mind, I choose to nurture those circuits that I want to grow, and consciously prune back those circuits I prefer to live without.

Although it is easier for me to nip a weed when it is just a sprouting bud, with determination and perseverance even the gnarliest of vines, when deprived of fuel, will eventually lose its strength and fall to the side.

ramblings, science

Aliens, but not as we know them

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This is the title of an interesting article by Ian Bogost in the 7 April 2012 issue of New Scientist. In it Bogost posits the question: Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens?

Answer: It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing.

I can’t link the article as it’s behind a paywall, but here are a few salient snippets.

[E]verything is an alien to everything else. And second, the experience of “being” something else can never be verified or validated …

[W]hy should we be so self-centred as to think that aliens are beings whose intelligence we might recognise as intelligence? … a true alien might well have an intelligence that is, well, alien to ours …

[L]et’s assume they are all around us, and at all scales – everything from dogs, penguins and trees to cornbread, polyester and neutrons. If we do this, we can ask a different question: what do objects experience? What is it like to be a thing? …

[W]hy is it so strange to ponder the experience of objects, even while knowing objects don’t really have “experiences” as you or I do? …

This kind of engagement will necessitate a new alliance between science and philosophy … From a common Enlightenment origin, studies of human culture split. Science broke down the biological, physical and cosmological world into smaller and smaller bits in order to understand it. But philosophy concluded that reason could not explain the objects of experience but only describe experience itself …

Despite this split, science and philosophy agreed on one fundamental: humanity is the ruler of being. Science embraced Copernicus’s removal of humans from the centre of the universe, but still assumed the world exists for the benefit of humankind … Occasionally animals and plants may be allowed membership in our collective, but toasters or [electronic components] certainly aren’t …

[W]hat if we decide that all things are equal – not equal in nature or use or value, but equal in existence? … then we need a flat ontology, an account of existence that holds nothing to be intrinsically more or less extant than anything else …

Thomas Nagel … famously asked what it was like to be a bat, concluding the experience could not be reduced to a scientific description of its method of echolocation. Science attempts to answer questions through observation and verification. Even so, the “experience” of all objects, from bats to Atari computers, resists explanation through experimentation …

The world is not just ours, nor is it just for us: “being” concerns microchips or drilling rigs as much as it does kittens or bamboo.

So perhaps the people who apologise to things when they throw them away aren’t quite so mad after all!?

amusements, arts, links, medical, science

In Case You Missed …

The usual links to things which have amused me and which you may have missed …

First of all … politics. Never short of an Idiot, and interesting cynical take on James Murdoch vs David Cameron.

And secondly … politics. The politicians are about to remove some of the interest in our lives by having “a bonfire of dead wood statutes” and abolishing some 800 outdated and obsolete laws. Have they really nothing better to do? Oh, sorry, it’s their job to make our lives boring.

So to alleviate that boredom here are a few seriously amazing items …

How long would it take to travel to the moon at the speed of whale? One Minute Physics has the answer.

[Not safe for the faint-hearted!] Turning to biology, entomologists have recently found and described an enormous Warrior Wasp, aka. Waspzilla. Talk about awesome! Yes, I really would love to meet one.

Still on the biological, I discovered The Tiny Aviary, the website of illustrator Diana Sudyka. Gorgeous drawings like the one above.

And finally more stunning art, this time from Dalton Ghetti who carves sculptures in pencil lead. How you even start doing that makes my head hurt!

Enjoy!

current affairs, environment, medical, science

Fukushima Reprise

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There’s so much going on at the moment that I should be writing about that I’m having a hard time keeping up! Anyway here’s the next piece.

There was an interesting, and I suggest important, “Opinion” article in last week’s New Scientist (dated 17 March 2012). In it Don Higson, a fellow of the Australasian Radiation Protection Society, argues for the total revision scale on which nuclear accidents are measured and points up the lack of true comparison between Fukushima and Chernobyl. Along the way he highlights the major differences between the two in health effects, adding some further important perspective on the situation.

The article itself is behind a paywall, so I hope I’ll be forgiven for reproducing some factual highlights here.

Everybody who gets cancer in Japan over the next 40 years will no doubt blame their misfortune on radiation from Fukushima Daiichi […] This would be entirely understandable but will have no basis in science […]

[T]here is no possibility that the physical health consequences of Fukushima Daiichi will be anywhere near as bad as those of Chernobyl.

As far as anyone knows, no member of the public received a significant dose of radiation attributable to the Fukushima Daiichi reactor emergency […]

Chernobyl was the worst that could happen. Safety and protection systems failed and there was a full core meltdown in a reactor that had no containment […]

237 Chernobyl workers were taken to hospital with suspected acute radiation sickness; 134 of these cases were confirmed; 28 were fatal; about 20 other workers have since died from illnesses considered to have been caused or aggravated by radiation exposure […]

On top of that, it has been estimated that about 4000 people will die […] from radiation-induced cancer […]

At Fukushima Daiichi, the reactors shut down safely when struck by the magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake […] problems arose after they were inundated by a much larger tsunami than had been anticipated when the nuclear plant was designed […] The reactor containments were partially effective […]

There were no deaths attributable to radiation. Two workers received burns from beta radiation. They were discharged from hospital after two days. Two workers incurred high internal radiation exposure from inhaling iodine-131, which gives them a significant risk of developing thyroid cancer.

Doses incurred by about 100 other workers have been high enough to cause a small risk of developing cancer after 20 or more years […] About 25 per cent of the population dies from cancer whether accidentally exposed to radiation or not. This rate might be increased by an additional one or two per cent among the exposed workers […]

[T]here have been no radiation injuries to children or to other members of the public […]

[T]he amount of iodine-131 escaping from all the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi was less than 10 per cent of the amount released at Chernobyl, and the release of caesium-137, the next most important fission product, was less than 15 per cent of the Chernobyl total […]

As I’ve said before, we need to keep this in perspective.

While there are clearly many, many lessons to be learnt Fukushima should be looked on as a success story in terms of reactor design. Yes there were shortcomings in the design of the resilience, the fall-back ability, the processes and the communications. And there have been massive knock-on effects on the population and the environment — and indeed it has been argued the worst of the health effects will be the devastating mental stresses on the Japanese people (see, inter alia, this Guardian report).

But given that those reactors are 40-ish years old, and that even before March 2011 we knew a lot better how to design safe and secure reactors, this should be viewed as a (limited) success story.

science

Hic, Haec, Fruit Fly

Following up on my links from the other day which included the one on fungi farming animals I realised belatedly this was the fifth in a series of six Scientific American posts about civilisation, fungus and alcohol by Rob Dunn.

And being by Rob Dunn, author of The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Our Evolution, they are interesting, well written, highly readable and perfectly accessible for the non-scientist. They also offer an interesting window into the way in which mad biologists think of and undertake research projects.

The six posts are:

  1. A Sip for the Ancestors: The True Story of Civilization’s Stumbling Debt to Beer and Fungus
  2. Fruit Flies Use Alcohol to Self-Medicate, but Feel Bad about it Afterwards
  3. Strong Medicine: Drinking Wine and Beer Can Help Save You from Cholera, Montezuma’s Revenge, E. Coli and Ulcers
  4. By Looking Carefully, Japanese Scientist Discovers the Secrets of Termite Balls
  5. 5 Kinds of Fungus Discovered to Be Capable of Farming Animals!
  6. Exhausted Writer Discovers First Cave Painting of Yeast

Or you can find them all linked together here.