Google Earth has captivated The Green Man and clearly the artists at The Glue Society. Here are a couple of their images of biblical scenes as they may have appeared from Google Earth.
Noah's Ark as the time of floating approaches
The parting of the Red Sea for Moses.
The crucifixion
Some people are just not cut out to be a teacher. One can only hope it was not a science class.
The Green Man posted at the time of the Abu Ghraib atrocity on the flaw in human nature that leads to ordinary people behaving in a manner that seems completely inhuman.
In 1971 Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in the basement of a Stanford University building. Volunteers were assigned randomly to be either a prison guard or a prisoner and they were left to their own devices. The outcome was essentially the same as Abu Ghraib. Dr Zimbardo explains
prisons offer an environment where the balance of power is so unequal that even normal people without any apparent prior psychological problems can become brutal and abusive unless great efforts are made by the institution to control the expression of guards' hostile impulses . . . It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches
I think we know that not only was there no effort to "expression of guards' hostile impulses" at Abu Ghraib it was probably encouraged. Anyway if you want to see the documentary on this ground breaking research that would now, quite correctly, be regarded as unethical. It is available on U-Tube. Visit Pure Pedantry
On a lighter note the American Physiological Society reports that cycles competing at altitude lowered the time it took to cover 6 kilometres by an average of 15% when using Viagra. The cyclists riding at a simulated altitude of 12,700 feet and using Viagra had significantly improved stroke volume (now now, that is the volume of blood moved out of one ventrical of the heart per beat) and cardiac output (which is the stoke volume times heart rate) compared with those not taking the drug.
The report did not report on whether any adjustments to the bicycle seats were necessary.
Is the west, lead by the USA, entering a new "dark ages" where religious doctrine is allowed to dominate and direct scientific endeavour? Well probably not, but the American public school system has certainly giving us some disturbing examples of "dark ages" mentality with the attempt of the religious right to introduce religion into the science class under the cloak of "intelligent design". It has reminded us of the preciousness of the purity of scienctific endeavour, which should be the unbiased search for knowledge.
Lifeevolving.org is a comprehensive resource for teachers, students and anyone interested in the science of evolution.
Kieren Green, who seems to have strangely, given his surname, taken a dislike to The Green Man website (see previous post), suggests that The Green Man shift his focus to theology.
The site isn't a theological site however religion and spirituality does crop up from time to time and, accordingly, The Green Man will take Kieren's, somewhat acerbic, suggestion and venture into the domain of spirituality.
We are all, of course, aware that physicians are appalling at healing themselves and one area where this is particularly true in the area of depressive incidents. Depression is at plague proportions within the medical community with upwards of 20% of interns suffering major and frequent depressive incidents. This is presumeably one of the most significant contributing factors to the epidemic of substance abuse amongst the medical profession. Research in this area indicates that 15% of interns exhibit pathological misuse of alcohol whilst another study found 11.4% of physicians had used benzodiazepines in the past year in an unsupervised fashion and 17.6% had engaged in unsupervised use of opioids.
A study by University of Cincinatti which appears in the March-April 2006 edition of Ambulatory Pediatrics, found that 25 percent of 227 primary-care residents surveyed reported a number of symptoms associated with depression such as irritability, sense of isolation and hopelessness, and fear.
Work has been done in an attempt to address this by limiting the excessive hours that these young doctors work however it seems to have had little or no impact on the incidence of depression.
So how does this relate to spirituality? Well I am glad you asked. The research shows risk for significant depressive symptoms was greater among respondents who reported negative religious coping mechanisms, poorer spiritual well-being and the need for more spiritual support. This may by correlative and not causal. Doctors who have trouble coping also have trouble dealing with their spirituality.
The bit of the conclusion that most intrigued The Green Man however was this statement
Mood or other psychological problems among primary-care residents, or any other health-care provider for that matter, could negatively affect patient care
I think we have the crux of the problem in this one statement. We don't give a bugger about the wellbeing of the doctors except in as much as it affects patient care. Perhaps if we started treating them as people with needs, wants and insecurities all of their own we may take significant steps forward in the solving the problem.
Read more here. and here.
This is a picture of the brown recluse spider. It has a really nasty bite so it is just as well that it is reclusive.
Below is a gross out photo of the results of a typical bite.
What makes the bite of this spider interesting to The Green Man is the toxin that it contains, called sphingomyelinase (SMaseD) and what makes SMaseD interesting that exists only in two places in nature, the brown recluse spider and the bacterial strains of pathogenic Corynebacteria that cause various illnesses in farm animals.
As the monk Gegor Mendle discovered all those years ago vertical transmission of genes from one generation to its offspring is an everyday process. Lateral gene transfer between unrelated species is a much rarer and special event. This is what appears to have happened in this case however at this stage it is uncertain whether the spider or the bacteria first had the gene for the production of this toxin and the transmission method is still unclear however an obliging virus is probably the most likely candidate. Matthew H. J. Cordes of Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, University of Arizona Tucson and Greta J. Binford of Department of Biology, Lewis and Clark College Portland continue the hunt for the origins and transmission vehicle.
Here is the count down to the new year this year
five - four - three - two - one - one - Happy New Year
Note that there are two "one"s because this year there is a leap second to adjust for the fact that our planet doesn't quite rotate at the rate it used to, partly thanks to the Boxing Day tsunami last year.
Think of it as the earth giving you a free additional second of life. Isn't nature a wonderful thing?
It looks so appealing, teaching numbers by using characters like in the image to the right.
Sadly it is much more meaningful to adults, who already understand the meaning of the number than to children. New research by Ohio State university has shown that the complexity of relating characters or faces to numbers only confuses chidlren and hides the deeper meaning of the symbol.
Here is the thing! Children are quite clever enough to understand the symbolism that is inherent in written numbers. Vladimir Sloutsky, who has touch of the Tim Allens about his appearance, thinks
Many teachers believe that concrete materials make learning more fun for students, and that will increase their motivation and help them understand the concepts. While this may be true, in many cases, the concrete materials also interfere with what they are trying to learn.”
It seems that if you want to teach your child about numbers it is best to simply show them some numbers. All the cute characters only confuse them.
Take a look at the photos on the right. A number of male subjects in an experiment conducted by researchers at Lund University, Sweden, and New York University were asked to choose which of the faces they found more attractive.
In a subsequent question they were asked to explain why they thought the face in the photo they had chosen was more attractive. Unbeknown to them however the researcher, in a magician like way, switched the photos. The majority of participants happily went about explaining why the they though that photo was the most attractive even though it was not the one they had chosen.
The crux of the matter is that, once we have made a decision, we reinforce the decision we have made by adjusting our expectations to suit the prior decision. Thus, when the participants were presented with a photo that they believed they had chosen they adjusted their expectations to support that choice.
You probably recognise the animals at the top of this image they are zebras of course. The ones down the bottom are quaggas. They became extinct about 100 years ago and pelts and skeletons are still around.
They evolved from the zebra between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago. So what does it take to evolve into a new species? Lets assume that we are rejecting the concept of God reaching down and giving them a prod with a devine device as advocates of Intelligent Design are suggesting, it takes a disrupted gene flow, that is where two populations are genetically isolated from one another either by geography or by behaviour.
The Quagga are an excellent example of the speed at which speciation can take place when animals are subjected to extreme evolutionary pressure, in this case the ice age. They evolved from a herd of zebra that became separated from the large community and under the extreme pressures of the ice age rapidly evolved, changing colour, body type and presumably behavioural patterns such that when they were reunited with the wider zebra community they could no longer interbreed.
This is a plot of solar flare activity over the last 30 years. No doubt you will spot a pattern, that is because the human brain is particularly adept at spotting patterns, even when there isn't one, but that's another story. In this case there is a legitimate pattern and it is an 11 year cyclical pattern.
The really interesting part about this pattern is that in 2005 we should be experiencing much less sun spot activity than we actually are. Whilst the solar minimum is not due until 2006, it was expected that sun spot activity would be diminishing in the lead up. The exact opposite has been occuring, the level of X-Class solar flares this year is more typical of a period approaching a solar maximum.
One of the major influences of sun spots on the earths ecology is that they are a major contributor to the warmth of the earth. Periods of extended absense of sun spots are the trigger for an ice age. Conversely excessive sunspot activity contributes significantly to the global warming of the earth.
If we are entering a period of extended sun spot activity then all the self-flagellation that has been occuring over the use of fossil fuels and their contribution to global warming may be unnecesary. It may be that not matter how responsible we could have been in the past the global warming would have happened anyway.
Read more on sunspot cycles here.
Putting aside the cause of global warming for a moment and moving to one of the most dramatic results of global warming, it seems that hurricanes and typhoons (which are essentially the same thing but in different oceans) are getting fewer but stronger. Nature reports on research by Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta which shows that ,whilst the number of "stormy days" has decrease by 25% since 1995, the number of category-4 and -5 storms have risen by 30% over the same period. Most of these storms are at sea and do not impact human communities but clearly experiencing storms such as huricane Katrina will be more common in the future and communities in the danger zones will need to alter their approach to coping with these phenonemia.
At 1740 UT on Sept. 7th, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a major X17-class solar flare coming from the sun's eastern limb. The source of the explosion was probably returning sunspot 798, which sparked strong auroras in August. An X-class flare is technically refered to as a "humungus bugger". They are major events that can trigger planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms.
This blast was not Earth-directed, but explosions later this week (and next week) could be as the active region turns more and more toward our planet.
Feel free to burn off. Your contribution to global warming will be swamped by the massive global warming that a X-Class solar flare generates.
On the up side September might be a particularly good month for auroras
Via Space Weather
Here is a photo from a make up supplies website Elyse It is supposed to be scary. The concept of maggots eating away at a living person is the stuff of horror films and, as it turns out, science.
In the first world war victims of horrific wounds often went days or weeks without proper medical attention. Wounds were simply bound up and left. William Baer, a surgeon of the time, reports on opening bandages to discover wounds teaming with thousands of maggots. On removing them he discovered dead tissue missing from the wound and only healthy living tissue remaining. Far from causing the death of the unfortunate victims the maggots were saving lives. Maggots only eat dead flesh and they are a most efficient micro surgeon when it comes to cleaning dead and rotting tissue from a wound.
It is a natural characteristic that is once again being harnessed by the medical profession to effectively treat patients with dead and potentially gangrenous tissue. Laboratories are producing blowfly maggots that are free from disease and distributing them to hospitals who use them to treat people suffering conditions that have resulted in extensive tissue death, such as frost bite and burns. The maggots are introduced and the wounds bandaged. Recipients report feeling some movement in the area but not pain from their medicinal companions.
It is, however, a serious departure from the modern approach to medicine and the FDA (food and drug administration) who regulates medicines is having trouble coming to grips with this reintroduction of what is the most ancient of natural surgical techniques. The question is, in legal terms, what are maggots. The FDA's lawyers have decided that they are a medical device since, according to Mark Melkerson, acting director of the Division of General, Restorative and Neurological Devices, speaking of both maggots and leeches
The primary mode of action for maggots is chewing. For leeches, it's the eating of blood. Those are mechanical processes
It seems to The Green Man that both leeches and maggots fall into a category entirely unquantified by the FDA.
Leeches are finding favour amongst microsurgeons charged with the responsibility of reattaching severed bits, such as fingers or hands. The major problem facing these surgeons is the differing structure of veins and arteries. Arteries must be strong enough to handle the pulsing blood pushed out by the heart and, accordingly they are thick walled and easy to identify and reattach. Veins, on the other hand, rely on the movement of muscles in the limb to shift blood back to the heart. Accordingly they are thin walled and difficult to find and repair. This results in a situation where blood is being delivered to the severed limb in greater quantities than it is being recovered, leading to a buildup of blood. This causes swelling and often death of the limb.
Leeches naturally inject patients with a potent chemical cocktail that includes an anticoagulant, an anesthetic, an antibiotic and a substance that dilates blood vessels. This cocktail encourages fast bleeding to empty the appendage of extra blood, reducing pressure and allowing veins to form on their own.
If that wasn't enough, leeches are also extraordinarily sensitive to proper blood flow and so can offer immediate feedback on how well surgery went. Dr. Bruce Minkin, a hand surgeon in Asheville, N.C. says
If it won't attach if there's not good arterial blood coming in, and sometimes that tells me that I need to go back in
The only serious problem in the utilisation of these two excellent biological agents in the treatment of extreme wounds is the attitude of the patients and their relatives. Many find it difficult to conceive that leeches and maggots, both regarded with disgust be most people, can be used in any way that would be beneficial. It is an example where our natural instincts are completely contrary to what is in the best interest of the patient.
Spreading activation is a model for linguistic information retrieval within the human brain. The basic idea is that memory is a network of interconnected concepts. A particular concept is linked to related concepts by bonds. The ease with which related information is retrieved is dependant on the closeness/strength of the bond between two concepts.
In the above example the concept of "fish" has many related concepts, "chips" as in "fish and chips", "sea", "cat", "scales" and, of course, many others. The ease with which each of these related concepts is retrieved is dependant on how strong the bond is in your brain between the two concepts. For me, chips wins hands down, somewhat reflecting an obsession with food, for you it is probably something quite different. The bonds are not static but dynamically change with use. The more frequently a link is accessed the stronger it becomes. This usually reflects the importance of that link. Things that are extremely important occupy much of our thinking and we traverse this link many times as we are mulling over aspects of the particular issue or event.
Of recent times this concept has been embraced by the business community with the development of mind mapping techniques. These involve the representation on paper of networks that have a similar structure to the theoretical structures discussed above. Naturally this was rapidly followed by supporting software. Now everything from PCs, to PDAs to iPods have mind mapping software available.
The big question is whether external representations of this conceptual model of memory are effective. Many people swear by it and find it a valuable tool but little research has been done in this area. The big problem, or possibly advantage, of this sort of software is that we record what we think should be important to us not what actually is. This may be an advantage simply because the mind does very well by itself at handling the things that are really important to us. The software can be used for the things that our bosses think should be important to us.
This Alex, he is an African grey parrot and he is 28 years old. He has just demonstrated something that we have long thought was impossible for children under 4 and all animals, an understanding of the concept of zero.
To put this in context, at the time of the birth of Christ, the concept of zero was not in common use. When you were born you were one. In the intervening 2,000 years we have incorporated this concept into our mathematics. You may think of it as a simple concept but its recent incorporation into our library of mathematical concepts gives testament to it's complexity.
Like so many characteristics which, over the years, we have use to define our humanity, our separation from the rest of the animal kingdom, this one has fallen to an animal with the brain the size of a walnut.
Alex, who lives in a Brandeis lab run by comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg, spontaneously and correctly used the label "none" during a testing session of his counting skills to describe an absence of a numerical quantity on a tray. This discovery prompted a series of trials in which Alex consistently demonstrated the ability to identify zero quantity by saying the label "none."
Dr Irene says
Chimpanzees and possibly squirrel monkeys show some understanding of the concept of zero, but Alex is the first bird to demonstrate an understanding of the absence of a numerical set.It is doubtful that Alex's achievement, or those of some other animals such as chimps, can be completely trained; rather, it seems likely that these skills are based on simpler cognitive abilities they need for survival, such as recognition of more versus less
Here is a most spectacular photo of astronomer Dennis Mammana of California pointing out Mars to onlookers on Aug. 26, 2003. He is lit by a flashlight which accounts for the extraordinary image and he is pointing at mars the last time it was as close to the earth as it will be on Oct. 30, 2005.
(I cheated and coloured Mars in red, it is actually whiteish like the rest of the objects in the sky in the original)
On October 30th Mars will come within 69 million kilometers of Earth. To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, easily the biggest object in the night sky, excluding the moon. Certain rumours about it actually being as big as a full moon are, fortunately, completely inaccurate. If it was close enough to be that big then the tides it would generate would make the Boxing Day Tsunami off the coast of Indonesia look like a ripple in a kiddies pool.
It may not be as big as a full moon but it is worth a look anyway.
See the original photo and a bigger story at the NASA website.
Do you have trouble with your nerves, that is your actual nerves not your nervous reaction to things, then in future you may be turning to the humble herpes virus for relief.
Neurologist David Fink of Ann Arbour University has been experimenting with herpes in a way that most people don't. It may not be as much fun but the benefits of his ground breaking research hold the key to relief for suffers of a nerve disease that is one of the most painful. Neuropathy is the degeneration of the nerves and is a common complication of diabetes and other diseases. It causes patients to experience excruciating pain when a normal person would experience only a mild touching sensation, temperatures that would normally be perceived as pleasantly warm feel furnace-hot.
Part of the problem arises from an absence of a substance called GABA, you don't care what it stands for.
Viruses, in case you are unaware, are very simple structures designed for inserting renegade DNA into cells in your body and Dr Dave is using this behaviour in the much maligned herpes virus to insert GABA producing genes into these nerve cells.
The herpes virus is modified to make it harmless and the gene, along with a promoter to switch on the gene, is inserted into the virus. The virus was then injected into the spinal chord where it goes about its work.
At this stage the only beneficiaries of the technique have been rats however the rats are very pleased with the results. Human trials are expected to commence next year.
A Green Man note: Images of herpes returned from a google search were far too gross for just after lunch and accordingly the entry is image free.
Asteroid 2004 MN4 is in an uncertain orbit around the sun. Here is a plot of its current orbit relative to the earth.
It looks pretty harmless and it is, at the moment. The plot of its orbit on Friday 13th April, 2029 looks considerably different. In fact on the scale that this plot is drawn it would show a direct impact of the asteroid with the earth on this date.
Of course this is drawn at a astronomical scale and the current thinking is that it will miss the earth by a astronomical "hairs breadth", 30,000 kms.
So what is the scenario like if it did hit? Well at 320 meters wide it is significantly smaller than the asteroid that is currently being blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is big enough however to destroy an area roughly the size of Texas or France. If it hit an ocean then the tsunamis would dwarf those recently occuring in the area of Indonesia.
The two initial sightings had Paul Chodas, Steve Chesley and Don Yeomans at NASA's Near Earth Object Program estimating the chances of it hitting at about 1 in 60. Given the level of devastation and death it would cause you would have to say that 1 in 60 is pretty damn scary. More recent analysis indicates that it is unlikely to hit.
The white bar in the image above that runs perpendicular to the trajectory indicates the current estimate of the margin of error in their calculations. That small amount of black space between the end of the margin of error and the earth is supposed to be reassuring.
Ever wondered what a synchrotron was for. Well apparently, amongst other things, it can be used for reading ancient manuscripts. The Archimedes Palimpsest is the earliest transcription of the theories of the legendary Greek mathematician, and the original text detailed his method of mechanical theorems.
In 12th century material for writing on was expensive, and the parchment containing the manuscript was scraped clean and reused for the production of a prayer book. The problem was further compounded by 20th century forgers reusing the parchment once again to make fake medieval art, as per the image to the right.
Scientists at Stanford Radiation Laboratory used the synchrotron to cause the iron in the original ink to fluoresce enabling the original writing to be seen.
The Green Man draws your attention to the venerable scientific journal The Australian Women's Weekly. Issued monthly, you may be tempted to wonder why it is not called "The Australian Women's Monthly". Who can say, persumably the publishers did not feel that name conveyed the feeling they were looking for, but that is another story. Known for its incisive commentary and thorough analysis of contemporary issues it is little wonder that your daily horoscope is nestled amongst thought provoking articles covering the full spectrum of critical thought, such as "Marry a farmer", "How Michelle Pfeiffer went from tomboy to luminous beauty" and "Six steps to help you choose the right foundation for your skin tone".
Given that the horoscope contains important information on romantic issues such as the selection of the appropriate husband, fiscal viability vis-a-vis selecting the correct tattslotto numbers and basically your whole approach to the month ahead you would naturally assume that Anthea Starwoman who authors this authoratative column would be abreast of current issues in the zodiac. It is with great surprise and regret that The Green Man must inform his readership that the information that she is baseing her forecasts on is millenia out of date.
Not only have the zodiac signs moved but a 13th star sign has been found, Ophiuchus or The Serpent Bearer. Your zodiac sign is determined by the constellation that the sun is in, viewed from earth, at the time of your birth, a "Gemini" is a person who was born when the sun was in front of the stars of the constellation Gemini the twins for example. The trouble is that the earth is wobbling on its axis, each wobble taking 25,800 years. The result of this is that the sun is now in capricorn when, 2,600 years ago, when the zodiac was defined, it was in aquarius.
To complicate the issue even further, not all constellations are the same width. When the zodiac was first drawn up each constellation was assigned 30 degrees or 1/12th of the year. We know however that Cancer, for example, is a small constellation, and Pisces is huge.
The upshot of all this, taking into account the current state of the earths wobble, the existence of the 13th sign, and the varying sizes of the constellations, the current dates for the signs of the zodiac have changed significantly.
Click here to see the current dates for the zodiac signs.
No wonder your lotto numbers are never the right ones!
Angelo Cagnacci of the Modena General Hospital, Italy reports in this months edition of the journal Human Reproduction that women born in Spring have a significantly longer period of fertility than those born in Autumn. He speculates that this may be a result of the fact that spring babies tend to be born with a smaller stash of eggs in their ovaries. This means they run out of eggs and consequently enter menopause earlier than autumn born women.
Just why this phenonemon exists is still a mystery however we do know that spring babies gestate largely during the winter, whereas their autumn counterparts spend summer in the womb. This points to some possible reasons
- differences in temperature,
- length of day,
- the mother's diet,
- infections
may influence the developing child
With a sample size of 3,000 post menopausal women the phenonemon is beyond doubt however whether these results from Italy will translate to other communities such as USA or Australia is debateable. The 3,000 women in question were all born in post-war Italy where access to food and general nutrition was poor. Equally, fluctuations in food quality and type across the seasons is far less these days in western countries.
Tom Kelsey, who studies human reproduction at the University of St Andrews, UK says that in todays world the most important indicator is the mother body mass index.
Ah, there is justice in the natural world afterall.
Brian Langerhans of Washington University Arts & Sciences has a fascination with male Mosquitofish genitalia. (The Green Man is not sure whether this classifies as an Art or a Science but, for the sake of maintaining some decorum, he will assume it is a scientific interest.)
Anyway it transpires that female Mosquitofish have a decided preference for male Mosquitofish that are, shall we say, "well hung", although it is not clear whether, in an aquatic environment "floating" might not be a better term than "hanging". What ever, female Mosquitofish go for male Mosquitofish that have a large one.
Casting your eye to the photo of fish in question you will note a certain streamlining of body shape. This is fundamentally disrupted by being well equiped in the genital department. Consquently the size of their organ slows them down, making them ripe for consumption by larger fish. It seems that, in the natural world, well equipped male Mosquitofish get a lot of sex but only briefly before they are eaten.
I think there is a lesson for us all in that.
Take a look at the picture to the right. Scary aren't they. That is because they are black. In a fascinating study by Matthew Lieberman, assistant professor of psychology at UCLA, it was discovered that fear of black men in embedded in the American psyche and that is not only the white American psyche, African-Americans are equally fearful when they see photos of expressionless African-American males. This is in contrast to Caucasian males who do not illicit this fear in either Black or White Americans.
The study was conducted by monitoring one of the most primitive structures in the brain, the amygdala. If you are talking primal fear then you talking about the amygdala. Most subjects, both Black and White, showed increased activity in this section of the brain when shown photos of expressionless faces of black men in a way that was completely absent when shown equivalent photos of white men. Professor Matt says,
Many people of either race may not be happy to find out that a part of their brain involved in responding to potential threats responds more to African Americans than Caucasians. Even people who believe to their core that they do not have prejudices may still have negative associations that are not conscious.
One of the more popular theories explaining this phenonemon is that our brains are "trained" at an early age to illicit this response when confronted with the appropriate stimuli, ie a black face. This training is independant of immediate family relationships. One could speculate that the Black Power movement originating in the 1960s may have fundamentally altered the perception of a whole generation of Americans of all colours towards Black males.
As pointed out earlier the amygdala is a very primitive structure in the brain and we have more modern structures that can, and do, come into play when dealing with our primal fears. The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is primarily concerned with moderating/inhibiting our more primal responses. In the case of the subjects of this study mentioning the term "African-American" at the time the image was shown caused a substantial increase in activity in this area. Spoken language interpretation is, of course, a much more advanced brain function than vision and invoking this high brain function also invoked the higher regulatory functions as well. It seems that whilst the subjects were scared of the image they also worked at suppressing this fear, presumably because they viewed it as racist and inappropriate.
September 11, 2001 certainly gave America a wake up call, it was not invincible afterall. But what was the message that they got and was it the correct one?
Whilst taking analogies too far is clearly dangerous and absurd, used in a restrained manner they can help clarify a complex issue. It is with this in mind that I risk the analogy of the USA with a man in his mid-20's. America is a young nation but past it's infancy and possibly at the height of its powers, like many young men, it had a view of itself as invincible.
Regardless of what they might think, young men are not invincible, and it is often the smallest of organisms, bacteria, that demonstrate this in the most devastating fashion. So it was with America, it was not a superpower, or even a smaller nation, that demonstrated to America that they could be damaged but a group of a dozen or so men.
America's response was also sadly typical of many young men when their vulnerability is made apparent to them and that is dangerous and reckless bravado to prove that they have not been cowed by the misfortune that has befallen them.
There is always more than one way to view an event of course and another way of viewing the 9/11 tragedy is as a natural disaster. It may be a strange and difficult concept but the reality is that acts of terrorism obey the same laws of nature as other disasters, such as the recent tsunami. Analysis by Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque has shown that world wide acts of terrorism follow the law of nature known as "power-law" relationship. Put simply the severity of an attack is inversely proportional to the time between attacks.
For those of a mathematical persuasion the ratio is x^-1.85.
Based on this approach we can expect another terrorist attack of the magnitude of 9/11 within the next 7 years.
If you are finding this concept somewhat difficult to accept then it may be that you are still thinking on the human race as being apart from nature and somehow not governed by its rules. Immanuel Kant was not burdened with this handicap. In 1784 he wrote
Individual men, and even whole nations, little think, while they are pursuing their own purposes...that they are advancing unconsciously under the guidance of a purpose of nature which is unknown to them.
This arises because we are talking of a sample of 6 billion individual organisms and the vagaries of small sample sizes simply do not apply.
This does not mean that we should stop trying to prevent terrorist attacks, that is part of the dynamic and is factored into the seven year estimate. It does however place a different perspective of the rhetoric relating to "the war on terror" that has been serving so effectively to re-elect conservative governments in the west. It is not a war, to win or lose, but a natural process in which we are all participants.
On December 24th there was a massive earthquake measuring 8.1 in Antarctica south of Tasmania. This was the result of the movement between two of the earths tectonic plates, the Antarctic Plate and the Indian Australian Plate. Two days later pressure created by this movement was released on the other side of the Indian Australian Plate.
An earthquake of 8.9 resulted in Tsunamis killing tens of thousands of people. These two related incidents were inconsequential in the earths long history, a minor adjustment of the earths crust.
On the 24th there was no rush to ascribe meaning to the massive earthquake in the southern ocean. No one died and, as such, it was an incident of note to scientists and few others. Because of the massive loss of life in the second incident however many people will be desparately trying to draw some meaning from the tragedy.
The event per se has no more meaning than any other natural event. Nature has no human traits, it is not vengeful or malicious or capricious. A lion kills for no reason other than to eat, tectonic plates shift for no reason other than to relieve pressure in the earths crust.The only meaning there is to draw is that life is tenuous and that our belief that we have somehow "tamed" the world in which we live is just a self-indulgent fantasy.
This is a terrible human tragedy but is it any more tragic than mass starvation in Africa. Perhaps it is time to consider that it is not the tragedy that you are reacting to but the "drama". It is so much more dramatic and so well covered by the media. Watching people starve to death doesn't make nearly as good television footage.
The moon will be full for Christmas and it is a smaller one that you will see. This is the moon at apogee when it is farthest from the earth. Here are two images of the moon, the upper one at perigee when it is closest and the lower at apogee.
At apogee (Dec 27th) the moon is 50,000 km further from the earth than when it is at perigee which last happened on Oct 18th. The moon's orbit around the earth is eliptical varying from 356,400 km to 406,700 km from Earth.
The Geminids can be found in the constellation of Gemini in the night sky, hence their name. They are not aliens however they are a meteor shower. The asteroid 3200 Phaethon is orbiting the sun in our solar system and is dragging after it a tail of dust particles. Each year in mid December the earth barrels through the tail creating a spectacular night time display. This year it is on 13th December. The particles causing the meteor shower are travelling at approximately 80,000 mph when they hit our atmosphere and burn up.
You, the readership of The Green Man, who are naturally more intelligent than average, will have no doubt raised your collective eyebrows at an asteroid having a tail. Of course we all know that comets typically have tails and asteroids don't. Since you already know this I don't need to explain that comets are made up of ice, dust and gravel, which facilitates the tail, where as asteroids are solid lumps of rock. Scientist speculate that 3200 Phaethon has collided with another asteroid or comet and picked up some debris as a tail in the process.
Here is a cellestial map courtesy of NASA to help you find the Geminids. The best time to look is around midnight of 13/12/04.
Read more at the NASA website.
I have posted this image before but it is just so spectacular it is worth a revisit. If you look carefully at this image of the setting sun you can see sun spot 652 which was present on the suns surface in July 2004.
The number of sun spots varies over an 11 year cycle and they have a significant impact on global warming. Quite unsurprisingly then it has been found that they also have an impact on agricultural productivity. Astrophysicist Lev Pustilnik of Tel Aviv University and Gregory Yom Din, an agricultural economist at Haifa University have been studying this and found a link between wheat productivity in the US, and hence the price of wheat, and the sun spot activity of the time. Read more here.
It is quite disconcerting for many people that aspects of our wellbeing are so completely out of our control and speaking of being outside our control the next two asteroids that are due to just miss hitting the earth are 2004 RZ164 due on 8th December and 2004 VW14 due on Christmas Eve. Neither is on track to actually hit the earth which is probably just as well because the second one particularly could have significantly disrupted your planned Christmas party. Both are big enough to cause catastrophic damage to the earth, something along the lines of the asteroid that allegedly whiped our the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
hmmmm some people do some funny things with chocolate. I might note at this point that a quick browse of the web for images using google with the word "chocolate" and "safe search off" will result in some even more intriguing photos that I will refrain from posting here since this is a "nice blog", well fairly nice anyway. This is a chocolate wig that formed part of the annual chocolate fashion show in New York.
By way of something mildly riske from the same event here is a chocolate bunny, but not the type you typically get at at Easter. It sets the mind a wondering, who gets to eat the chocolate afterwards and given the location of some of the chocolate who would want to. Hmmm perhaps I had better not persue that thought much further.
It seems to me that this would definitely have to be a cold climate type activity. In the tropics, yuck, it doesn't bear thinking about really. Enough of that, you can listen to a chocolate dance song here.
Peter Barnes, professor of thoracic medicine at Imperial College London, UK is also interested in matters relating to chocolate. You will note that Peter is a professor of Thoracic Medicine and not Gynaecology so those of you on work PCs can continue reading in safety.
Professor Pete is working with chocolate in the treatment for persistent coughs. He is finding it to be an effective alternative to opiates, which have traditionally been used, and nearly as much fun for the patient to boot. The chemical in question is theobromine which is a constituent of cocoa. Theobromine appeared to have no unwanted side effects. This is not true of narcotics which list drowsiness and constipation among the negative effects. Apparently theobromine interacts with the vagus nerve that runs from the lungs to the brain and regulates coughing. You can read more about his research here.
If you are pregnant at the moment then you can take heart that the chocolate is not only helping to suppress your cough but also producing a happy baby.
Katri Raikkonen at the University of Helsinki, Finland has found that babies born to women who had been eating chocolate daily during pregnancy were more active and "positively reactive" - a measure that encompasses traits such as smiling and laughter. Also where the mother was stressed the babies showed less fear when confronted with new situations than babies of stressed mothers who had not consumed chocolate. Read more about chocolate in pregnancy here.
Here is a photo of a US Soldier, a Marine actually. Mind you it looks mighty dry in Iraq. It makes you wonder whether a Marine is quite the right choice. Their name tends to imply a somewhat wetter environment. Still I assume that the US Military knows what they are doing placing soldiers with such an amphibious name in a desert.
He looks pretty tough though. Not tough enough for the US Military however. They are always looking for ways to toughen up their soldiers and since they are not members of the International Olympic Committee they don't have to pretend to be tough on performance enhancing drugs.
When it comes to performance enhancement the wonder drugs for humans are androgens, those are the male sex hormones. Everybody benefits from a bit of androgen in their lives, even women. So what do androgens do, well apart from a bit of a downer about them slightly increasing the risk of prostate cancer in men, they facilitate development of muscle mass and are critical in the development of bone density. Increased androgen levels result in skulls that are thicker, increased formation on the outside of long bones, such as the femur, decreased formation on the marrow surface inside the bone, reduced bone loss and low bone "turnover." In spite of the helmet our friend is wearing I think we all recognise that a thicker skull has to be an advantage in his line of work.
Anyway the US Military think it is and they have given Oregon Health & Science University $1.72 million to research it on their behalf.
You can read about their research here.
Cast your mind back to 1925, well most of you will have to imagine it since you are young whipper snappers. A noteable trial was taking place in Dayton, Tennessee where a one John Scopes was fined $100 for having the audacity to teach the concept of evolution to his science class. Tennessee had, at the time, a law that forbade the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals". Who knows they may still do.
It seems that the concept that we are at one with the animal world and evolved from forms of humans more primative than ourselves and indeed that we share a common ancestory with, most recently, chimpanzees, gorillas and other high order primates is still a very real problem for fundamentalist USA. Patricia Fuller of Atlanta's Cobb County for example firmly holds the opinion that
God created earth and man in his image. Leave this garbage out of the textbooks. I don't want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey."
Unfortunately for Ms Fuller antidiscrimination laws prevent nursing homes from being quite so selective of their staff and I would suspect that shortages of qualified staff in this discipline means that nursing homes can't afford to be that fussy anyway.
Dear Patricia is not confining her dogmatic beliefs to her retirement planning however. She has successfully brow beaten the local educational authorities into placing a sticker on their science text books that said
"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
She did this on the basis that
It is unconstitutional to teach only evolution. The school board must allow the teaching of both theories of origin.
The fatal flaw in this argument is that creation is not a scientific theory but rather a religious assertion and has no place in a science class. Whilst fully admitting that US constitutional law is not my strong point I seriously suspect that there is no law that is compelling Ms Fuller to send her children to this school or, even if she does, compelling them to take science.
Anyway, there other parents in her neighbourhood who are equally indignant but this time at the presence of the sticker on the text books. Gina Stubbart says
Widely accepted or otherwise evolution is science. If you don't want to learn about art don't study Art; if you don't want to learn about History don't study History and if you don't like Science don't study Science.
As you can imagine, there is only one place for matters to be settled in the USA and this is in the courts, everyone sueing everyone and why wouldn't you, it is the American way.
(via Guardian)
There is always hot controversy in the realm of the dinosaurs but one thing is agreed upon, when it comes to size in dinosaurs big is better and the biggest of the lot was a Seismosaur. His name means ground shaker and this mock up of a Seismosaurs skeleton gives you a good indication why.
Conventional wisdom has him clocking in at 170 ft and making him the largest animal ever to have lived. What gave Seismosaurus his incredible length was a long whip-like tail. Now controversial new research by paleontologist Spencer Lucas of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science has pruned nearly 70ft off the overall length by shortening the predicted length of the tail. He claims that researchers wanting to have a bigger one than everyone else placed the few caudal vertebrae (as the vertebrae in the tail are known amongst the white lab coat fraternity) that they had too far down the tail.
At 100 feet long it was still an impressive animal but not that much bigger than a Diplodocus, which you will all be familiar with as a the earth moving dinosaur that Fred Flinstone operates in the quarry where he works.
There is only one known fossil of Seismosaurus, which is incomplete and is housed at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque where it is on public display.
Read more here.
Or visit the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
Further to the post of 19th October on Sun Spots the Max Planck society has released a graph of sun spot activity for the last 11,400 years. The sunspot activity determined by carbon-14 dating is represented by the line in blue. The line in red represents observations of sun spots since 1900.
Click on the image to see and bigger and better version.
You will note that apart from the fact that we are heading into decline on the normal 11 year cycle it has been 8,000 years since we have experienced the level of sun spot activity that we have experienced over the last 60 years.
Clearly this has an effect on global climate change but does it account for the global warming that the earth is experiencing at the moment? The answer is "a bit but probably not all". The sun spot activity has been elevated but relatively stable over the last 60 years. Global warming on the other hand has accelerated during the last 30 years.
This could, in part, be to a lag in the earth responding. When you subject an object to thermal radiation it does not heat up instantaneously and the earth is a mighty big object. It could also be that we are playing our part through the emission of greenhouse gases. Let us not forget however that we are mere specks of dust when the game is being played on a cosmic scale.
Read more about the recent sun spot activity here.
Read more on its effect on global warming here.
Remember how successful your Atkins Diet was? Well if you were on it you possibly can't.
The Green Man has a friend who is a fan of the high fat - low carb diet. (Out of courtesy I won't mention your name Phil, oops). The American Society for Neuroscience do not agree with him. They say
new studies show that diets high in fat are a risk factor for not only heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes, but for cognitive decline as well.
Put down that copy of Ulysses Phil and go directly to the Readers Digest. This is perhaps why McDonalds and Burger King also do not count the classics amongst their in-store reading material. Dr Veerendra Kumar Madala Halagappa and Dr Mark Mattson of the National Institute on Aging, who have been researching this very topic, say
These results provide direct evidence that fast food diets, particularly a diet high in saturated fats, can have an adverse effect on learning and memory. These findings show that fast food diets impaired memory acquisition in mice and made their brains more vulnerable to kainate-induced cognitive dysfunction. If such diets have similar effects in humans, then reducing the amount of fat and empty calories may improve one's memory and increase resistance to age- and stress-related cognitive impairment.
hmmm there may be too many big words there for your serious fast-food junkie. To paraphrase - fast food, slow mind. Time to start moving to a diet of lean meat and lots of fresh fruit and vegies.
If you are committed to cognitive impairment then perhaps you should consider alcohol. It has been the drug of choice for cognitive impairment through the ages and one that The Green Man finds excellent for the purpose.
The Green Man, accompanied by Mrs Green Man, is a regular attendee at the Mind, Body and Spirit show that is held at the Melbourne Exhibition and Conference Centre each year. It is a colourful eclectic collection of stalls spanning the breadth of New Age and the spiritual. One of the things that is most intriguing, to The Green Man's warped sense of reality anyway, is that many of the stallholders seem to regard most of the other stall holders as quacks whereas their particular flavour of spiritualism or their particular New Age product is completely legitimate. This lack of a common vision translates to a strange communal disconnect.
One of the regulars at this event is the aura crowd. These are people who can see auras around people and are more than happy to represent them on a piece of paper using pastels, for a fee of course. Sadly, as Dr Jamie Ward of University College London points out in the October issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology
These colours do not reflect hidden energies being given off by other people, rather they are created entirely in the brain of the beholder.
These individuals, rather than being magically gifted with a special sight, have a brain condition known as emotion-colour synaesthesia. It is not that uncommon either, synaesthesia is a condition found in 1 in 2000 people. It is not always colour related more generally stimulation of one sense produces a response in one or more of the other senses. For example, people with synaesthesia may experience shapes with tastes or smells with sounds. It is thought to originate in the brain and some scientists believe it might be caused by a cross-wiring in the brain, for example between centres involved in emotional processing and smell perception. Synaesthesia is known to run in families.
Mind you, it is a fair bet that Dr Jamie isn't well received at the Mind, Body and Spirit show and probably doesn't have that much fun there either.
Here is a graph of the frequency of sun spots over the last 400 years
The period in the 17th century was a mini ice-age when there were virtually no sun spots.
You will notice a certain regularity to the number of sun spots, oscillating approximately every 11 years. On October 10th and 11th there were no sun spots at all. David Hathaway, who is very interested in sun spots might have said
It is a sign, the apocalypse is upon us. Run for your lives, hide under the bed.
but he is a scientist and not prone to such emotional outbursts. Instead he said
This is a sign that the solar minimum is coming, and it's coming sooner than we expected.
We weren't expecting the next solar minimum, one of those troughs on the graph above, until 2007 but it looks like it will be here in 2006.
Here is a really cool picture of the current cycle.
This is good news for those of you worried about global warmining because the sun, funnily enough, is a major source of global warming and the sun spots are the main culprits, which is why that mini ice-age happened in 17th century. It also means your satellite TV reception will be much better than normal.
Read more at NASAs website.
That is the science of voting prediction, well many regard it more as a "black art". It has been notoriously wrong on a number of occassions, the election where Kennet got ousted in Victoria for example. The polls were predicting he would be returned with an increased majority.
One of the most obvious reasons for this is that people don't end up voting the way they said they would. It may be lying but more often it is probably they were not as firm in their opinion as they said they were.
Further to the previous post about telling when someone is lying Drazen Prelec of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recons he has come up with a way that he believes eliminates the effect of lying and indecision by people on the forms and questionaires they fill out.
The problem is, according to Drazen, that people tend to answer in a way that they believe is expected of them, particularly when they are undecided. With Drazens approach a second question is asked of the responded along the lines of what they think other people will say. This question is used to alter the weighting of the response to the first question.
Here is how it works:
For example, to find out whether people think Picasso is a great artist, you ask people whether they like Picasso, and also how many people in the population they think are likely to answer yes or no to that question.
A person who believes more people believe the same as them is more likely to be hold a firm opinion and be telling the truth. This is because you hold the opinion for reasons you believe to be valid. Because you believe your reasons are valid it is a logical extension to believe many other people will have come to the same conclusion. Given this you tend to overestimate how many other people share your opinion.
If you are less sure you are likely to pick a lower percentage of people who share your opinion.
Drazen recons it works best when there is little information about what the public, as a whole, thinks about a topic. It would work well immediately after a televised debate for example.
If he is right and his system works then he stands to be a very wealthy young man very quickly.
The Green Man suspects that Dr Maureen O'Sullivan of psychology at the University of San Francisco would be a very difficult person to be married to. She has made a life time study of determining when someone is lying.
We just can't help displaying on our face when we are lying. There are micro-facial expressions that give us away. Most of us are not particularly attuned to recognise these micro-expressions. A select few are, however, keyed into them and it is almost impossible to hide from these people when you are lying. Dr Maureen tested 13,000 individuals and found 31 that had an almost perfect accuracy when determining if someone was lying or not. Interesting most were not police officers, CIA or FBI agents who generally performed pretty much the same as the rest of us. She termed these living lie detectors "wizards".
Those people who are good at detecting lying use two basic methods.
1. Emotional Cues
There are usually emotions that are stirred up by lying. For most of us the emotion may be distress, but some people take real delight in duping people. The clue to the deception is the mismatch between what is being said and what the person seems to be feeling
2. Cognitive Cues
When someone is lying they may have to think more about keeping details straight and slow their speech or become more hesitant; work particularly hard to make the lie flow smoothly and speak more rapidly; use an odd phrase; or become tongue-tied. The inconsistency or the change in delivery is the clue that something is more going on.
Dr Maureen does not report on the marital status of the 31 wizards she has identified. The Green Man suspects that they are either single or very tolerant.
Yes, sad as it is, the way to a successful career is brown nosing. Not familiar with the term? Well I wont explain its derivation here, The Green Man, is a nice blog after all. Suffice to say that it is lavishing praise on your superiors and agreeing with what they say. It appears it is critical in securing that top job you have been hankering after. Also you can forget about making the decision makers aware of your achievements, they just don't care. They just want to get complimented.
These are the findings of Timothy Judge a professor in the School of Management at University of Florida and they are published in the August edition of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Professor Tim says
Kissing up, being nice and agreeing more than disagreeing do seem to be effective tactics for people to use when looking for a job. This approach succeeds because it leads recruiters and interviewers to believe the applicant will fit into the organization. . . . We know that on the job, self-promotion has never seemed to work too well, probably because the supervisor has much more of an opportunity to find out the reality.
If you are sitting at your PC in Iowa reading this thinking "that's why Florida is so pathetic. It's not the same as that here." Then you will be shocked to know that the study was carried out on 116 undergraduate students majoring in business or liberal arts at the University of Iowa. They were assessed on their interview style "suck" vs "self-promoter" and then rated by interviewers on the suitability for positions. Those who chose to suck up to the interviewers romped it in.
Yep, it is true and I am not being a meglamanic either, although I am happy to give that a try, it sounds so much fun.
It sounds impressive but, sadly for me, you will also share in the honour. Well you will if you are a man, if you are a woman you will have to content yourself with being mother of the world. In less that 2,000 years you are statistically likely to be an ancestor of every human being alive at that time.
Working back the other way it is likely that a common ancestor to everyone alive today lived less than 3,000 years ago.
Amazing bit of stats that, it is the work of Joseph T. Chang, professor in the Department of Statistics at Yale University. You can read more about it here.
Further to the earlier post on child and infant health in America, it seems to The Green Man that illicit drugs are a small problem for American children when compared to prescription drugs. The Daily News Transcript reports that 11 million American children are on some form of antidepressant drug, this is out of a population of 50 million children. That is 22% of all American children and adolescents.
Just to fill you in on what these drugs are:
Antidepressants are psychotropic drugs used primarily in the treatment of major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, and otherwise unnamed depressive disorders. . . They are also used in treating patients with certain types of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, and some personality disorders. Types of antidepressants include tricyclics, such as Norpramin and Etrafon; monoamine oxidase inhibitor agents (MAOIs), such as Nardil and Parnate; selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil; and miscellaneous antidepressants, such as Wellbutrin, Serzone, and Effexor. (source CDC)
Of particular interest are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, Zoloft. These are the drug of choice for most American parents who are medicating their depressed children. It is not unreasonable to suggest that many depressed individuals, both child and adult, have had suicidal thoughts and as Dr. Michael Jellinek, chief of child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital quaintly observes
Antidepressants can also, in what is typically a positive effect, restore the ability to take action by making patients feel energized, another trigger that could move depressed people to kill themselves. If you have suicidal ideation, that ability to be more active also means you could be more active in trying to hurt yourself.
It may be stating the obvious but there other approaches to the treatment of depression than medication. Naturally medication has its place however, when that medication leads to a 2-3% increase in the chances of having suicidal thoughts, it would seem obvious that a degree of caution and restraint should be used.
This rate of medication of children in the USA is unnaturally high and it suggests either:
1. If children globally suffer depression at this rate, then other societies are coping with this problem in other ways rather than overmedicating their children.
2. If the level of depression in US children is unnaturally high then there is something fundamentally wrong with the structure of the American society.
Probably it is a little bit of both. It is a complex problem with no simple solution however one simple step is available to all parents that costs very little - EXERCISE. The American Heart Association observes that the 1996 U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Physical Activity and Public Health found that, compared with inactive people, the physically active had higher scores for positive self-concept, more self-esteem and more positive "moods" and "affects."
Don't go to the gym, take your kids on a walk in the forest, go fishing, fly a kite. If you have a garden give them a corner to start their own vegitable patch and help them dig it over and plant the seeds/seedlings.
The quick fix is medication and it is easy. The slow fix is a more healthy and loving lifestyle and it is hard. This time do not take the easy path.
Here in Australia we get a very sanitised view of the USA. We are liberally supplied with TV soaps that depict what life is like in the USA. If you are a teenager or young adult living in California, which is most people if the soaps are anything to go by, then then you are healthy, white, attractive and spend a lot of time on the beach. There are others of course, they live in Seattle or New York or some such city but they are also fit and healthy although sometimes not white.
One thing that comes through is that, generally speaking, USA is a healthy place for children to be raised. New findings by Barbara Starfield of John Hopkins School of Public Health shake this perception. Collating information from the World Health Organisation and International Health Behaviour In School-Aged Children Study she shows that America has overall the least healthy children of any first world nation. In fact child health in the US is so bad that it almost qualifies as a third world nation by these measures.
Some key areas that drag the US down are:
Infant and Child Mortality: 26 countries have lower neonatal mortality than the US and 23 have lower child mortality.
Immunisation of Child against common preventable diseases: 68 countries did better.
Teenage Health:
out of the 28 industrialised countries the USA rated
Psychological Wellbeing: 18th
Chronic Illness: 27th
Taking Sleeping Tablets Regularly: 24th
Healthy Lifestyle: 17th
Junk food consumption: 24th
Barabara points to two primary factors that she considers are the major contributors to the unenviable position in which the US finds itself.
Firstly that United States is the most income-inequitable country among the industrialized nations, that is the rich are much richer and the poor are much poorer in the USA.
Secondly the niggardliness of health policies and consequent heath services. The United States is the only industrialized country to lack universal health insurance.
David Williamson of University of North Carolina throws in his two bobs worth by observing that since 1977 consumption of soft drinks has risen by 137% and during the same period consumption of milk has fallen 38%. Milk is far more nutritious and contributes to bone density through its high calcium content. This one fact combined with the increasingly sedantry nature of children will mean long term increases in diabetes and bone related problems such as osteoporosis in these children.
Of course, if you are reading this then you are literate and have reasonable computer skills so you are probably not in the group of extremely poor who are dragging the USA statistics down to third world level. Accordingly you probably don't care enough to do anything about it, not that you could anyway, right. Hang on! I heard a rumour about an upcoming election in the States. Perhaps it is time to direct that massive intelligence of yours to improving the US for all US citizens and cast a considered and intelligent vote this election.
Read more of Barabara Starfields research here.
Read more of David Williamsons research here.
Stanley Milgram is renown for his work on abedience but The New York Times has an interesting article on an earlier piece of work. Seemly innocuous, it involved getting students to travel on the subway in New York and to ask passengers to give up their seats. New Yorks have a reputation for being hard nosed but the survey uncovered two interesting things.
1. 68% of people when asked directly gave up their seat
2. It was very hard to do. It traumatised the students who were doing the asking because it violated social mores.
That was 30 years ago. So has 9/11 and modern life generally toughened up the New Yorkers. The experiment was undertaken again recently and, guess what, 93% of people gave up their seat.
Even in hard bitten New York it seems people are more compassionate and considerate than they were in 1974. What a good news story.
The Green Man attracts a wide range of readers, something to do with the wide range of topics that are convassed. A number of the readers maintain their own blogs, Phil from Signposts, Darren from Living Room, Bene from BeneDiction Blogs On to name three that spring to mind. Sickly bunch that they are. Well I don't actually know that but new research published in New Scientist suggests that people who maintain a diary and write about their experiences are less healthy than those who don't spend the time ruminating on the hand that fate has dealt them.
They are more likely to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness than people who do not maintain a diary, on line or otherwise. (Not Phil, Darren and Bene but diarists generally). Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University, who conducted the research says
We decided to test the idea that writing is cathartic. . . We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off. In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all.
This goes against the traditional wisdom of course but they suggest it might be that if you don't write about something, in many cases, you just move on with your life and the incident fades. Writing about it means that you have to process it at a more detailed level over a longer period and this means it has a bigger impact on your life.
She does point out that this is a corrollation and that cause and effect has not been established. It might just be that sickly people are more inclined to write than healthy ones.
Do feel deprived because you have never seen a brilliant meteor entering the earths atmosphere? Here is what it looks like.
The trouble is you don't know when to look up to see it. Hang on - wait - The Green Man is having some sort of funny turn, his is going all queer (no not that sort of queer), is it a premonition perhaps. I am standing at Bend, Oregon on Wednesday, September 8th at 8:52:46 a.m and one is appearing as a white dot streaking across the blue morning sky. Now I am magically transported to the southwestern corner of Idaho and it's 8:53:35 a.m. The meteor is quite spectacular now.
The Green Man blinks, as if coming out of a trance. Ah, what a strange experience.
Odd that the premonition coincides exactly with the planned reentry of the Genesis spacecraft. Below is a map of the trajetory.
If you live within 100 miles of the red line then you are in for an excellent spectacle on the morning of the 8th of September.
The map is courtesy of NASA on whose web site you can find out more about the event click here.
The American Institute of Biological Sciences has carried out a meta-study, that is combining the results of many studies, to conclude that desertification is the result of, wait for it ......
climatic factors that lead to reduced rainfall
who'd have thunk it. Also chopping down all the trees and overgrazing are big factors in this devastating phenonemon.
If you want more details on the bleeding obvious then you can read their report here.
Kathryn Anthony, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a somewhat questionable interest in men urinating. It seems that a significant number of American men, precluding prostate problems, posses a problem pointing percy at the porcelain in the presence of people (how's that for an alliteration of Ps? which is somehow appropriate since we are discussing pee) .
She says
Although few discuss it publicly, some men question the lack of privacy in the standard men's room lineup of urinals, with users in full view of each other. In fact, a disorder called paruresis, or shy bladder syndrome, making it impossible for someone to urinate in public if others are within site or hearing distance, affects over 1 million Americans. Nine out of 10 of them are men.
She is clearly not as clever with alliterations as The Green Man is.
By way of critique of the assertion, The Green Man suggests that nine out of ten are men because women, generally speaking, do not urinate in public anyway, well at least not at the parties The Green Man typically attends. This also explains why women are not as successful in business because scientific studies have shown that 30% of business deals are negotiated at the stainless steel urinal in the men's toilet.
Anyway, back to the topic; did I say Professor Kathryn had a strange fascination with men urinating? Well that is a bit unfair because she also has a strange fascination with women urinating. Actually she has a fascination with toilets generally. As far as Professor Kathryn is concerned you can't have too many urinals, or more precisely that America does not have nearly enough urinals. She wants to put an end to those long queues at the toilets, particularly the womens.
The Green Man has a simple solution, plant more lemon trees, although he does note that women in Australia do not show the same enthusiasm with "feeding the lemon tree" than men do. Strange that.
By the way if you are interested in a serious architectural discussion of toilets, you can find an article on Professor Kathryn's work here.
Thinking of planning your next heist? The big question is "where?". A bank is probably a pretty obvious choice but the obvious is not always the best. If this is going to be a daylight job where witnesses abound then more careful planning could save you a long time in the clink.
The Green Man suggests an amusement park. New research by the University of New South Wales indicates that happy eyewitnesses are about "as useful as tits on a bull", to quote that colourful Australian expression. Yep if you want to rely on your eye witnesses account you had better hope they are depressed, which, if they are visiting a bank these days, they probably are.
Joseph Forgas, who is professor of University of New South Wales School of Psychology, has been conducting research into this very topic and says
It shows that our recollection of past events are more likely to be contaminated by irrelevant information when we are in a positive mood. A positive mood is likely to trigger less careful thinking strategies.
Further if you are going into an exam then you had better hope you are depressed because you'll do so much better. When considering the quality and persuasiveness of arguments put by students he found that those who were in a negative frame of mind were much more lucid and coherent.
Teenage years can be full of angst and things that, as adults, we would laugh off assume life and death significance, literally. Between 1974 and 2001 65,594 teenagers committed suicide in the USA. The method of choice for 62% of them was a gun. When it comes to suicide, guns are a real problem because they are an extremely fast and efficient way of killing yourself. Most methods take more effort and more time, time when you have the opportunity to reconsider your actions, time for someone to intervene and save your life.
If a teenager is comtemplating suicide then where do they turn for assistance? Research in Queensland, Australia by Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention has shown that teenagers will not seek professional help and that teenagers finding themselves in this position turn to their peers for support and advice. This points to a need for this usually taboo subject to be raised in fora where teenagers can be taught the rudimentaries of supporting one of their friends who finds themselves in this situation.
There is a common, and quite understandable, misconception that people who commit suicide want to die. In many instances this is simply not the case, it is just that they see this as the only option available to them. Teenagers in this category can be helped through counselling if there is an opportunity to do so. Guns often deny us this opportunity. If a teenager is contemplating suicide then easy access to a firearm in the home facilitates and sometimes even accelerates their progress down this tragic path. In recognition of this a number of states have introduced Child Access Protection (CAP) legislation that requires safe storage of firearms within the home. Obviously when guns are unavailable some teenagers will choose another method however analysis of the data shows an approximately 8% reduction in teenage suicides in states where this legislation is in force. This represents 256 teenage lives per annum that are saved by the CAP legislation.
Suicides are often impulsive acts which is what makes an available gun in the house a dangerous thing. Accordingly restricting access to purchase firearms by teenagers did not affect the suicide rates because this did not involve impulsiveness and those who were sufficiently goal focused on suicide who would have gone and purchased a gun for the purpose simply chose another means.
Read about the Australian Research here.
Read about the CAP research here.
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.
These fateful words were the introduction of a paper that was to fundamentally change the way biologists looked at and understood living organisms. They were the introduction to a paper by Francis Crick and James Watson describing the molecular structure of DNA. It was to win them the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Not satisfied with this awe inspiring achievement Francis Crick went on the break the genetic code that determines how DNA is translated into protiens. His interest was then captured by the nature of consciousness, something that we still do not truely understand to this day.
Crick moved from Cambridge to California's Salk Institute for Biological Studies to continue his study of consciousness. The Institute recently honoured him by establishing the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology which is using computer technology in conjuction with biological techniques to study how genes regulate brain activity.
Of his life-long friend and colleague, James Watson, says
I will always remember Francis for his extraordinarily focused intelligence and for the many ways he showed me kindness and developed my self-confidence
Francis Crick died on 28th July 2004 after a long battle with colon cancer at Thornton Hospital in La Jolla, California, he was 88. Congratulations on a magnificent and fruitful life Francis. If I contribute one tenth of what you did I will be amazed at my own achievement.
Sun spot 652 can be clearly seen in this magnificent sunset shot by Riccardo Di Nasso at the Marina di Pisa in Italy.
Image is from www.spaceweather.com
Clearly there is noone sitting out in space with a camera at the moment and equally an large asteroid has not just hit the earth so it is reasonable to assume that this image is an artists impression of what a large asteroid hitting the earth would look like. It does have some cred though, the artist is a NASA employee.
Even though this hasn't happened recently it is not the say that it could not. Here is a list of asteriods heading our way in the near future.
|
2000 PH5 |
July 25th |
|
2003 UX34 |
Sept 9th |
|
2004 JA27 |
Sept 10th |
|
1998 OX4 |
Sept 14th |
|
Toutatis |
Sept 29th |
Fortunately none are on target to hit, or so they tell us.
I was in Brisbane not so long ago and this ageing hippie was busking in the pedestrian mall. He was creating new age images of a worlds and moons with aerosol paint cans. It was fascinating to watch and he had drawn quite a crowd. Being up there for business and by myself I had plenty of time to kill so I watched for quite some time.
I include this image from SpaceWeather.com, taken by Eva Seidenfaden of Germany as evidence that nature can trump any image that man's imagination can conjure up.
Ice crystals in high clouds catch and bend sunlight, forming beautiful halos and arcs of light around the sun. Usually the halos are faint, but not on June 26th when Eva Seidenfaden of Germany saw this dazzling display
Part of the process in learning to talk when you are a baby is babbling. It has been thought that this babble process was the baby learning how to control vocal and mouth muscles to make the vocal sounds necessary for speech. Whilst there is undoubtedly a component of this in the activity new research indicates that the processes involved are more complex than simple muscle control.
In a fascinating new study by Laura-Ann Petitto at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire it was found that babies babble with their hands when they are exposed to sign language, regardless of whether they are deaf or not. This points to an inate capacity to embrace the rythym and structure of language regardless of whether it is presented in audible or visual format.
Now where would you go to research the hotest spot in the solar system, the sun?
To a polar ice cap, of course.
Taking cores of ice enables us to look back at the prevelance of sun spots in past times. (If you want to know how then I suggest that you email Dr Sami Solanki at the Institute of Astronomy in Zurich.)
The reason sun spots are interesting is because they have a direct influence on the temperature of the earth. Between 1645 and 1715 there were virtually no sun spots, this corresponded to a mini ice age at the time, it is known as the Maunder Effect. The corrollary is that during periods of intense sun spot activity the earths temperature rises due, in part, to the bombarment of the earth by millions of tonnes of superheated gas streaming across space.
The most interesting aspect of this that, over the last 60 years, we have been in a period of intense sun spot activity unmatched in the time we can measure, which is the last 1,150 years.
Green house gas emmissions has been right up there in the Green Movements hit list and it is clear that shifting all that carbon from where it is locked underground into the atmosphere is probably not a good thing. It is balancing however to keep in mind that we are mere specks of cosmic dust when it comes to influencing the stars and planets, including earth. A significant burp by the sun could wipe out all the environmental problems that we have created or undo all the good that we have done. We are at the whim of the stars, just not the Astrology ones, which is a load of crap.
If you only exercise once in a blue moon then it is time to drag out the joggers, squeeze into the track suit and hit the track. Yep, there is a blue moon on the horizon, or there will be on July 31st.
A blue moon is a second full moon in a month. The lunar cycle is 29 days and given most months have 30 or 31 days every now and then, 2 1/2 years actually, we strike two full moons in a month.
Those of you who do not live in a city where the air is thick with pollution will know that the first moon of the month is a silvery grey colour. The second will have a decidedly bluish tinge, especially if you look at it through blue cellophane.
This is not the only reason that the moon will change colour, of course. As I alluded to above, particles in the atmosphere can have the affect of altering the colour of the moon. If you happen to have a spare 100 megaton atomic bomb on you then you can easily demonstrate the phenonemon. This is what happened with island of Krakatoa, off the coast of Indonesia. In 1883 it was split in two by the equivalent of a 100 megaton bomb, a volcano, making sufficient noise to be clearly heard 600kms and spewing ash into the upper atmosphere, turning the moon blue. The blue moons continued for a number of years after the explosion as did the first examples of noctilucent clounds.
Dr Susan Swithers hails from Purdue University in West LaFayette where she is a Developmental Psychobiologist. Phew, that is some title Susan. The Green Man has hankered after a swish sounding title like that for some time now, something along the lines of Aboreal Antiquarian perhaps. Anyway, enough frivolousness. In spite of the fact that The Green Man thinks that Susan has got a bit carried away when thinking up a title she is doing some interesting work in the area of obesity.
It seems that diet soft drinks have a role to play. There is one simple reason why most people are fat and that is that they consume more calories per day than they burn. This raises the question of how you know, in normal circumstances, how much to eat. The answer, according to Susan, is that we learn, at a subconscious level, how many calories are in food based on its characteristics.
There are a number of characteristics that we use, sweetness is one and consistency is another. Both of these we can fool and this leads to a reduction in our ability to monitor and regulate our consumption of calories to match our requirements. Looking at each of these in turn. The increasing consumption of sweet low calorie food means that the relationship between sweetness and calories breaks down in our subconscious and our natural tendancy to feel sated after a small amount of these foods is removed.
Similarily the body does not treat thick liquids as as satisfying as solids even though they may contain an equal number of calories. Yes folks, the "thick shake" is one of the principal enemy combatants in the obesity war.
If the break down of our ability to regulate our intake of calories is a real phenonemon and it is linked to the consumption of diet drinks then another statistic suddenly becomes very interesting. Between 1987 and 2000 the number of Americans consuming diet drinks rose from 70 million to 160 million. During the same period consumption of non-diet soft drinks rose by 15 gallons (57 litres) per person per year. Yes you read that correctly 15 gallons per person increase.
Taking a holistic view of the problem we see that this is a symptom of our general loss of connectedness with our bodies. We are vesting the responsibility of maintenance of our bodies in others and we are doing this because it is easy and self-indulgent. Water will quench your thirst, there is no need to sweeten it even with calorie free sweeteners. Your hunger will be sated by grains and pulses just as well as with hamburgers. If they take more effort to prepare then you have burnt calories preparing them. In food, faster is not better. Try visiting SlowFoodUSA and learn about the "slow food" alternative to the fast food culture that pervades the west.
Read more of Susan Swithers' research here.
Not comfortable thinking about the Nazis and reproductive science well let's move on to safer ground. In another corner of European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference Dr David Gardner, Scientific Director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, Englewood, USA reported that a high protein diet may interfer with a womans ability to get pregnant. Speaking of mice he said
Analysis of foetal development on the fifteenth day of gestation showed that foetuses from the high protein group were a third of a day behind the control group in their development, and one foetus had a neural tube defect.
He hypothesises that this is because a high protein diet results in an increase of the level of ammonium in the system, a chemical that is known to interfer with embryonic development.
He suggests that if you are trying to conceive then you forget the prime rib steak and keep your protein intake to less than 20% of your total energy intake. By way of comparison, the average American derrives 14% of their energy from protein.
Meanwhile, down at the bar at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference, Fiona MacCallum, a research psychologist at the Family and Child Psychology Centre, City University, London, UK was telling anyone who was prepared to listen about the differences in attitude between those couples who become pregnant with a donated embryo as compared with those using IVF with their own sperm, egg or both.
Like adoptive parents, most parents who participated in the IVF program intended to tell their child about the circumstances surrounding their birth. In comparison less than one third of those who received a donated embryo intended to tell their child. Though she was slurring slightly she could be heard telling the bystanders
Embryo donation parents obtained significantly higher scores on measures of emotional over-involvement and defensive responding than did the adoptive or IVF parents. However, we found no differences between the three groups for parental warmth, the quality of the parenting, or the behavioural and emotional functioning of the children
It is a fascinating anomoly in the attitudes of one group of participants in IVF. (good luck with the hangover Fiona.)
Your can read about her research here.
Enough politics for today. It is far too depressing to focus on the intolerance and evil in the world. What better tonic for the soul than natural beauty.
The photo is by Morten Ross, taken in Sandbukta, Svartskog, south of Oslo Norway. The whiteish clouds that you see in this picture are Noctilucent Clouds. They get their name from the fact glow like a neon light suspended in the night sky.
These clouds hang at the very edge of space, 80kms above the earth. They are a recent phenonemon hinting that man has had a part in their creation. They are thought to be made of rocket emissions and perhaps some cosmic dust. Here are some more from Finland.
Find out more about Noctilucent Clouds at Nasa
Why would you put up with antarctic blizzards, periods of isolation and general discomfort just to get a bit of ice, unless perhaps your wife forgot to fill the ice cube tray?
To work out when the next ice age is due, that is why, and the answer is not for some considerable time yet. The New York Times reports that scientists have spent 5 years digging a hole in the ice in Antartica (that is some hole). Ice from this hole has been analysed and their conclusion is that the current warm period matches a prolonged warm period that occured around 430,000 years ago. This supports the work of other scientists that have reached similar conclusions via different methods. It seems that we don't need to worry about establishing the colony on Mars for at least another 10,000 years, well not from a climate change perspective anyway, getting away from the neighbours may be another matter.
If you are going to dig a hole at one end of the earth why not dig one at the other as well, that is The Green Mans view of the world. Scientists clearly think the same way because they are now heading to the other cold bit, namely the artic circle to dig a hole there. This has some greater challenges because, unlike the antarctic which is a land mass, the arctic is largely water. Consequently they have purloined an ice breaker for the purpose. You can read about their exploits in Nature.
The trial of the man accused of murdering Peter Falconio in the Australian outback is underway in Darwin at the moment. Joanne Lees who was allegedly taken captive at the same time has been testifying and the defence lawyer has been challenging the veracity of her testimony. The ABC reports
And now police concerns about inconsistencies in her account have emerged at the committal hearing of Bradley John Murdoch.Under cross-examination by the defence counsel Grant Algie, Superintendent Jeanette Kerr admitted there were more than a dozen points in Joanne Lees' story that didn't appear to make sense.
hmmmm, it seems that she couldn't give a consistent or accurate account of what happen during and immediately following being taken captive. If you think that sounds a bit suspicious then you would be completely wrong. New research by Charles Morgan III, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine has shown that it is entirely normal and that most eye-witnesses who have been in extremely stressful situations are incapable of accurately remembering what happened even if they are questioned as soon as 24 hours after the event. Several of the subjects in the study could not even get the sex of their assailant correct.
In another interesting study conducted in the USA, which I can't find a copy of on the net at the moment, subjects witnessed an attack of one person against another involving a white person and a black person. In the instances where the white person attacked the black person a significant percentage, after a period of time, reported that the attack had happened the other way around, ie the black person had been the aggressor.
These things happen because, in stressful situations, a large chunk on the minds processing power is devoted to processing the emotion itself and is not available to process the visual images that are presented. The mind compensates by filling in the gaps with what the person expects to see rather than the actuality.
Sadly, a key foundation of western justice, namely the eyewitness account, is proving to be one of the most unreliable forms of evidence and yet the justice system and the public at large cling to it like a childs security blanket.
To those people who are deeply religious the question of why they are religious may seem so blindingly obvious that it is pointless to even consider it. Not all people share this view however and, in fact, people are attracted to religion for a variety of reasons.
Steven Reiss, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University has been studying this very question and has come up with some interesting conclusions. It appears that the most appealing aspect of religion derives from a strong desire for interdependence with other people. The people who are least likely to be religious are those who place great importance on self-reliance and independence.
Beyond this a church is faced with the challenge of making the religious experience satisfying for the participants and this is not as simple as it might seem because different personality types have different needs if they are to receive a fulfilling religious experience. Steve says
People who have a strong need for order should enjoy ritualized religious experiences, whereas those with a weak need for order may prefer more spontaneous expression of faith
There has been much debate between the champions of the "emerging church" and the traditional church hierarchy over the concept of vexed issue of "the marketing of religion". This study suggests that rather than the emerging church diluting faith by offering alternative models of worship they are simply catering for the needs of a wider range of personality styles; that is ministering to the needs of a wider section of the community. There in, perhaps, lies their success.
Back to Steve's research for a moment. It is important to note that his study was primarily based on the Christian religion. It would be interesting to see comparative studies in a similar vein that draw their subjects from, say, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam
Nature reports that scientists at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, UK have achieved a successful IVF pregnancy using 21 year old frozen sperm. The embryo was created using intracytoplasmic sperm injection which requires only a single sperm, which is injected directly into an egg.
This technique requires only one sperm in a sample to be a wriggler rather than the masses that are required in other techniques for achieving pregnancy, including the fun way that most of us use.
The only concern scientist have is that of behaviour abnormalities as the child ages. Some speculate that the child show enhanced attraction to heat. "It's only natural," they say "Half of this kid has been cold for a hell of a long time."
Well recent research tends to suggest that they should be. Colour plays a big role in our overindulging apparently.
Research by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing and nutritional science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been doing some specific research into the role of colour in food consumption. Here is some interesting findings.
1. moviegoers given M&Ms in 10 colors ate 43% more than those offered the same number of M&Ms in seven colors
2. adults offered six colored flavors of jellybeans mixed together in the same bowl ate 69% more than when the colors were each placed in separate bowls
3. office employees ate more if the container on the desk was clear rather than opaque
Brian says
People eat with their eyes, and their eyes trick their stomachs. If we think there's more variety in a candy dish or on a buffet table, we will eat more. The more colors we see, the more we eat.
We can use this knowledge for good rather than evil. He suggests
* Avoid multiple bowls of the same food at parties or receptions because they increase perceptions of variety and stimulate overeating.
* At buffets and receptions avoid having more than two different foods on your plate at the same time.
Read more of his research here.
Enough of the prisoner abuse in Iraq, it is such a depressing topic anyway. Time to get onto something much more in the general vein of The Green Man, sex.
Chris Bazinet, at St John's University in New York not only has sex on the brain but all his other cells as well. He is not alone, he believes that those mischievous little mitochondria that exist in every cell were the start of it all.
He hypothesises that they were originally parasitic bacteria that had a habit of breaking out through the cell wall and infecting other cells. This was not necessarily a bad thing for the target cell because they often took beneficial genes with them.
The benefits involved could have lead to the cells "formalising" the gene exchange process, voila sex was created.
Rick Michod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson is a desenting voice. Whilst he agrees that mitochondria had a role he believes that sexual systems predated them. He says that sexual systems for gene exchange were in place before the mitochondria were on the scene. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst agrees
Bazinet has shown that mitochondria behave just like their bacterial ancestors, but I wouldn't make his grandiose claim about mitochondria being responsible for the whole of the evolution of sex.
Read more in New Scientist
Cognitive loss and personality change are often the direct result of surgery when the heart has to be stopped. It is the result of small bubbles of air being released into the blood stream by the heart-lung machine that is keeping the recipient alive.
The machine also ruptures red blood cells releasing hemoglobin into bodily organs, where it's toxic. Combine this with plastic tubing triggering white blood cell immuniological alerts on a mamoth scale and you can see why this sort of surgery is limited to extreme cases.
The purpose of the heart lung machine is, of course, to reduce damage to the body and particularly the brain from oxygen deprivation during periods when the heart is incapable of supplying the oxygen. The reciprical approach to the problem is to reduce the demand of oxygen by the body and the consequent damage from deprivation.
This is achieved by drastically reducing the temperature of the areas of the body that are subject to oxygen deprivation, called therapeutic hypothermia. There are problems with this approach of course. The most obvious being the the affect that it has on the blood. Dropping the temperature below 90 degrees causes the blood to thicken and protiens to loose their shape, which is bad. It leads to catastrophic circulatory dysfunction.
A company called Biotime has come up with a blindingly obvious solution to the problem, human blood anti-freeze. The product is called Hextend and has been approved by the FDA. Hextend allows the blood temperature to be reduced to 35 degrees, at this temperature the brain takes hours to suffer the same damage that would only take minutes to occur at normal body temperature.
Interestingly, the compound was developed to assist in the Cryogenics industry but is now finding huge success in the mainstream surgical community.
Dave Haxton, a regular visitor to The Green Man blog, lives at Hammerstead Farm, lost somewhere in the American bush (that's rural countryside to the non-Australians out there). It looks like a peaceful, idyllic lifestyle generally speaking but it is about to get a shake up. It is likely to be the site of a frenzied few weeks of feasting, sex, and general partying till you drop, literally. Although, to be fair, Dave's farm has not been singled out. It will be happening across most of America as billions of cicadas emerge in mid-May this year.
Michael Schauff of the Agricultural Research Service's Systematic Entomology Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland says that this years emergence of "17-year" cicadas will be the largest emergence of the species ever. They are called 17 year cicadas because they emerge from the ground once every (now how many years was it again) Oh that's right 17.
Although generally regarded as harmless they are guaranteed to make a lot of noise, clog up radiators of cars and make an all round pest of themselves as they pursue their glutonous and lust filled endeavours.
Michael reliably informs us that those of you who are not too particular about your sources of protein may like to experiment with consuming them. Whilst being high in protein they don't have a very "meaty" taste. Michael thinks
"They are quite soft and take on the flavour of whatever you cook them in. They are not quite like a piece of meat, more like a small white potato that's been cooked"
Apparently it is best to get them when they have just hatched before their exoskeleton becomes too hard. They may even be appropriate for some vegetarians who, like the rest of us, consume insects and insect parts everyday, al beit, inadvertently. It just depends on how far down the animal kingdom their vegetarianism extends.
Read more in New Scientist.
It is an interesting experience running a blog. As regular readers know, The Green Man posts on a quite diverse range of topics and it is impossible to know which is going to be a popular post and which not. Some of the more peripheral posts have been long term favourites on The Green Man. One post in question is the inadvertant killing of the worlds tallest hardwood tree in Tasmania.
This has some sort of synergy really given that The Green Man is an ancient forest spirit but it was completely unintentional. Anyway, in the spirit of the earlier post, Nature has an interesting article on the theoretical limit to which a tree can grow, it is 130 metres apparently.
As pointed out in the comments section of the earlier post the tallest trees are California redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), and the research has shown that they have about maxed out, height wise, because of the difficulty of getting water up that high to feed their leaves. The tug of gravity and the friction between the water and the vessels through which it flows mean that fluid cannot be dragged any higher than 122-130 metres.
New research indicates that girls do, in fact, learn faster than boys. Where boys have a short attention span are concerned with rough and tumble games the girls are more studious and anxious to learn. Paying close attention to their mothers girls quickly pick up the technique of catching termites using a stick. Boys on the other hand take much longer to learn this skill.
It seems that, once again, our chimpanzee relatives are not that much different from ourselves. Learning abilities in human children are characterised by girls tending to catch on faster than boys when considering learning skills such as writing and drawing.
A lesser soul than The Green Man may have been tempted to question the relationship Robert Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Boston had with his mother. The Green Man, on the other hand, is prepared to accept that there is an entirely legitimate reason for growing a female human breast on a mouse.
Of the technique Bob has to say
The key is to transplant two types of human breast cells into the mice, one of which has been blasted with radiation
Those interested in the said mice for research into breast cancer are quite pleased with the outcome. For those looking for some visual stimulation it is back to the drawing board. Unlike human breasts the mice's growths sit flush to the chest.
Read more in Nature.
Susie Nanney is acting director of the Obesity Prevention Center at Saint Louis University and she is concerned that people are taking the message of "an apple a day" to literally. Susie recons
While people understand they should eat a variety of fruits and vegetables each day, they are not translating 'variety' in a way to capture health benefits, such as reducing their risk of developing chronic diseases. I'm just asking them to expand their interpretation of diets.
Of course this is a serious issue and The Green Man should take it seriously (there are some other serious posts on this if you look for them). Today, however, The Green Man is in a flippant mood and, as such, the first thought that sprung into The Green Man's mind was.
The last thing an obese person needs is more nutrients. Wouldn't the dietary equivalent of cardboard, bran, be more in line.
Anyway, to drift into the sensible for a moment she suggests that colour is the way to go with selecting your food.
White: Eat cauliflower more often than potatoes, onions and mushrooms.
Green: Add more dark lettuces, such as romaine and red leaf lettuce, spinach, broccoli and Brussels sprouts to replace iceberg lettuce and green beans.
Yellow/orange: Substitute more carrots, winter squashes, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, oranges and grapefruit for corn or bananas.
Red: Select tomatoes, red peppers and strawberries in favor of apples.
How come I didn't get a job in a University? Well at the time it was a realistic option I thought that the big wide world of business seemed much more exciting. How wrong I was.
Charles E. Roselli is a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, OHSU School of Medicine and he has been studying sexual orientation in male sheep. Now there is excitement for you.
The Green Man is more of a cow person than a sheep person so it came as a bit of a surprise to find out that approximately 8% of rams "bat for the other team".
It seems from Chuck's research that a male sheep's preference for same-sex partners has a biological basis. Apparently brain anatomy and hormone production may determine whether adult rams decide to adopt a happy and gay lifestyle. They have discovered a densely packed cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the sheep brain, which they named the ovine sexually dimorphic nucleus or oSDN. This area of the brain was significantly smaller in those rams that preferred other rams to ewes.
Colmar De Von Figueroa-Moseley has found that women who were sexually abused as children are much more likely to be current smokers than women who weren't abused as children. It is the finding a study she conducted as part of her PhD research. She says it is
a topic that has been largely overlooked in medical research.
Um could that be because it is of absolutely no value. Let's face it, if you are an potential abuser of a child, the childs welfare is clearly not a major consideration. You are hardly likely to restrain yourself because the child may take up smoking in later life?
I know it is getting hard to find innovative research topics these days but surely there is something a little more valuable that this researcher could be working on.
If, for some perverse reason, you want to read about the research. Click here.
Earlier this month The Green Man reported on pain perception and how it is altered by the gender of the person administering the pain. Casting more light on this curious phenonemon is a recent article in Science that investigates the placebo effect with respect to pain.
Subjects were told that a cream they were given to apply dulled pain in the skin. They were then given painful but harmless electric shocks. Comparing their brain activity with that of people who had not been given the "anti-pain" cream showed a shift in brain activity away from well-known pain-sensing regions, such as the thalamus, the somatosensory cortex and parts of the cerebral cortex, to an area known as the prefrontal cortex.
Given that the cream did nothing the shift of brain activity was unconsiously orchestrated by the person themselves. This research highlights that, just as the brain controls activities in other parts of the body, so it can control its own activity. This is a big step that has been taken in providing understanding and scientific legitimacy to certain eastern meditative therapeutic practices which appear to work but for which science had no explanation.
I know you have been sitting there pondering "I wonder how many motor vehicle accidents there were between 1975 and 1999 in Texas". Well wonder no longer, there was 3.9 million resulting in 90,036 fatalities.
As reckless teens burn rubber up and down your street I can see you sitting in the rocking chair on your balcony thinking "Those darn young uns, they are the menace on the road". Well they might be annoying but they are not the main cause of the accidents, that honour falls to the over 65 bracket.
Not only do the elderlies have the most accidents, because of declining perception and motor skills, but, quite understandably, they also experience the most trauma when they do have one. Drivers 65 or older are nearly twice as likely to die in a crash as drivers between 55 and 64. Drivers over 85 were nearly four times as likely to die.
We could, of course, view this as nature in action, easing the older members of the community off their perch to make way for the young uns but it will continue to increase in significance as populations in countries such as Australia, USA and UK age.
Here is question for you! Who is supposed to be having babies?
Hmmm tough one that, let me guess, is it young women?
Yes it is and basically they are not. They are waiting until they are older then, in a desparate attempt to wind back their biological clock, they are resorting to fertility treatments. This in turn is leading to multiple birth pregnancies which, in turn, leads to complications and babies dying. Multiple births climbed more than 400 percent between 1980 and 1998 because of fertility treatments by older women, the CDC has reported.
Couple this with the higher instance of babies with birth defects or other potentially deadly complications in women in their 30s and 40s and you get the first increase in infant mortality rates in the US in quite some time. It is a trend we are likely to see continue unless women return to having children at a younger age.
Ideology aside, if you are a women, for your own physical wellbeing, it pays to have your children young or not at all.
Herpes is a big success as an organism, that is if you define a virus as an organism but we wont enter that debate. It has successfully established itself in the human population and does what the most successful parasites do. It may inconvenience its host but it does not kill it. If you think about it, a parasite that kills its host is depriving itself of a home.
It appears that there is a version of herpes that is not quite so benign. Koi herpes virus, or KHV, is killing four out of every five carp that it infects, and has spread rapidly around the world. The disease threatens two important fish populations: the ornamental koi carp industry, which is worth tens of millions of dollars in Japan, and the common carp, the world's fourth most-farmed fish.
It was first identified in Israel in 1998 which prompts The Green Man to wonder what bizarre practices are engaged in in that country via-a-vis fish and herpes infected humans. Perhaps it is better not to think to much about that. Anyway it has spread to Europe, Asia and the United States, which prompts the question "How come we haven't got it in Australia?" It seems that everywhere that likes carp have got it and Australia, that hates carp (they are an environmental nightmare here) has missed out. Ah the irony.
You can read more about this carp social disease in Nature here.
I have called this principle, by which
each slight variation, if useful, is preserved,
by the term Natural Selection.
—Charles Darwin from "The Origin of Species"
One of the truely great thinkers in natural science was born on this day in 1809. From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world. This trip was when Darwin made the observations that were to be the foundation of one of the most fundamental shifts in scientific thinking. Up until this time man had seen himself as separate from the natural world, a higher being. Through Darwins work we came to see that we fitted into and were part of the natural world.
If you happen to be in London you can celebrate his birthday at the Natural History Museum who sponsor an annual celebration. Find out more here.
Darwin was the fifth child in his family and, as such, had the gift of intellectual flexibility, at least according to Frank Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His theory is that it’s our siblings and the threat they present us to getting out of childhood alive that are at the heart of who we are, the single best predictor of personality traits. Basically, lower born children, like Charles Darwin, are physically less capable of exerting an influence in the family because their siblings are older and stronger. These individuals are forced to adopt more innovative ways of thinking in order to survive and prosper in the family. His book "Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives" makes fascinating reading from a theoretical perspective but it is a bit long winded. I found myself skipping bits but it was worth the read anyway.
Dr Susan Hallam of the UK Institute of Education is about to become a hero amongst our younger citizens. Analyzing 75 years of research by the Institute she has concluded that homework is almost a complete waste of time particularly when parents attempt to assist the child.
The most productive environment for out of class study is after-school learning clubs, away from the potentially disruptive influence of parents. Anxiety, boredom, fatigue and emotional exhaustion are about the only things that students gain from in home study.
Dr Hallam says
Parents have the most positive influence when they offer moral support, make appropriate resources available and discuss general issues. They should only actually help with homework when their children specifically ask them to.
Gender plays a big part in the perception of pain. As surprising as it may be it is well established that males have a much higher tolerance of pain than females, both in their perception of pain and in their physiological response to pain, quickened heart rate, increased blood pressure etc.
Interesting work by David Williams,of the University of Westminster in the UK, has shown that the gender of the person administering the pain is also important. Earlier studies indicated that men reported higher pain thresholds when the person administering the pain was a female. This was put down to a macho display on the part of the recipients. It turns out, however, that both males and females, genuinely experience less pain when the person administering it is female.
There has been some theorising over the evolutionary benefit of this phenonema however it seems pretty tenuous at this stage. At least we now know why women make better nurses.
Read more about pain in New Scientist.
Ever thought of breeding yourself a master race of humans? America did, although if you take a look at the comments on post entitled "Facts On Guns In The USA" you will see that they were not completely successful, not, at least, if intellect was the measure.
But I digress, the science is called Eugenics and America embraced it with enthusiasm.
You can read all about it at the Eugenics Archive.
Conduct disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis defined as "a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others and major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated," In a teenager this means they have little respect for their peers and consistantly violate those social rules that are the glue that holds our society together. These sorts of teenagers undermine the psychological wellbeing of the community.
Recent research indicates that adolescents with conduct disorder are also five times more likely to be carrying of a conceled hand-gun. Even though the carrying of handguns by juveniles is prohibited, this is hardly a surprising finding since that
1. disorder is closely linked with delinquency.
2. sufferers are characterised by their disregard for the law
The demographic of these adolescents is 30% black, 70% white. Blacks represent 12.6% of the population generally meaning that they are overrepresented in this group.
I am not sure how many of my international readership are acquainted with the culinary delight that is fish and chips wrapped in paper. It is something that Australia inherited from the English and Friday evening would not be complete for many Australians without a trip to the take-away Fish and Chip Shop for the evening meal. It has been that way in Australia for generations.
They did change slightly when health regulations meant that the traditional newspaper wrapping had to go in favour of clean white paper. Up until then they had been somewhat greyer in appearance, courtesy of the leached out newsprint.
The gold rush of the late 19th century saw a huge influx of Chinese to southern Australia. One of the cultural treasures they brought with them was Dim Sum. It's Australian derrivative, the Dim Sim, is now a consistent presence on blackboard menu of every Fish and Chip shop although any resemblance in taste to a chinese dish is distant at best. Australians know that it is best not to inquire as to what they contain.
Known affectionately in Australia as a Dimmy they can be purshased steamed (pictured) or fried, the health conscious usually feeling obliged to purchase the steamed variety.
If you are on a low fat diet for a healthy heart then it may be time to swap to the deep fried variety if research from The State University of New York is to be believed. In findings that seem counter intuitive they found that those on a moderate fat intake actually fared better than those on a low fat intake. Both groups were on reduced calorie intake diets.
Participants who consumed a diet containing 33 percent fat (moderate fat) reduced their cardiovascular risk by 14 percent, based on their lipid profiles, findings showed. Those consuming a diet containing 18 percent fat (low fat) reduced their lipid-based risk by nine percent.
Want a healthy heart, forget the steamed rice and raw vegetables and head off to the Fish and Chip Shop. Just don't eat much when you are there, which is the hard bit because it makes a pretty tasty meal.
Is Georgia in the American bible belt? I imagine it is because they have a big problem with the theory of evolution there. It seems that it is creating confusion amongst the students.
In a move simplify things that could only have been thought up by a bureaucrat, the state has mandated that schools are allowed to teach evolution, they are just not allowed to use the word "evolution", it has been banned from their text books. The bureaucrat in question, Superintendant Cathy Cox says
"The unfortunate truth is that 'evolution' has become a controversial buzzword that could prevent some from reading the proposed biology curriculum. We don't want the public or our students to get stuck on a word when the curriculum actually includes the most widely accepted theories for biology. Ironically, people have become upset about the exclusion of the word again, without having read the document."
'Evolution' was a controversial buzzword in England, IN 1860!!!
Ex-president and Georgian native Jimmy Carter is not known for his atheist leanings but he has a different view on this topic.
As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox's attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia's students.The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe. There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy.
There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.
And while we are on the topic of "the theory that must not be named", a recent paper in the journal of The Royal Society points to snakes "developing into their current form" on land rather than in the ocean. (Isn't that so much simpler than saying "evolving")
Genetic analysis by Nicolas Vidal and Blair Hedges at Penn State shows that snakes are more closely related to land based lizards than aquatic ones, such as the monitor lizards. This points to the fact that they lost their limbs after leaving the ocean, possibly in response to evolutionary pressure arising from burrowing. (oops I should have said "developing into their current form" pressure).
Read more about the research here.
Ever wondered what a lung looks like. I am sure your butcher can oblige if you want to see one out of the flesh, so to speak. If that is too biological for you perhaps a bit of reality web might be more acceptable, click here.
If you are someone who counts smoking amongst your vices then your lung will look more like this. (Gross out alert, it is pretty disgusting)
It is enough to make cut down on the fags. Don't bother it won't do you the sligtest amount of good apart from saving you money of course. Recent research by Stephen Hecht of the University of Minnesota Cancer Center has shown that when smoker cuts back on the number of cigarettes they compensate by inhaling deeper and absorbing more carcinogens. Even those who cut down the ciggies and used patches still compensated by inhaling deeper and showed little drop in the harmful chemicals in their body.
The message is simple, you need to give up completely.
Read more in Nature.
Further to yesterdays entry on obesity in adolescents, Great Ormond Street hospital reports a 97% success rate in significantly reducing obese children's weight by at least 10% through education and therapy.
The approach categorises food into three major groups and ties them to the traffic light colours. Red foods such as, crisps and chocolate, may only be consumed once or twice a week as treats, yellow foods, including protein, carbohydrates and dairy products, are consumed in "healthy portions" only and green foods, fruit and vegetables can be consumed freely.
Children attend weekly therapy sessions and the whole family follows the same rules as the child, including introducing exercise into daily activities.
More info on obesity here
Latest figures released by National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen, Denmark, in a study of 15 industrialised countries, show that the USA is leading the way in the Adolescent Obesity and Overweight Stakes. For girls there are no near competitors to the USA, with almost 50% of teenage girls being overweight or obese.
For boys the race is a lot closer with Greece, Portugal, Israel and Ireland in hot pursuit.
And if you are wondering what happened to the numbers for the other countries, I couldn't get them without forking out US$15 for the article in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. (Hint: If I start getting some donations I might spend some of it on these sorts of things.)
More info on obesity here
There is nothing like a slur on his fertility to undermine a man's self esteem. History is littered with examples of fertility insults and curses to be used by aggressors to undermine the confidence of their foes in battle.
The French have been past masters at this and the direction in which the insults are usually hurled is England. Well may you say that curses are mere superstition but new evidence coming to light suggests that the centuries long hurling of gallic fertility curses across the English channel is at last bearing fruit.
New Scientist cites new evidence that suggests that the average sperm count of UK men may have fallen by as much as 29 per cent over the past 12 years. Naturally, being scientists, they are blaming environmental toxins such as pesticides for the declining sperm counts. A study published in July 2003 showed that chemicals mimicking the action of estrogen and found in some foods can impair the normal functioning of sperm.
Of course a sperm doesn't just have to be there, it has quite a swim if it is going to fertilise an egg. This is called motility and British sperm motility is also under a cloud. British men are just not what they used to be.
It is an ill wind that blows no good, however, and the beneficiaries of this slump in British male fertility are the men of Finland and the discount airlines with the recently introduced "fertility holidays" that woman can take to visit the most fertile men in Europe, the Finnish.
Here is a site that everyone should visit. Consumer Psychology is a site dedicated to the analysis of the way people shop and consume products.
Do you think you are saving money by buying the bulk value packs? No way, they are probably costing you money.
Larger package size increased product usage between 7% and 43%.
Do you think you are saving money by buying "no name" or generic brands. Nope your not.
Consumers poured 9% to 36% more from a sale-priced bottle of liquid cleaner (lower per-unit cost) than a full price bottle.
Why do you think stores impose a "Limit of 12 per customer", you buy more when they do.
When consumers shop for groceries, such as soup, they determine how much to buy based on how many they normally buy. For example, a customer might normally buy 2 or 3 cans of soup without giving it any thought. In effect, they "anchor" on the number 2 or 3 when they decide how many to buy. If you could increase that anchor number through marketing, purchase amounts would rise as well.
This site makes fascinating reading.
Those of you who are vegitarians can leave this post it is of no concern to you.
Now they have gone let us turn our attention to the vexed question of whether you prefer white or dark turkey meat. The Green Man is more inclined to the dark himself, it seems richer and more succulent but each to his own.
The colour arises because of the different types of muscle fibres present the different parts of the bird. Dark meat comprises so-called slow twitch muscle fibers, which are specialized for extended exertion, whereas white meat is made up of fast twitch fibers that fuel short, intense bursts of energy.
At this stage it is time to turn our attemtion to Blimp-1 and that is not The Green Man following the Christmas season that we are talking about. It is a transcription factor protein that controls muscle development. Philip Ingham of the University of Sheffield, having discovered that all the research into world hunger was already taken, decided to research this protein and believes he has identified the gene that controls it. So no more of that dry white meat for The Green Man. He is ordering his turkey dark, mind you it may be a strange looking bird.
Read more in Scientific American.
Meet doris, she is an ordinary sheep occupied with the things that ordinary sheep are occupied with, eating and baaaing. I had a sheep for a while, Ewenis. At the time I acquired her I was under the impression that sheep ate grass and lived in a paddock. Unfortunately no one had told Ewenis this. She was convinced that she was a "house sheep" and immediately came inside any time the back door was inadvertently left open. Her favourite food was camillia leaves and "wild bird mix" seed, she only ate grass as a last resort.
This post is not about her, or Doris for that matter. It is about a future sheep that will be someones life bouy when they are adrift in a sea of disease. Esmail Zanjani at the University of Nevada is pioneering a technique for growing human organs in sheep. Say your liver is on the way out, a distinct possibility in the case of The Green Man based on his alcohol consumption, stem cells can be taken from you and injected into the sheep embryo. When the sheep is grown, bingo, you have a new liver that is a least partly you. This makes rejection issues minimal.
The ethical dilemma, of course, is that is the animal carrying the liver still a sheep, given that many of its cells are human.
Are you a friendly sort of person? If you are then you will have lots of friends and the chances are that you will make an excellent carrier to distribute the next virus to be making the rounds. If you are very friendly maybe even the next sexually transmitted disease.
This is the logic behind a new approach to preventing disease, computer viruses and even terrorist cells being developed by Reuven Cohen, of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. The technique is to approach people at random and ask them who their friends are. We don't know that the random individuals are friendly but we can be fairly sure their friends are. By treating these individuals then we can provide a highly effective prevention campaign at much less than the cost of a blanket immunisation campaign.
Mathematically, this method means that only half the population needs to be treated to acheive almost total cover. It's application to the disruption of terrorist networks is by identifying people occupying key nodes in the network and removing them.
You may think these guys are a fraction young for the army but they are 18 and 21 respectively. Boys just don't seem to be entering puberty quite as young as they used to, do they? It's probably because they liked their fruit.
Environmental Health Perspectives reports that male school children exposed to the pesticide endosulfan showed delayed sexual maturity compared with similar children who were not exposed. The critical age is 10-19, which is hardly surprising because this is when physical sexual maturation in males occurs.
An estimated 1.4-2.2 million pounds of endosulfan is used in the United States on crops including squash, pecans, and strawberries each year. It has been banned in several countries, including Cambodia, Colombia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Indonesia, and its use is severely restricted in at least 20 other countries.
The one bright light for US citizens is that aerial spraying has now been banned so that secondary contamination with the chemical is now limited.
If your boys want to grow into big stong men get them to wash their fruit.
As evidence that some people have even more time to waste than The Green Man does, here is a visual map of the internet.
And in answer to your question, no I don't have any idea what it means either but it sure looks cool.
Here is a photo of Michael Lawley of the quaint New Zealand town of Taranaki. Actually I haven't been to Taranaki but most of New Zealand is quaint, in the nicest possible way of course, so I presume Taranaki is as well. Michael, who moved there from England 12 years ago, is holding a couple of wind turbines that he has constructed from discarded washing machines of the Fisher and Paykel variety. (that's "fusher and piekel" to you)
Traditionally, people have used car alternators for this type of turbines but they have to rotate at a very high speed. The smart-drive generates a useful amount of power at a very slow speed which lends itself to both wind and hydro applications.
Michael reliably informs us and far be it for The Green Man to argue with him.
Purchasing the old washing machines at $10 a pop and selling his turbines for around $1,000 it is the sort of business that we all wish we had. And he gets to occupy the high moral ground, environmentally speaking, at the same time. Some people have all the luck.
Michael is known for his engineering skills and not his website design skills. A quick trip to hiswebsite will show you why. Better still visit him in person by staying at his eco friendly backpacker hostel next time you are down Taranaki way, you'll find the details on the site.
Image and story via Otago Daily Times who make it impossible to link to the actual story.
Aerial devices have, in the past, been constrained by the requirement to have a pilot. This mandated a minimum size and placed constraints on the application of airbourne technology. The advent of increasingly sophisticated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle technology is removing these constraints. Take a look at an example of your pilot of the future.
At 28 grams and measuring 4cm x 10cm this autopilot is capable of navigating a plane from take off to landing. This capacity means that planes can be developed for applications that were previously impractical.
Take, for instance, intracity courier activities. The Inventus, pictured below has a payload capacity of 2.7 kg and a range of 145kms it is capable of delivering papers and small packages rapidly across town. It has a wingspan of 1.8m (6 feet) and can take off and land on a building roof. It can also be used for such arial surveillance activities as inspecting railway track, traffic congestion, pipelines, search and rescue support, firefighting etc.
And if you think that is cool have a look at this little baby. The Black Widow is the size of your palm and is so small it is undetectable by most radar. 
It is believed to be currently in use American intelligence agencies for collecting of intelligence on troop movements and enemy installations in theatres of war and in detection of drug smuggling activities. It can fly for 30 minutes and delivers streaming colour video to a monitor located on the ground. I am thinking the ones the army uses aren't painted yellow.
To read more about your future pilot click here.
To read more on Inventus click here.
Read more about Black Widow and other cool UAVs from Aerovironment click here.
or better still, if they have an advert at the top of the page, click on it, that way I get paid for this, otherwise free, plug. Go on. It is not that much of an effort to scroll back to the top of the page.
I've won the lottery a while ago and I am cruising the Whitsundays on my new yatch. I find an ideal snorkelling spot, weigh anchor, and it's into the water. Here is a photo in case you are having difficulty following my daydream.
Oops, the boss is coming, I had better start concentrating again.
That ability to rapidly shut down your daydreaming and focus is a skill that young adults find quite simple. As we grow older it becomes more difficult, which may explain why The Green Man, being an ancient woodland spirit, is daydreaming most of the time.
Washington University in St. Louis researchers are investigating this phenonemon and using it as a tool for detecting the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
Recent research has provided mounting evidence supporting the existence within the brain of a "default network," a set of interconnected brain areas that carry out routine, passive mental processes, such as monitoring the environment, registering internal emotions and other forms of largely undirected thought and reflection.
Through this study researchers detected significant differences in the timing and magnitude of changes in the "default network" activity in older people compared with young adults and particularly in those with Alzheimer's disease.
The Green Man finds himself drifting off again - back to the yatch. "Make sure that champagne is chilled James. I'll have some with the char-grilled coral trout after my swim."
King's College London has appointed a new receptionist on a trial basis. Called Inkha, which is short for 'interactive neurotic King's head assembly', she dishes out directions and information on upcoming events. Like receptionists across the globe, she will also comment on the weather and fashion faux pas.
She has nine motors, several hidden cameras and infa-red sensors which are all powered by a laptop computer. She consists of a head with eyes and mouth that move mounted on a plinth. What's more she will work 24 hours a day for only the cost of a bit of electricity.
A more politically incorrect website than The Green Man would be tempted to observe that Inkha
a. has a bit too much cognitive ability
and
b. lacks two important physical characteristics
to make it as a successful receptionist.
Can you remember when lifts had operators? The Green Man can, but only just. They were on the way out when The Green Man was a boy, replaced by the more cost effective self operated models. You press a button and the lift looks after closing the doors, finding the correct floor etc.
We think nothing of it these days but when they first came people must have been pretty anxious about getting into a lift without an operator. Do you think that it was silly of them? That's probably how people will feel 50 years hence when the matter of flying in a pilotless plane is concerned.
Pilotless planes have been operating for sometime, particularly in dangerous situations. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, as they are known are commonplace in the military these days with the role of "fighter pilot" rapidly approaching obsolescence. They were used in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq very successfully for bombing raids.
Australia is planning to buy drones to monitor it’s borders for illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Other nations are exploring the possibility of using drones to monitor the seas for both piracy and storms.
Northrop Grumman have taken a further step with their UAV the Global Hawk, pictured. It it is the first UAV to get approval to fly in civilian airspace. The next step is a pilotless passenger aircraft but public apprehension may mean this is a long way off yet.
Visit NASA's UAV website here.
Continuing on in my chicken little series ("the sky is falling, the sky is falling!")
Asish Basu, Professor of Earth Sciences at University of Rochester has an article in the latest issue of the journal Science reporting that "An ancient meteorite body, one from the days when the solar system was still forming, struck the Earth 251 million years ago," This resulted in "The Great Dying" a period during which 90% of life on earth became extinct.
This created the environment in which the dinosaurs could rise to ascendancy. They in turn were driven to extinction 65 million years ago by a meteorite colliding with the earth making way for the ascendance of the mammals.
Hmmm, I detect a bit of a pattern developing here.
Read more of the phenonemon here.
Don't you find that sentences that fail to contain a lack of double negatives take some nutting out? The omission of a lack of sentences that cause you to have not read a sentence in a singular linear manner can result in text that is able to be understood only when not read while distracted.
There I think that makes senses, don't you? What's more, if you worked it out, then you can thank The Green Man for giving you your mental aerobics exercise for today and that's important. Participating in intellectually challenging leisure-time activities such as reading or taking evening courses appears to improve the middle-aged mind.
Dr. Archana Singh-Manoux of University College London has found that the "use it or lose it" approach to muscle mass also applies to cognitive ability. So next time you find that you are succeeding in not understanding a sentence that is failing to present cognitive exercise in a manner that is not simple, just turn to The Green Man, and indulge in a bit of mental aerobics.
Like youth, much of science is wasted on the young. There are so many "adults-only" topics that can occupy an adult scientific mind. If you are broad minded enough and inquisitive enough then you will be delighted to learn of a new venue in which you can explore topics that would be off limits in most places. Well you'll be delighted if you live in London, otherwise, like me, you'll be envious.
The Dana Centre opened in London on Tuesday with the raison d'être of providing a forum where adults can explore and discuss topics such as the implications of genetically modified foods, face transplants, sex over 60, male pregnancy, death or AIDS. This is not your safe, family friendly museum that has become the popular face of modern science but a place to visit the rarely explored areas of the human psyche.
It does us all good, from time to time, to have our taboos challenged and our sensibilities affronted, it is part of the maturing process and what better way to do it than to spend an unusual evening at the Dana Centre.
It will be on my list of places to visit next time I'm in London. It is located at 165 Queensgate in South Kensington. Their website does not appear to be up yet. I'll post it when I have it.
That's Near Earth Asteroids to you and there is good news from the Astronomy Department. The number of asteroids floating around our cosmic neighbourhood that are big enough to cause a mass extinction along the lines of that which was supposed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs has been revised down from 1,200 to 1,090.
We can expect one to hit about once every 600,000 years apparently. How long has it been since the last one? 65 million years. I'd say one was a bit overdue actually.
