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Flu: "super-antibody" discovered that could prevent pandemic

Researchers have discovered an antibody that is effective against all strains of flu. This is a potentially huge discovery in the race between flu evolution and human technology.

Can people become immune from flu?

Will we be able to prevent the next pandemic?



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Here's a link to just one article:

Flu vaccine based on 'super-antibody' could prevent all pandemic strains
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/28/flu-vaccine-super-antibody-pandemic

Warren Buffett asks for more taxes on himself

It's unbelievable that Americans keep electing politicians who would rather condemn us to unpayable medical debt, increasingly mediocre schools and expensive universities, and crumbling infrastructure than ask the wealthiest to pay additional taxes they wouldn't even notice.

Even when we actually have a regressive tax system where the middle class pay a higher percentage that the wealthiest. Warren Buffett paid 17.4% of his taxable income in Federal taxes. The average in his office of 20 was 36%.

Thanks again to him for being so level-headed.

Aside from basic fairness, he also debates the argument that capital gains taxes inhibit investment.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html

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Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
By WARREN E. BUFFETT
Published: August 14, 2011

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon yet deployed.

Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon yet deployed

How do outsiders stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Sanctions? Bombing? Support street protestors? Actually: computer worms.

We're still having to rethink the art of war in the information age.

Read more about Stuxnet on wikipedia.

The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.

Unlike most malware, Stuxnet does little harm to computers and networks that do not meet specific configuration requirements. Symantec noted in August 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in Iran.

The attacks seem designed to force a change in the centrifuge’s rotor speed, first raising the speed and then lowering it, likely with the intention of inducing excessive vibrations or distortions that would destroy the centrifuge. If its goal was to quickly destroy all the centrifuges in the FEP, Stuxnet failed. But if the goal was to destroy a more limited number of centrifuges and set back Iran’s progress in operating the FEP, while making detection difficult, it may have succeeded, at least temporarily.

On 23 November 2010 it was announced that uranium production at Natanz had ceased several times because of a series of major technical problems. A "serious nuclear accident" occurred at the site in the first half of 2009.

Symantec estimates that the group developing Stuxnet would have consisted of five to ten people and as many as 30, and would have taken six months to prepare.

Human intelligence vs. other animals

One measure of relative intelligence between animals.

The encephalization quotient or EQ) is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism. It can be defined as the ratio of the actual brain weight to the expected brain weight of a typical animal that size, EQ=w(brain)/Ew(brain).

Of course this measure keeps humans on top.
But interesting how much closer bottlenose dolphins are to humans than chimps...


wikipedia

Bicycle City

In the Southern U.S., instead of building another golf cart development, why not a bicycle city?



A nice sign of progress: toward appropriate technology.

Charleston City Paper

Bicycle City

Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much

Starting to quantify the benefits of friendly touches, researchers looked at NBA basketball teams.



"If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”"

The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett.



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Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much
By BENEDICT CAREY
February 23, 2010



Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.

But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.

“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.

The evidence that such messages can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.

In a series of experiments led by Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana, volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy.

“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.”

To see whether a rich vocabulary of supportive touch is in fact related to performance, scientists at Berkeley recently analyzed interactions in one of the most physically expressive arenas on earth: professional basketball. Michael W. Kraus led a research team that coded every bump, hug and high five in a single game played by each team in the National Basketball Association early last season.

In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

The same was true, more or less, for players. The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star big man, followed by star forwards Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors and Carlos Boozer of the Utah Jazz. “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys,” Dr. Keltner said.

To correct for the possibility that the better teams touch more often simply because they are winning, the researchers rated performance based not on points or victories but on a sophisticated measure of how efficiently players and teams managed the ball — their ratio of assists to giveaways, for example. And even after the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted. Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent.

The study fell short of showing that touch caused the better performance, Dr. Kraus acknowledged. “We still have to test this in a controlled lab environment,” he said.

If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”

“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”

The same is certainly true of partnerships, and especially the romantic kind, psychologists say. In a recent experiment, researchers led by Christopher Oveis of Harvard conducted five-minute interviews with 69 couples, prompting each pair to discuss difficult periods in their relationship.

The investigators scored the frequency and length of touching that each couple, seated side by side, engaged in. In an interview, Dr. Oveis said that the results were preliminary.

“But it looks so far like the couples who touch more are reporting more satisfaction in the relationship,” he said.

Again, it’s not clear which came first, the touching or the satisfaction. But in romantic relationships, one has been known to lead to the other. Or at least, so the anecdotal evidence suggests.

Requests to the Right Ear Are More Successful Than to the Left

This adds new depth to the idea of a "right hand man."


"Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear.... some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively."


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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/earcigarette/#ixzz0fclY4yXS

You’re in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, “Hai una sigaretta?”

If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.

“The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior,” write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.

What’s surprising about the study is that ear choice had such a decided impact on the behavior of participants in a natural, or as the researchers put it, ecological, setting. Why would people feel more generous when their right ears are addressed?

Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain.

“These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized differential specialization of right and left hemispheres,” they write.

In addition to the direct cigarette-ask study, they also simply observed people interacting and also asked for cigarettes without directing their requests towards a particular ear. The Italian researchers picked the night club setting because the loud music allowed the cigarette-asker to approach people and speak directly into one ear without seeming “odd.”

getting used to commercialism

the thousands of ads we sense each day are like flies on our faces that we've gotten used to.

Biochar - sequester carbon as charcoal fertilizer

With all the talk (and money) behind carbon capture and storage, the fact remains that storing carbon as coal is the safest bet. First: Leave It In The Ground.

But second: we can generate a kind of charcoal from biomass (which does not decay back into the air like rotting biomass). It is also a particularly rich soil amendment, especially because the surface area of the charcoal retains additional water and nutrients.

Although charcoal is the secret of the rich "loma prieta" soils cultivated by Amazonian natives, it is today being called "biochar" and it's a promising, elegant potential solution.

Farmers or cooperatives process biomass in high-heat, high-pressure, low-oxygen conditions, separating it into gas, liquid, and solid. The gas (methane and carbon monoxide) and liquid (hydrocarbons) are a superior energy source because they can be burned at a higher temperature than biomass. The solid layer is biochar that can be used to sequester carbon and improve soil quality.

We should be careful not to overload soils, but the opportunity to start increasing, rather than linearly decreasing soil depth, is exciting.

Maintaining rich soils is a hallmark of successful civilizations.


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http://www.biochar-international.org/


http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TQPDNDDT

Military robots that eat bodies

Well, it takes no creativity to imagine this going bad...


http://www.robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/EATR
The purpose of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR)™ (patent pending) project is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions. The system obtains its energy by foraging – engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.

answers to the Rorshach test

Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems

"Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing:
--Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action;
--the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution;
--more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined;
--more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity;
--and about one-quarter of the bird species on Earth have been driven to extinction.
By these and other standards, it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet."

Childhood stress and diminished working memory: a simple explanation for the cycle of poverty?

Some new studies seem to simplify the cognitive reasons children have a hard time escaping from poverty.


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I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told
Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain


THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory—the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle.

Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.

Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s volunteers were 195 participants in a long-term sociological and medical study that Dr Evans is carrying out in New York state. At the time, the participants were 17 years old. All are white, and the numbers of men and women are about equal.


Stress in the city

To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, the two researchers used an index known as allostatic load. This is a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity. For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class. Moreover, because Dr Evans’s wider study had followed the participants from birth, the two researchers were able to estimate what proportion of each child’s life had been spent in poverty. That more precise figure, too, was correlated with the allostatic load.

The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.

These two correlations do not by themselves prove that chronic stress damages the memory, but Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg then applied a statistical technique called hierarchical regression to the results. They were able to use this to remove the effect of allostatic load on the relationship between poverty and memory discovered originally by Dr Farah. When they did so, that relationship disappeared. In other words, the diminution of memory in the poorer members of their study was entirely explained by stress, rather than by any more general aspect of poverty.

To confirm this result, the researchers also looked at characteristics such as each participant’s birthweight, his mother’s age when she gave birth, the mother’s level of education and her marital status, all of which differ, on average, between the poor and the middle classes. None of these characteristics had any effect. Nor did a mother’s own stress levels.

That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.

Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children.

Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s study does not examine the nature of the stress that the children of the poor are exposed to, but it is now well established that poor adults live stressful lives, and not just for the obvious reason that poverty brings uncertainty about the future. The main reason poor people are stressed is that they are at the bottom of the social heap as well as the financial one.

Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, and his intellectual successors have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those at the top—and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things.

So, it may not be necessary to look any further than their place in the pecking order to explain what Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg have discovered in their research into the children of the poor. The Bible says, “the poor you will always have with you.” Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have provided an important part of the explanation why.

Dating A Banker Anonymous

If only guys didn't think investment banking was the way to attract pretty women, maybe we'd have avoided this whole financial mess.

Women: it's urgently time to prefer guys working to end poverty and unburden the planet!




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Dating A Banker Anonymous

Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter and email your stories


DABA Girl: A charming and successful woman (imagine Tina Fey’s wit and Zoe Cruz’s ambition) who’s looking for a man who can keep up.


FBF: Finance guy Boyfriend (the G is silent), a DABA Girl’s significant other. Their work spans the gamut from investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, to private equity analysts at Morgan Stanley, to hedge fund guys at any of those companies whose name could easily be mistaken for a high school mascot, to traders on the floor or upstairs, to commercial real estate men and to the occassional corporate lawyer. He is ambitious, well-dressed, over caffeinated, may or may not have a social conscious (but will attend every charity ball regardless), exudes confidence even when touting a trade he’s only 50% sure of, and had serious throw-down in the bedroom BR.


Je Ne Sais Finance: Those magic qualities that attract DABA Girls to their alpha male counterparts.

The stackable CityCar

Intended for the "last mile" of transportation, connecting neighborhoods to rail transit stations. Stackable, shared cars, a combination of the Smart car, the baggage carts you can rent at airports, and the bike share schemes in some European cities.


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CityCar

The CityCar is a stackable electric two-passenger city vehicle. The one-way sharable user model is designed to be used in dense urban areas. Vehicle Stacks will be placed throughout the city to create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, the vehicle allows the citizens the flexibility to combine mass transit effectively with individualized mobility. The stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them. Similar to luggage carts at the airport, users simply take the first fully charged vehicle at the front of the stack. The City car is NOT a replacement for personal vehicles, taxis, buses, or trucks; it is a NEW vehicle type that promotes a socially responsible and more effective means of urban mobility.


The CityCar utilizes fully integrated in-wheel electric motors and suspension systems called, "Wheel Robots." The wheel robots eliminate the need traditional drive train configurations like engine blocks, gear boxes, and differentials because they are self-contained, digitally controlled, and reconfigurable. Additionally, the wheel robot provides all wheel power and steering capable of 360 degrees of movement, thus allowing for Omni-directional movement. The vehicle can maneuver in tight urban spaces and park by sideways translation. This technology is patented-pending and under design development at the MIT Media Lab.

Non-religious people less afraid of death?

An interesting article covered in the Economist.
So many people find their faith as death approaches...

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But not yet, Lord
Mar 19th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition


Religious people seem curiously reluctant to meet their maker

HOW do a person’s religious beliefs influence his attitude to terminal illness? The answer is surprising. You might expect the religious to accept death as God’s will and, while not hurrying towards it, not to seek to prolong their lives using heroic and often traumatic medical procedures. Atheists, by contrast, have nothing to look forward to after death, so they might be expected to cling to life.

In fact, it is the other way round—at least according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Andrea Phelps and her colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Religious people seem to use their faith to cope with the pain and degradation that “aggressive” medical treatment entails, even though such treatment rarely makes much odds.

Dr Phelps and her team followed the last months of 345 cancer patients. The participants were not asked directly how religious they were but, rather, about how they used any religious belief they had to cope with difficult situations by, for example, “seeking God’s love and care”. The score from this questionnaire was compared with their requests for such things as the use of mechanical ventilation to keep them alive and resuscitation to bring them back from the dead.

The correlation was strong. More than 11% of those with the highest scores underwent mechanical ventilation; less than 4% of those with the lowest did so. For resuscitation the figures were 7% and 2%.

Explaining the unpleasantness and futility of the procedures does not seem to make much difference, either. Holly Prigerson, one of Dr Phelps’s co-authors, was involved in another study at Dana-Farber which was published earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This showed that when doctors had frank conversations about the end of life with terminally ill cancer patients, the patients typically chose not to request very intensive medical interventions.

According to Dr Prigerson, though, such end-of-life chats had little impact on “religious copers”, most of whom still wanted doctors to make every effort to keep them alive. Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of Christianity’s most revered figures, famously asked God to help him achieve “chastity and continence, but not yet”. When it comes to meeting their maker, many religious people seem to have a similar attitude.

The Tao of Water

This guy, John Daido Loori, has taken some nice photos of water, in an exhibit called "The Tao of Water."

The bees are back in town (the latest on colony collapse disorder)

We're not as close to losing bee pollination as we could have been (whew).

Seems like commercial bees weren't getting proper nutrition, and so became vulnerable to infectious disease when intermixed like they are these days.

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Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition


The economic crisis has contributed to a glut of bees in California. That raises questions about whether a supposed global pollination crisis is real


AT THE end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery.

Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut.

Bee good to me

The annual orgy of sexual reproduction in the Californian almond orchards owes little to the unintended bounty of nature. Francis Ratnieks, a professor of apiculture at Sussex University who has worked on the state’s almond farms, says the crop is so large and intensively grown these days that it has greatly surpassed the region’s inherent ability to supply pollinators. Decades ago, when there were fewer almonds, farmers could rely on pollination just from the beekeepers who live in the Central Valley. Now, they have to import migrant apian labour.

Scientific AG, a firm based in Bakersfield, California, helps broker pollination deals between local almond growers and apiarists from across America. Joe Traynor, the pollination broker who founded Scientific AG, says that in the 1960s there were 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares) of groves. Today it is 700,000 acres and the industry claims it supplies 80% of the world’s almonds. In order to meet this pollination demand, more than a third of America’s beehives must be moved to California for the season. Such changes to the industry have been reflected in the prices for bee hives. In 1995 growers could rent a hive for $35. Today, says Mr Traynor, a strong colony would cost $150-200.

It is hard to pin down what has been causing honeybees to vanish. “People want it to be genetically modified crops, pollution, mobile-phone masts and pesticides,” says Dr Ratnieks, and it is “almost certainly none of those”. But he adds that such large losses to a population are not unusual in epidemics.

One explanation offered by both Dr Ratnieks and Mr Traynor is of a once-rare disease, possibly caused by the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), sweeping through colonies that have already been weakened by parasites such as Nosema ceranae, a parasitic fungus from Asia. Some have suggested that N. ceranae alone might be sufficient to cause CCD, as the fungus is believed to have been widespread since 2006, when CCD first became a problem. There is also Varroa, a parasitic mite, which has been another problem in bees for some time, and which might also transmit the IAPV. But there is almost certainly a further factor causing stress on the bees—a poor diet.

Bee-conomics

It is increasingly being recognised that managed bees need food supplements. In some places, a decline in the area of pasture land on which they can forage, the loss of weedy borders and the growth of crop monocultures mean it is hard for bees to find a wide enough range of pollen sources to obtain all their essential amino acids. In extreme cases they may not even find enough basic protein. Writing in Bee Culture this February, Mr Traynor observes that places where crops with low-protein pollens, such as blueberries and sunflowers, are grown are also places where CCD has appeared.

The suggestion is that poor nutrition has weakened the bees’ immune systems, making them more vulnerable to viruses and other parasites. Feeding bees supplements, rather than relying on their ability to forage in the wild, costs time and money. Many beekeepers therefore try to avoid it. Anecdote suggests, however, that those who do fork out find their colonies are far more resistant to CCD.

This year’s Californian bee glut, then, has been caused by a mixture of rising supply meeting falling demand. The price of almonds dropped by 30% between August and December last year, as people had less money in their pockets. That has caused growers to cut costs, and therefore hire fewer hives. There is also a drought in the region, and many farmers are unlikely to receive enough water to go ahead with the harvest. Meanwhile, the recent high prices for pollination contracts made it look worthwhile fattening bees up with supplements over the winter. That may help explain why there have been fewer colony collapses.

The rise and fall of the managed honeybee, then, owes as much to the economics of supply and demand as it does to the forces of nature. And if the nutrition and disease theory is correct, next year’s lower contract prices may see beekeepers cutting back on supplemental feeding, and a resurgence of CCD.

Bee off with you!

Despite the importance of the honeybee, none of this is evidence of a wide-scale pollination crisis or a threat that is specific to pollinators. No one has shown that colonies of wild bees are collapsing any more frequently than they used to. And while it is true that many species of butterflies, moths, birds, bats and other pollinators are in retreat, their problems are far more likely to mirror broader declines in biodiversity that are the result of well-known phenomena such as habitat loss and the intensification of agriculture.

Troubling though this loss of diversity is, it does not necessarily translate into a decline in the amount of pollination going on. Jaboury Ghazoul of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, writing in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2005, points out that the decline of bumblebees in Europe that has been observed recently mostly affects rare and specialised species—an altogether different problem.

Though the idea that there is a broader and costly pollination crisis under way is entrenched (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is spending $28m on a report investigating it), the true picture is cloudier. In 2006 America’s National Academy of Sciences released a report on the status of pollinators in North America that concluded “for most North American pollinator species, long-term population data are lacking and knowledge of their basic ecology is incomplete.” Simply put, nobody knows. As for the managed bees of America, Dr Ratnieks says that “the imminent death of the honeybee has been reported so many times, but it has not happened and is not likely to do so”.

Market Researching Painting Preference

Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, of the Dia Center for the Arts, have conducted professional market research about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting, first in the U.S. and then the rest of the world.

The landscape here is the most wanted painting for U.S. residents. (Note the George Washington in the middle.)

The abstract is the least wanted.

You can see a similar pattern for other countries here.

A notable exception is Holland, where the most wanted painting was not a landscape with a mountain, a tree, and water, but instead a colorful abstract. Another argument for the Netherlands as the best country in the world...



The same guys have also developed "most-" and "least-wanted" songs. Most wanted was a cheesy R&B/rock love song; least wanted was an opera mix of hip-hop.