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"Darwinism": A "marketing problem"?

Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…

Be a smart dick

Is PZ Myers over the top? Is Phil Plait too nice? Is Chris Mooney right about framing? If I meet a Creationist, should I throw a fossil over his head? A while back, I did a radio show with a skeptic who happened to be a musician. One of the main topics was whether or not being mean to people who did not agree with you was OK. I was on the side that it was often OK, certainly not the only way to do it, but that the entire conversation about being mean vs. nice had become too uni-dimensional and counter productive, that there were times and places for being stern and firm, and times and…

Climate Change and the Collision between Human and Geologic Time

[An early version of this essay was originally published on my Forbes blog in 2012. It has been edited and updated.] Geologic time scales are long – far too long for the human mind to easily comprehend. Over millions, and tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years, the Earth has changed from something unrecognizable to the planet we see on maps, plastic globes, and photos from space. The Atlantic Ocean didn’t exist eons ago and it will literally disappear in the future as the continental plates continue to shift inch by inch. A visitor from outer space millions of years ago would…

When old folks get the shaft

I admit there are some medical articles I just read the press release for. They are almost always articles in journals I don't have easy access to and don't read regularly, but when I run across a press release I find interesting enough to read and maybe post about, it often isn't so compelling I'm going to go out and read the article. It's just mildly interesting and for my purposes the details aren't as important as the main ideas. If you guessed that I'm going to do that now, you'd be right. It's about an article in The Journal of Trauma Injury, Infection, and Critical Care from…

Reports: Fast food's low-wage business model comes with supersized public costs

Wages in the highly profitable fast food industry are so low that more than half of families of front-line fast food workers are enrolled in and depend on public assistance programs to make ends meet. In other words, that seemingly inexpensive burger and fries not only comes with a secret sauce, but a secret cost. According to "Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast Food Industry," which was released last week, the cost of such public assistance is nearly $7 billion every year, with Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program costs accounting for more than…

Finding Λ - Nobel Prize in Physics for Cosmological Constant

Congratulations to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt for the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 for the observations of the acceleration of the Universe. The prize is specifically for a series of papers, beginning in 1998, measuring the redshift and luminosity distance of a sample of type Ia supernovae, independently by two teams, and showing that, combined with other known constraints, the result was consistent with a Hubble constant that was increasing in the recent past, and therefore an accelerating universe. ΩΛ from SCP> "Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift…

Libby, MT: Playing fast and loose with people's lives

A report released last week by staff of the Senate  Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee on EPA's handling of the massive asbestos contamination in the mining town of Libby, Montana is laden with words including "failure," "misled," "interference," and "delay."  Refering to "EPA's Failure to Declare a Public Health Emergency in Libby, Montana," Senator Baucus said that he and the staff examined more than 14,000 internal documents and found: "...a pattern of intervention from OMB, the White House, and political appointees at EPA that undermined cleanup efforts at Libby, delayed…

It's got electrolytes - Real Medical Case Presentation Number Two

But why? Why does Brawndo have electrolytes? Because you need electrolytes to live. Every cell in your body uses electrolytes like sodium (Na), Potassium (K), Calcium (Ca), Magnesium (Mg) and other critical ions for cellular functions, proper osmotic gradients, enzymatic activity and even coordination of complex functions like muscle contraction and nerve conduction. All the cells in your body are full of little ion channels that are importing or exporting (or passively diffusing) these ions for physiological functions, and several organ systems (pituitary, adrenals, kidneys) in your…

Out, pesky engram!

I think I made clear that Scientology is a wacked-out cult. The primary concern from my perspective as a doctor is their denialist position on psychiatric illness. Given the toll mental illness takes on society, and the amount of influence exerted by Scientology, everyone should be shouting from the rooftops (in a perfectly calm and sane way), "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" The Church of Scientology has a little friend called the "Citizens Commission on Human Rights". It's motto is "investigating and exposing psychiatric human rights abuse". Who is this "commission"…

The 300

``The King with half the East at heel is marched from land of morning; Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air, And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning. The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.'' Full text of letter with signatures and footnotes (PDF) July 6, 2009 Dear Governor Schwarzenegger: The three hundred signers of this letter write to you as members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, and as professors at the University…

Career pathways in biotechnology

Students in the United States take many convoluted and unnecessarily complicated paths when it comes to finding careers in biotechnology. If Universities and community colleges worked together, an alternative path could benefit all parties; students, schools, industry, and the community. The image below illustrates the current paths and the approximate time that each one takes. I was at two meetings recently, one in Arizona and the Bio-Link workshop in Berkeley, where we spent time discussing the paths to careers in the biotech industry. You might think, if you consider the number of years…

Whether 50 or 5,000 or more, would pipeline jobs be safe jobs?

by Elizabeth Grossman As Congress nears recess, legislative approval of the Keystone XL pipeline is still a possibility. Congressional Republicans and the American Petroleum Institute have said the Keystone XL pipeline could create 20,000 new jobs, as has the Teamsters union. House Speaker John Boehner has said "tens of thousands" of jobs would be created. The State Department estimate comes in at between 5,000 and 6,000, and a report from Cornell University's Global Labor Institute concludes that the pipeline could ultimately "kill more jobs than it creates," since most of the pipeline…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Thousands of foreign workers in the U.S. — workers here legally through a visa program that allows employers to import workers from abroad — are abused, imprisoned and exploited. And the government does little to stop it, according to an investigation by BuzzFeed News. Reporters Jessica Garrison and Ken Besinger and data editor Jeremy Singer-Vine began their investigation with the story of Marisela Valdez and Isy Gonzalez, two H-2 visa workers who peeled crawfish at L.T. West Inc. in Louisiana, where they say their employer took away their passports, sexually harassed them, forced them to…

America's Christian Colonies

Whenever you see a religious right apologist claiming that America was founded as a "Christian nation", you inevitably find them defining the nation not from the point it was founded - the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - but from the time of the colonies that were still ruled by England. In particular, they like to point to documents like the Mayflower Compact and the charters of the various colonies, all of whom had official established churches, as proof that we were indeed founded as a Christian nation. The National Reform Association, which has been around…

Science Stories: One-Shots

(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...) One of the tricky things about writing this book was that I didn't just need stories from the history of science, but stories that fit a particular pattern. The point of the book, after all, is…

The standards for the proof of the existence of god are in decline

A Christian game company has started a promotion for one of their games, and one gimmick is that they are offering a $10,000 prize to any atheist or agnostic who can replicate the unique literary style of the bible, which they purport is evidence of its divine origin. Mankind has been debating the issue of "who wrote the bible" for centuries. Some view the Bible as only the writings of man. Others claim it is inspired. We offer a simpler comment and challenge. Bring all of your books, empty your shelves, from the crypt, ancient, new, lost, hidden, revealed, secret, inspired, outspired, by…

FrankenTrump

The Republican Party and its handlers, including the right wing talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh, and the bought-and-paid-for media such as FOX news, did not create the Tea Party. Michele Bachmann and a few others did that.* But once the Tea Party got going, mainstream conservative Republicans, including and especially leaders in Congress, went right to bed with it. The Tea Party gave Republican strategists an easy way to garner votes and support. This was especially easy to do because America decided to elect an African American president. Make no mistake. The Tea Party is pro-…

Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World

Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events. This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to…

Which Linux Do I Turn To In My Hour of Need?

RIP Ubuntu. Ubuntu was great. For years, I kept trying to get my own Linux box up and running, initially so I could relive the halcyon days of UNIX and later so I could avoid Windows. But every time I tried to get Linux working some key thing would not be configurable or would not work. Well, I'm sure it was configurable and could work but configuring it and making it work was beyond me. Those were also the days when what little support was available on the Internet was limited mostly to the sort of geeks who prefer to give answers that are harder to parse than one's original problem. In…

Basic Concepts: Ohm's Law

Scott Aaronson is explaining "Physics for Doofuses," and has started with electricity. He's got a nice breakdown of the basic quantities that you need to keep track of to understand electricity, leading up to Ohm's Law. He asks for a little help on this point, though: Well, as it turns out, the identities don't always hold. That they do in most cases of interest is just an empirical fact, called Ohm's Law. I suspect that much confusion could be eliminated in freshman physics classes, were it made clear that there's nothing obvious about this "Law": a new physical assumption is being…

The Creation Museum I: Getting Our Foot in the Door

Due to some conflicts between MapQuest's directions and my map of Kentucky, I was nervous during the final leg of my drive to The Creation Museum. After all those hours of driving, the only thing that would have been worse than actually having to walk through that pathetic monument to human ignorance and credulity would have been not getting to see it at all. I needn't have worried, however. There were clear signs to the museum along I-275. Those signs eventually led me into a field in the middle of nowhere. The entrance bore a nondescript sign in front of a large metal gate fitting for…

Gender Gap Update

The JCC day care is closed today for one of the fall cluster of Jewish holidays, which means I'm spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift so I can teach my class. Thus, this is more of a tab clearance sort of exercise than a thoughtful examination of the underlying issues. But having spent a bunch of time in the recent past on gender gaps of various sorts, these are some recent links that struck me as interesting enough to pass along. -- Via Crooked Timber, Anca Gheaus offers cheers for being the "token" woman at academic conferences. This is mostly…

Fun With Simulated Scattering

Two chapters of the book-in-progress will be devoted to the development of the modern understanding of the atom. One of these is about the Bohr model, which turned 100 this year, but Bohr's model would not have been possible without an earlier experiment. The actual experiment was done by Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger, but as is the way of such things, the historical credit mostly accrues to their boss and noted force of nature, Ernest Rutherford. This is the experiment that established the cartoon image of an atom as a solar system, which is utterly unworkable using classical physics, and…

BEC: What Is It Good For?

Another response copied/adapted from the Physics Stack Exchange. The question was: What are the main practical applications that a Bose-Einstein condensate can have? Bose Einstein Condensation, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a phenomenon where a gas of particles with the right spin properties cooled to a very low temeprature will suddenly "condense" into a state where all of the atoms in the sample occupy the same quantum wavefunction. This is not the same as cooling everything to absolute zero, where you would also have everything in the lowest energy state-- at the temperatures…

Two Big Genetics Studies

Two big studies on genetics came out in the past couple weeks, and I want to talk about both. One of them -- the ENCODE study -- was well covered by the media. The other seems to have slipped through. Paper #1: In the ENCODE study, the authors compiled data using a variety of experimental techniques focusing on a small portion (about 1%) of the human genome. There purpose here was to go deep; they wanted to thoroughly catalog in their target area all the transcriptional elements, all the resulting RNA sequences, all the histone and chromatin modifications, and all of the intronic and…

What's your favorite MTV memory? (redux)

Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house. I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…

AP refers to McCain as "Arizona Democrat"; are they turning into Fox?

There have been a number of indications that the Associated Press isn't being as neutral in the election as we would expect from a major media outlet. At an event in April, two Associated Press employees gave McCain a box of donuts and a cup of coffee - both prepared to his tastes - while the Chairman of the AP asked Obama a question about Afghanistan, where "Obama bin Laden is still at large". Concerns have been raised regarding AP campaign coverage of Iraq and health care, among other issues. The hypothesis that there might be a solid pro-McCain bias at the AP has received additional…

Federal Judge Orders Endangered Species Act Protections Reinstated for Grey Wolves - At Least For Now

Yesterday afternoon, Judge Donald Molloy of the Federal District court for Montana issued a preliminary injunction reinstating Endangered Species Act protections for grey wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. This is very good news for the wolves. Although a preliminary injunction will only protect the wolves until the lawsuit is resolved, a judge will only issue one if it appears likely that the party requesting the lawsuit is going to win at trial. A friend of mine emailed me a copy of the decision. It's forty pages long, and very little of it is kind to the Fish and Wildlife service.…

The Income Gap and the Education Gap - and how to stop leaving children behind.

Late last week, the IRS released figures showing that the income gap in the United States is larger now than at any time since they began tracking that data in 1986, and may be worse now than at any time since the 1920s. The figures, which are based on 2005 tax returns, reveal that the richest 1% of Americans accounted for 21.2% of income, up from about 20.8% in 2000. The bottom 50% of families earned 12.8%, which is a drop from the 13% that they took home in 2000. When the Wall Street Journal asked President Bush about the widening income gap, he said: First of all, our society has had…

On philosophy, humidity and equanimity

In which our hero rediscovers history and sociology and damned hot weather... My travels continued with the usual boring flight to Heathrow, thence to Chicago, and a train trip to visit David Hull, as I said. As I flew into American airspace, I was struck looking out the window by the haze of pollution that covers the entire continent. I saw this also last year and in previous trips. Looking down from 11km, one wonders if the sun can even be seen on the ground, for the ground cannot be easily seen from the air. On the ground, though, the heat indicates that enough energy reaches the ground…

New details on how cytoplasmic RNA structures form

There are plenty of large mRNA agregates in cells. In the past few years, two of these structures have gained quite a bit of attention, Stress Granules (SGs) and Processing Bodies (PBs). mRNAs in SGs are loaded with 48S complex, which consists of the small ribosomal subunit, the cap binding complex (aka eiF4F) and the eIF3 complex. SGs are transient structures that are formed in cells experiencing stress such as arsenite, elevated temperatures and amino acid starvation. The key step in forming these structures is the inactivation of eIF2alpha, the protein that carries the initiator tRNA-…

Hamza Tzortzis is playing gotcha with Lawrence Krauss now

After that debate between Tzortzis and Lawrence Krauss that was overshadowed by the disgraceful anti-egalitarian exhibition of Muslim misogyny, iERA is now trying a new tactic: they're releasing tiny snippets of the debate that they believe they can spin into anti-Krauss sentiment. Here's a perfect example, Krauss's reply to a question about the morality of incest. The audience gasped when Krauss said it's not clear to him that incest is wrong, and then he went on to argue that there are biological and societal reasons why incest is not a good idea, but that he'd be willing to listen to…

When the budget needs cutting, who gets to bleed? (Illinois edition)

Via Kate Clancy on Twitter, a news story about how one Illinois legislator wants to save his state some money. As reported in The News-Gazette State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois' public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children's tuition costs. Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law. "I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package," said state Rep.…

If you think anti-vaccine loons are just crunchy left-wing New Agers, think again

One of the stereotypes of anti-vaccine loons is that they are predominantly left wing New Agey ex-hippie types, usually well-educated and affluent. Certainly recent stories out of California indicating that Marin and Sonoma counties are ground zero for declining vaccine rates would seem to back up that stereotype. However, there is a right wing religious variety of antivaccinationist, and it's hard not to point out that Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) is arguably the best friend the mercury militia has in Washington. But if you want to get a true flavor of right wing paranoid whackaloon,…

An Open Letter to Americans Who Are Annoyed at Obama's Nobel Prize

If you are a right wing Republican conservative Yahoo, this letter is NOT for you. If you are a moderate, progressive, liberal, centrist, or anyone associated with the legitimate (i.e., not FOX News) press, this IS for you. Dear Disgruntled Sisters and Brothers, Many people are beside themselves, or at least a little annoyed, or in some cases simply bemused, because Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but he "seems to have not done anything yet." There are so many misconceptions behind that sentiment that I don't know where to start. If you are one of the people who does not…

Another Week of GW News, September 23, 2007

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's GW news roundup (skip to bottom) Top Stories, IPCC WG2 2007 Report, Montreal Protocol, African Floods, Melting Arctic, Antarctica, Methane Burp Hurricanes, Temperatures, Glaciers, Sea Levels, el Niño, NEO Impacts, Tropical Rainforests, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts, Biofuel & Food Mitigation, Transportation, Architecture, Sequestration, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science Kyoto, Carbon Trade, Carbon Tax, Optimal Carbon Reduction Strategy Politics, International, Kofi's Forum…

Mystery emo skinks of Tonga!

There are about 3800 lizard species living on the planet today; accordingly, it can sometimes be a bit difficult to keep track of them all. Furthermore, new species are described on a very regular basis, and there's little doubt that many more species await discovery. Matty Smith (from New Zealand) recently encountered the lizard you see here while in Tonga, and he's been having trouble identifying it. Ever one to take on a tetrapod-themed identification challenge, I had a go at identifying it, and I'd be interested in your opinion should you be able to help. It's clearly a skink (as…

The Tet Zoo guide to rhynchosaurs, part III

Welcome to the third, and last, of the rhynchosaur articles. The other two are mandatory reading: part I is a general intro, part II is on jaws and teeth. This time round, we look at the form and function of the postcranial anatomy (well, predominantly at the limbs actually), and also at rhynchosaur phylogeny and at their place in the grand scheme of things [life restoration of Hyperodapedon shown above, from Benton (1983)]. We begin with the forelimb. The rhynchosaur humerus is stout, with large crests for muscle attachment and a wide, flaring distal end. The rest of the forelimb appears…

Messier Monday: The Top-Heavy Gumball Globular, M12

"A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle." -Khalil Gibran It’s time again for another Messier Monday! The Messier Catalogue was the original comprehensive and accurate catalogue of fixed, deep-sky objects visible to any dedicated (northern hemisphere) skywatcher with even the most primitive of astronomical equipment. Over the centuries, as our understanding of what we're looking at has improved, these 110 celestial wonders have provided classic examples of astronomical phenomena ranging from stellar corpses to new star-forming regions, from young…

Antibiotics and Industry Pressure in New Zealand

Lest you think corporate interference in public health policy is solely a U.S. problem, New Zealand is suffering a brain drain in the area of antibiotic resistance research due to political pressure hindering research on the effects of antbiotic use in agriculture. Worldwide, antibiotics are widely used in poultry production, but in the U.S., there was a successful attempt to ban the use of enrofloxacin (a ciprofloxacin analogue commonly known as "Cipro") in poultry production (enrofloxacin is already banned in other forms of meat production). From the Sunday Star Times: Scientists say…

Is medicine more "scientific" than physics?

Sheril pointed me to this data rich release of Science and Engineering Indicators. I was interested to see this table: Table 7-12 Perceptions of scientific nature of various fields: 2006 (Percent)   Field    Very scientific    Pretty scientific    Not too scientific    Not at all scientific    Haven't heard of field    Don't know   Medicine   81   16   1   --   --   1 Biology    70   24   2   1   --   2 Physics    69   21   3   1   2   4 Engineering    45   32   11   7   --   4 Economics    16   35   31   13   1   3 Sociology…

Political fictions & Social Darwinism

Charles Johnson argues that Richard Dawkins has mischaracterized Herbert Spencer: First, Spencer was not a Social Darwinist. He was not, in fact, a Darwinist at all; he published his most famous work on evolution and society, Social Statics, in 1851, eight years before Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. His ideas about evolution, especially as applied to society, were Lamarckian, rather than Darwinian; which is not ultimately that surprising, since he came up with them independently of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and before that even existed in published form. Second…

What genetics tells us about human psychology

I've commented on the African American Lives series a few times. One thing I've said in other threads is that these massively more data rich ancestry analysis tests aren't going to tell you anything you don't already know in 99% of the cases. That doesn't mean that it's not worth it to get tested, but if the kit costs you hundreds or thousands of dollars, most people are really better off passing I think. When these tests get down to the $10-20 range then I'll be sanguine if a friend of mine starts mooting the possibility of purchasing a kit. By analogy, I wouldn't get worked up over a $…

The genius of stupidity

John Lynch comments on an impending list of Ph.D. scientists who dissent from Darwin. He doesn't care, and neither do I, ho hum. As I've noted in the past (and plenty of others have) these lists are usually stacked with physical scientists, and within the life sciences they are slim on individuals from integrative fields where evolution plays a large role. Rosters of scholars who dissent from Darwin is part of a public relations ploy meant to leverage the fact that most humans don't have a great grasp on the specificity and the specialization which a course of scientific work entails.…

String Theory → Theology

I enjoyed the recent Blogging Heads dialogue between John Horgan and George Johnson, in part because I could follow the whole thing without falling asleep. But the comments about string theory were really over the top and kind of disturbing. I enjoyed Lee Smolin's jeremiad against string theory, The Trouble With Physics,1 but at least he acknowledged that his own camp was in a definite minority. In the exchange Horgan deems string theory "pseudoscience" and analogizes it to theology. You'd expect the author of The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies…

Ivory & ebony, twins again...and again...

I noticed today that I was receiving a lot of search engine queries for black and white twins. Well, I have posted on it several times, but I thought it was a bit much, so I checked the news, and lo & behold, another case just popped up. Like the Australian twins the mother here was biracial (Nigerian and English) while the father was white (in contrast to the earlier British case where the parents were both biracial). I'm sure you're getting tired of this, but I have to comment when I see headlines this: Mum defies million-to-one odds to give birth to black and white boys. I've…

Roger Ebert: hacked or poor satire?

There is a very peculiar article at Roger Ebert's movie review site. It may not last long, so I've put a copy below the fold. It's a straight-faced recitation of creationist claims, all nonsensical, all typical, presented as if they were Ebert's opinion. It could be an exercise in Poe's Law, I suppose, or it could be the consequence of a little web hacking. Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution: Q. When was the earth created? A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654…

The Donald Trump War on Science: Week 1: How bad could it be?

How bad could it be? On so may fronts, the first week or so of the Donald Trump administration was the shit show to end all shit shows. But we're only going to talk about the science stuff here. As the more astute observers among my readership will observe, I still haven't updated the Pre-Inauguration Edition of this post. Nor should this post really be considered a true beginning to tracking the post-inauguration devastation that the Trump administration will wreck on science, technology, the environment and public health. I'm hitting the high lights here with a more complete accounting to…

Emergency workers: "can you hear me now?"

We've all heard stories about how emergency workers (aka first responders) have had trouble communicating at disaster sites because their equipment was not "interoperable," that is, operated at different frequencies or use incompatible methods. But disasters in big cities have other problems, even when the interoperability one is solved. There are so many physical obstacles -- buildings, steel girders, possibly rubble or wreckage -- that create barriers or echoes or other problems that prevent workers from speaking to each other even when they are close by. An article, still in press at IEEE…

The lung cancer mystery

We dwell a lot on the many unknowns about the bird flu H5N1 virus. What could make it easily transmissible between people? What determines what host it infects? What makes it so virulent? With the threat of a pandemic looming it can sometimes seem the virus is an especially, maybe even uniquely, wily foe. Every move we make it changes to outsmart us. We remain helpless. But the same is true of so many other deadly threats, including one that killed over 160,000 people in the US last year: lung cancer. What makes lung cancer so deadly? Why are some lung cancers so aggressive? What makes it…