Quotulatiousness

April 18, 2013

Could this be the long-hoped-for breakthrough in battery technology?

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

In The Register, Tony Smith discusses a new prototype battery that might be coming to your electronic devices … eventually:

Electronics continue to shrink to ever smaller sizes, but researchers are having a tough time miniaturising the batteries powering today’s mobile gadgets. Step forward, bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes.

Smartphones use smaller power packs than they did five years ago, it’s true, but that’s because their chips and radios are more power efficient, not because of any major new battery technology.

Now boffins from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reckon they have come up with a new pocket-friendly electricity supply.

Enter the “microbattery”, a compact power cell constructed from many three-dimensional nanoporous electrodes capable, its developers claim, of delivering both high power and a large energy capacity.

The negative cathode was devised by another team at the university, but graduate student James Pikul, working under Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering William King, figured out how to create a compatible anode and put the two into a battery.

[. . .]

The cathode design, devised by a team led by the University’s Professor Paul Braun, is fast charging. Pikul reckons building a battery out of it yields a rechargeable that can be filled up in a thousandth of the time it takes to charge a comparably sized regular rechargeable cell.

Building a battery in a lab is one thing. Working out how to manufacture it commercially at a price that makes it a realistic power source for future devices is another thing altogether. Pikul and King will be working on that next.

April 17, 2013

New frontier in crony capitalism – public-policy profiteering

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

Timothy Carney explains why the big companies that made ordinary incandescent lightbulbs were among the groups pushing to make those lightbulbs effectively illegal. It’s a classic case of using government power to reduce competition and increase profit margins for certain companies:

Absent barriers to entry, light-bulb profit margins had to stay low. GE could make superior bulbs — soft white, etc. — but people are only willing to pay so much of a premium for those. After all, we’re dealing with light here, which is kind of a commodity.

So, where to find barriers to entry? Maybe higher-tech bulbs? LEDs, CFLs, or other bulbs that offer longer life and greater efficiency. GE, Osram, and Sylvania jumped into those high-tech bulbs, got some patents. R&D expenses, higher manufacturing costs, proprietary information — these created barriers to entry and allowed heftier profit margins.

But what if you made a super-efficient long-life bulb — and nobody wanted it? What if you couldn’t convince consumers that these bulbs were good for them? Well, that’s when you thank your lucky stars that you are GE, with the largest lobbying budget of any company in America.

You “heavily back” legislation that will “effectively outlaw … the traditional incandescent light bulb.” Now all consumers are forced to play in the world where you have greater barriers to entry, and thus bigger profit margins.

The negative consequences here aren’t mere Tea Party concerns about “crony capitalism” or, say, freedom of choice. One cost is the erosion of competition. GE in this case has found a way to divorce profit from the delivery of value – and I call it public-policy profiteering.

Sure, these high-tech bulbs have value. But I think consumers, rather than politicians, should be the ones who determine what value they assign to energy efficiency and longevity. So, through government intervention, capitalism starts to resemble the Marxist caricature of capitalism — Big Businesses making profits while denying consumers what they want.

More on the US Navy’s laser weapon development effort

Filed under: Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Earlier this month, it was reported that the US Navy had successfully tested their ship-mounted laser defence system called LaWS (earlier story here). Strategy Page has more information about the weapon system’s development:

The U.S. Navy believes it has found a laser technology that is capable of being useful in combat. This is not a sudden development but has been going on for most of the last decade. Three years ago the navy successfully tested this new laser weapon (six solid state lasers acting in unison), using it to destroy a small UAV. That was the seventh time the navy laser had destroyed a UAV this way. But the LaWS (Laser Weapon System) was not yet powerful enough to do this at the range, and power level, required to cripple the expected targets (missiles and small boats.) The manufacturer convinced the navy that it was just a matter of tweaking the technology to get the needed effectiveness. Three years later another test was run, under more realistic conditions. LaWS worked, knocking down a larger UAV at longer range. The navy now plans to install the system in a warship within the year for even more realistic testing.

The LaWS laser cannon was mounted on a KINETO Tracking Mount, which is similar, but larger (and more accurate than) the mount used by the Phalanx CIWS (Close In Weapons System). The navy laser weapon tests used the radar and tracking system of the CIWS. Four years ago CIWS was upgraded so that its sensors could detect speedboats, small aircraft, and naval mines. This was crucial because knocking down UAVs is not something that the navy needs help with. But with the ability to do enough damage to disable boats or missiles that are over two kilometers distant meant the LaWS was worth mounting on a warship. LaWS may yet prove incapable of working under combat conditions, but so far this new development has kept passing tests.

[. . .]

The LaWS uses electricity and more and more U.S. warships are producing a lot of electricity, mainly because it is used to operate electrical motors to propel the ship and, as part of that plan, operate weapons like LaWS. Thus a warship with an electrical drive (propulsion) system would be able support multiple shots from LaWS at low cost (a few dollars per firing). By current standards that’s pretty inexpensive ammo. The 20mm shells for the Phalanx cost less than $30 each, but you have to fire a hundred or more at each target. The 20mm cannon is being replaced by RIM-116 “Rolling Air Frame” missiles that have a longer range (7.5 kilometers) than the 20mm cannon (two kilometers) but cost nearly half a million dollars each.

Nearly half a century of engineering work has produced thousands of improvements, and a few breakthroughs, in making the lasers more powerful, accurate, and lethal. More efficient energy storage has made it possible to use lighter, shorter range ground based lasers effective against smaller targets like mortar shells and short-range rockets. Northrop’s move a decade ago was an indication that the company felt confident enough to gamble its own money, instead of what they get for government research contracts, to produce useful laser weapons. A larger high energy airborne laser would not only be useful against ballistic missiles but enemy aircraft and space satellites would also be at risk. But companies like Northrop and Boeing are still trying to produce ground and airborne lasers that can successfully operate under combat conditions. The big problem with anti-missile airborne lasers has always been the power supply. Lots of chemicals are needed to generate sufficient power for a laser that can reach out for hundreds of kilometers and do sufficient damage to a ballistic missile. To be effective the airborne laser needs sufficient power to get off several shots. So far, no one has been able to produce such a weapon. Shorter range solid state lasers need lots of electricity. This is difficult for aircraft or ground troops but not for properly equipped ship. That’s why these lasers remain “the weapon of the future” and will probably remain so for a while.

LaWS takes a different approach, using existing solid-state laser technology tweaked to complement the 20mm cannon shells normally used with Phalanx. Unlike the 20mm autocannon, the power of LaWS can be adjusted down to non-lethal (but blinding to the human eye) levels. That makes LaWS more flexible than the 20mm cannon and cheaper to operate. That will happen if LaWS proves able to operate under the same conditions that the 20mm cannon in Phalanx has operated for decades.

April 12, 2013

Neuroscience or neurotrash?

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

In The Register, Andrew Orlowski reports on the sad state of published neuroscience articles:

A group of academics from Oxford, Stanford, Virginia and Bristol universities have looked at a range of subfields of neuroscience and concluded that most of the results are statistically worthless.

The researchers found that most structural and volumetric MRI studies are very small and have minimal power to detect differences between compared groups (for example, healthy people versus those with mental health diseases). Their paper also stated that, specifically, a clear excess of “significance bias” (too many results deemed statistically significant) has been demonstrated in studies of brain volume abnormalities, and similar problems appear to exist in fMRI studies of the blood-oxygen-level-dependent response.

The team, researchers at Stanford Medical School, Virginia, Bristol and the Human Genetics dept at Oxford, looked at 246 neuroscience articles published in 2011 and and excluded papers where the test data was unavailable. They found that the papers’ median statistical power — the possibility that a study will identify an effect when there is an effect there to be found — was just 21 per cent. What that means in practice is that if you were to run one of the experiments five times, you’d only find the effect once.

A further survey of papers drawn from fMRI brain scanners — and studies using such scanners have long filled the popular media with dramatic claims — found that their statistical power was just 8 per cent.

Low statistical power caused three problems, the authors said. Firstly, there is a low probability of finding true effects; secondly, there is a low probability that a “true” finding is actually true; and thirdly, exaggerating the magnitude of the effect when a positive is discovered.

April 9, 2013

US Navy to deploy laser ship defence system in the Persian Gulf next year

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

At The Register, Neil McAllister reports on the most recent successful test of the US Navy’s LaWS prototype and plans to deploy the weapons to the Persian Gulf:

The US Navy says it has successfully test-fired a ship-mounted laser weapon, and that it plans to deploy the device to an actual maritime staging area beginning in 2014.

On Monday, the Navy released video and still images showing the somewhat-unimaginatively named Laser Weapon System (LaWS) firing on an unmanned drone, causing the aircraft to burst into flames and plummet from the sky.

Speaking at the Navy League Sea Air Space Exposition at National Harbor, Maryland on Monday, Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, chief of Naval research, said the device would be deployed to the Persian Gulf, where Iran has been “harassing” US ships with drones and small, fast boats.

“The area we’re going to test this in is a very intensive maritime region of the world,” Klunder told USNI News. “Lots of commerce, lots of ships.”

Klunder said the Navy has field-tested the solid-state laser 12 times so far, and in each case it managed to destroy its target. He added that the weapon also has a nonlethal mode that can generate a “dazzle” effect, which can be used to blind enemy vessels by overwhelming their sensors.

In addition to being effective against small, fast-moving craft, the cannon offers another benefit: its low cost relative to traditional weapons systems. According to The New York Times, firing LaWS costs less than $1 per sustained pulse. Compare that to the cost of a short-range interceptor missile, which the paper estimates run around $1.4m apiece.

The YouTube description:

120804-N-ZZ999-001 SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Jul. 30, 2012) The Laser Weapon System (LaWS) temporarily installed aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) in San Diego, Calif., is a technology demonstrator built by the Naval Sea Systems Command from commercial fiber solid state lasers, utilizing combination methods developed at the Naval Research Laboratory. LaWS can be directed onto targets from the radar track obtained from a MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon system or other targeting source. The Office of Naval Research’s Solid State Laser (SSL) portfolio includes LaWS development and upgrades providing a quick reaction capability for the fleet with an affordable SSL weapon prototype. This capability provides Navy ships a method for Sailors to easily defeat small boat threats and aerial targets without using bullets. (U.S. Navy video by Office of Naval Research/ Released)

March 21, 2013

“Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk.”

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

By way of Five Feet of Fury, an interesting story about challenging some very basic assumptions about psychology:

While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was not. Rather than practice traditional ethnography, he decided to run a behavioral experiment that had been developed by economists. Henrich used a “game” — along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma — to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery — the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.

[. . .]

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences — particularly in economics and psychology — relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?

A notion that’s popped up several times in the last couple of months is that the easy access to willing test subjects (university students) introduces a strong bias to a lot of the tests, yet until recently the majority of studies disregarded the possibility that their test results were unrepresentative of the general population.

March 14, 2013

The scare stories about increasing antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

In sp!ked, Robin Walsh debunks some of the scare factor from recent reports about antibiotic resistant diseases and the looming pandemic:

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January — a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

February 20, 2013

Publicly funded research results should be available to the people who paid for them

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick explains why publishers are losing their collective shit over a new bill that would require almost all government-funded research to be made generally available:

A year ago, we wrote about Rep. Mike Doyle introducing an important bill to provide public access to publicly funded research. As we’ve been discussing for years, the academic journal business is a huge boondoggle. Unlike just about any other publication, the journals don’t pay their writers (and in many subject areas, authors need to pay to submit), they don’t pay the peer reviewers — and then they charge positively insane amounts to university libraries, often knowing that those libraries feel obligated to pay. Oh yeah, and the journals keep the copyright on everything. I’ve heard of researchers having to redo basic experiments because they were worried they couldn’t even reuse data from earlier experiments due to the copyright assignment agreement they had to sign.

Thankfully, for years, there’s been a law on the books for any NIH-funded research to guarantee that 12-months after publication, those works also had to be published openly. While some publishers have tried to game this system (such as by demanding a mandatory fee to “deposit” the work in an open access database), on the whole this has been hugely important in making sure that taxpayer funded research is actually available and can be built upon. Over the years, there have been multiple bills introduced in both directions on this issue. There have been some bills that sought to take away this requirement under NIH funding and there have been bills that have tried to expand it to the rest of the federal government and any of the research they sponsor.

[. . .]

But, of course, the publishers are really not happy about all of this, calling it “different name, same boondoggle.” This is quite incredible, really, since it’s really the publishers who have been getting away with a giant boondoggle for ages. If that gives you an idea about just how ridiculous the publishers’ claims are, read on. Nearly every claim they make in attacking the bill actually applies to the publishers themselves much more than to the bill [. . .]

Basically, the publishers know that their current position with these journals is such a sweet deal that they don’t want anything to mess with it at all. That’s ridiculous. While they’re fighting for ever bigger profits, we’re talking about access to research that was funded with our own dollars. It’s really sad that the publishers would fight such a thing, though it shows what they really think concerning education. To them, it’s not about how best to disseminate information, but how to lock it up and charge insanely high prices for it.

February 13, 2013

Amity Shlaes on Coolidge

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:21

Ed Driscoll has an interview with author Amity Shlaes at PJMedia:

MR. DRISCOLL: How long after finishing The Forgotten Man did you start work on Coolidge, and how did you do your research?

MS. SHLAES: I think I started working on Coolidge while I was writing The Forgotten Man because I wrote one draft of Forgotten Man, this history in the 1930s. And then I thought well, this doesn’t work narratively because I didn’t describe what the change was from; where they started, what were their premises. Their premises were the premises of the ’20s and, you know, the ’20s premises were maybe smaller government is better, maybe still the pendulum of government action, reduce uncertainty in the policy environment so that a business can go forward. All these ideas were ideas from the ’20s, and whose ideas were they? Well, they were Calvin Coolidge’s and before Coolidge, Harding’s ideas. But mostly Coolidge’s, I think he’s the hero of the ’20s.

So I went back at the very last minute with Forgotten Man and put Coolidge in and he felt just right. I really liked him. And I thought well, we don’t — we don’t appreciate him much and what I learned in that short look for writing the new beginning to Forgotten Man made me want to go back and give him his own show.

MR. DRISCOLL: Coolidge is sadly remembered today by many people for only one quote and that’s “The business of America is business,” which is actually a bastardization of what Coolidge really said. Could you place that quote into context?

MS. SHLAES: Yes, that’s from a nice speech to newspaper people, actually. And he says the chief business of America is business, and he also says the chief ideal of Americans is idealism. So there’s a yoking together of two concepts, if you go back and read the whole speech, and it’s not fair to paint him as a only capitalism or capitalism to the exclusion of other areas. He’s not like Ayn Rand, for example, because he always tends to bring in the spiritual — other spheres in — and he doesn’t think only capitalism always prevails. He sees a balance. What he doesn’t like is when capitalism or business intrudes upon spiritual. And that’s very different from modern libertarianism.

So anyway it’s all there and that’s — he was extremely idealistic and extremely spiritual, some would say pious. Herbert Hoover called him a fundamentalist, and that was not a compliment coming from Herbert Hoover.

February 6, 2013

Old and busted: organ transplants. New hotness: 3D organ printing

Filed under: Health, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Matt Peckham on the very near future of organ replacement technology:

Say you need a new trachea, a part of the body we’ve already managed to replicate using stem cells and successfully transplant to a human with late-stage tracheal cancer (I’m not making that up or exaggerating). With a 3D printer and a bunch of stem cell-saturated bio-ink, you might be able to just print that trachea on demand thanks to a new technique that lets you pass human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) through a printer nozzle without destroying them.

A team of researchers from Scotland announced Monday that they’d finally managed to get an inkjet-style printer to craft an organic 3D object. Not an actual organ (well, not yet), but these scientists claim they’ve been able to clear a crucial hurdle: getting hESCs, prized for their ability to become cells of any tissue type, to survive the printing process.

The solution involved rejiggering the way the inkjet-style 3D printer worked, specifically the printing valve, which had to be tweaked to ever-so-gently deposit blobs of hESCs in programmable patterns without compromising the viability and functionality of the cells themselves. The researchers figured out how to do this using two types of bio-inks as well as allow for independent control of the amount in each droplet (with considerable control granularity — down to less than five cells per droplet). The results of the experiment were just published in the bio-science print and online journal Biofabrication.

January 31, 2013

The “clean” side of archaeology

Filed under: History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

BBC News has an interesting segment on how digital technology is changing the field of archaeology:

Archaeologists may not need to get their hands so dirty any more, thanks to the kind of digital technology being pioneered at Southampton University.

Its ‘µ-VIS Centre for Computed Tomography’ possesses the largest, high energy scanner of its kind in Europe: a ‘micro-CT’ machine manufactured by Nikon.

Capable of resolutions better than 0.1mm — the diameter of a human hair — it allows archaeologists to carefully examine material while still encased in soil.

Using visualisation software, archaeologists can then analyse their finds in 3D. This keeps the material in its original form, and postpones any commitment to the painstaking process of excavation by hand.

Video of the machine in operation at the BBC News site.

January 14, 2013

The increasing precision of DNA editing

Filed under: Food, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Matt Ridley looks at the vastly improved editing tools becoming available for DNA manipulation:

Little wonder that precision genetic engineering has taken a while to arrive. In truth, it has been moving steadily toward greater precision for 10,000 years. Early farmers in what’s now Turkey introduced a mutation to wheat plants in the “Q gene” on chromosome 5A, which made the seed-head less brittle and the seed husks easier to harvest efficiently.

They did so unknowingly, of course, by selecting from among random mutations.

Fifty years ago, scientists used a nuclear reactor to fire gamma rays at barley seeds, scrambling some of their genes. The result was “Golden Promise,” a high-yielding, low-sodium barley variety popular with (ironically) organic farmers and brewers. Again, the gene editing was random, the selection afterward nonrandom.

Twenty years ago, scientists inserted specific sequences for four enzymes into rice plants so that they would synthesize vitamin A and relieve a deadly vitamin deficiency-the result being “golden rice.” This time the researchers knew exactly what letters they were putting in but had no idea where they would end up.

January 10, 2013

QotD: The mild, quiet, unassuming world of high-nitrogen compounds

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

When we last checked in with the Klapötke lab at Münich, it was to highlight their accomplishments in the field of nitrotetrazole oxides. Never forget, the biggest accomplishment in such work is not blowing out the lab windows. We’re talking high-nitrogen compounds here (a specialty of Klapötke’s group), and the question is not whether such things are going to be explosive hazards. (That’s been settled by their empirical formulas, which generally look like typographical errors). The question is whether you’re going to be able to get a long enough look at the material before it realizes its dream of turning into an expanding cloud of hot nitrogen gas.

It’s time for another dispatch from the land of spiderweb-cracked blast shields and “Oh well, I never liked that fume hood, anyway”. Today we have a fine compound from this line of work, part of a series derived from N-amino azidotetrazole. The reasonable response to that statement is “Now hold it right there”, because most chemists will take one look at that name and start making get-it-away-from-me gestures. I’m one of them. To me, that structure is a flashing red warning sign on a dead-end road, but then, I suffer from a lack of vision in these matters.

But remember, N-amino azidotetrazole (I can’t even type that name without wincing) is the starting material for the work I’m talking about today. It’s a base camp, familiar territory, merely a jumping-off point in the quest for still more energetic compounds. The most alarming of them has two carbons, fourteen nitrogens, and no hydrogens at all, a formula that even Klapötke himself, who clearly has refined sensibilities when it comes to hellishly unstable chemicals, calls “exciting”. Trust me, you don’t want to be around when someone who works with azidotetrazoles comes across something “exciting”.

Derek Lowe, “Things I Won’t Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More Or Less”, In the Pipeline, 2013-01-09

January 2, 2013

Don’t let your BMI scare you (too much)

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

A quick reminder that the Body Mass Index (BMI) is more a convenient mathematical trick than an actual healthy weight guideline:

In a finding that could undermine many New Year’s resolutions, a new government study shows that people who are overweight are less likely to die in any given period than people of normal weight. Even those who are moderately obese don’t have a higher-than-normal risk of dying.

Being substantially obese, based on measure called body mass index, or BMI, of 35 and higher, does raise the risk of death by 29%, researchers found.

But people with a BMI of 25 to 30 — who are considered overweight and make up more than 30% of the U.S. population — have a 6% lower risk of death than people whose BMI is in the normal range of 18.5 to 25, according to the study, being published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

People who had a BMI of 30 to 35 — considered the first stage of obesity — had a 5% lower risk of dying, but those figures weren’t considered statistically significant.

In other words, a few extra pounds are not going to threaten your life (a lot of extra pounds might). In the western world, few of us have the kind of jobs that require much in the way of physical exertion and we also have both relatively low food prices and much greater access to calorie-dense food. Our parents tended to have jobs that required more physical effort and their access to food was not as great as ours (they were less wealthy overall, and didn’t eat at restaurants or fast food joints as often as we do). Two otherwise positive trends that combine to produce a less-positive result on the scales.

Earlier discussion of the limitations of BMI as a guideline here, here, here, and here.

December 23, 2012

More copper to fight superbugs

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

Brass and other copper-alloyed metals may have a bright future in doorknobs, handles, and other frequently handled surfaces due to a recent discovery about the metal’s ability to fight bacteria:

Researchers have discovered that copper and alloys made from the metal, including brass, can prevent antibiotic resistance in bacteria from spreading.

Plastic and stainless steel surfaces, which are now widely used in hospitals and public settings, allow bacteria to survive and spread when people touch them.

Even if the bacteria die, DNA that gives them resistance to antibiotics can survive and be passed on to other bacteria on these surfaces. Copper and brass, however, can kill the bacteria and also destroy this DNA.

Professor Bill Keevil, head of the microbiology group at Southampton University, said using copper on surfaces in public places and on public transport could dramatically cut the threat posed by superbugs.

[. . .]

In research published in the journal Molecular Genetics of Bacteria, Professor Keevil and his colleagues found that compared to stainless steel bacteria on copper surfaces bacterial DNA rapidly degraded at room temperature.

Professor Keevil added: “We live in this new world of stainless steel and plastic, but perhaps we should go back to using brass more instead.”

Tim Worstall points out that much of the stainless steel came in through health and safety regulation:

But isn’t this just great? All that modernity, all that ripping out of the old and replacement with futuristic design actually kills people?

It’s almost as fun as the discovery that the wooden chopping boards, which they made illegal, contain natural antibiotics which the plastic chopping boards, which they made compulsory, do not.

The Man from Whitehall really does not know best. And given that, can we hang them all from the Christmas tree please? It would usher in such a jolly New Year.

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