Baboon metaphysics

Tyler Cowen cites this amusing passage about Baboon metaphysics:

In sum, monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels: stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are a social impediment) but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families. The two rules interact in interesting ways. For members of high-ranking matrilines, the rules of kin-based and rank-based attraction reinforce one another, whereas for the members of low-ranking families they counteract. A member of a high-ranking matriline is attracted to her kin not only because they are members of the same family but also because they are high-ranking. A member of a low-ranking family may be attracted to her kin, but she is also drawn away from them by her attraction to unrelated, higher-status individuals. As a result, high-ranking families are often more cohesive than lower-ranking ones. Or, to paraphrase Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, all high-ranking families are alike in their cohesiveness, each low-ranking family is cohesive or not, in its own way.

Alcohol Labeling

NPR notes that Alcohol Labeling is about to change:

Alcohol beverages are about to get a makeover. The Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau has proposed a ruling that will require the alcohol industry to include detailed product information on the label — the amount of protein, sugar, calories and, of course, alcohol per serving.

The Great Happiness Space

The nightlife in Japan is surreal and — to a westerner — bewildering. The Great Happiness Space — how Japanese is that title? — is a documentary from 2006 that explores host bars, where androgynous young men with big peroxide hair entertain young women. Get ready for some culture shock.

Come back to it later if you don't have time now. You definitely want to get to the first "plot twist" about a half-hour in.

Human Weapon

I have been watching and enjoying Human Weapon on the History Channel, but two things have bothered me.

First, they pretend that after training for a few weeks, our hosts will be able to compete against a master of that particular style. The masters are clearly toying with them, sparring lightly, but the show doesn't admit that obvious fact.

Second, while Jason Chambers is a well-trained martial artists, his football-player co-host, Bill Duff, is a meat-head. Here's what a Canadian judoka training in Japan had to say:

Training was going really well for a long time. I felt strong, techniques were clicking, and all in all things were excellent.

Then last Wednesday people filming a show for the History Channel came to Tokai to do a show on judo.

After a four and a half hour practice, after I had cooled down and stretched, I was asked by Agemizu sensei to have a little match with one of the History Channel guys, a six foot 5 or so, 230+ lb man.

Now, knowing well that this guy was a beginner, it wouldn't look good if I slammed this guy, so I took it easy and was just moving around, going in for techniques half-heartedly, and just kind of messing around. No one told me that this guy was going to fight me like his life depended on it.

So, long story short, after being at Tokai for well, almost a year now, and training with World Champions and the like, for the first time since my shoulder surgery, something in my shoulder popped when this oaf jerked my arm back with both his arms with all his might.

I acted like nothing happened, and got up and moved around some more with him, and at that point he started sticking his bald sweaty head in my face while pushing me straight back, and then he grabbed my leg, and I just hopped away, thinking he'd let go, but instead he football tackled me from behind.

The Obesity Fight

Body Mass Index, or BMI, may be a flawed measure of health and fitness, but if you look at the interactive map from The Obesity Fight, you immediately realize that all those people aren't creeping over 30 kg/m² by lifting weights and putting on muscle.

A War We Just Might Win

Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, writing in the New York Times, call Iraq A War We Just Might Win:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
[...]
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Weird California

Weird California describes itself as "Your Travel Guide to California's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets," and as such it lists the sites of a number of utopian communes, including the Rancho Santa Fe location of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide of 1997.

You may recall that the cultists were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants and brand new black-and-white Nike tennis shoes, with purple shrouds over their dead bodies. There were two details I didn't know though. First, their track uniforms included patches saying "Heaven's Gate Away Team". (That seems darkly comical.) Second, they each had their passports and $5.75 in hand.

Weird California claims that the protagonist of Mark Twain's Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven takes his passport and $5.75 for fare to Heaven, but that's simply not the case.

Minding the Gap in Sizing Up Sale Prices

Minding the Gap in Sizing Up Sale Prices notes that consumers act as if low digits are farther apart than higher ones:

Students who saw ads showing a $233 skate marked down to $222 thought they were getting a larger discount than did students who saw a $199 skate marked down to $188, even though the opposite was true. The first group of students also rated themselves about 20 percent more likely to buy the skates than did the others.

Training is no guarantee of health

Mark Sisson notes that Training is no guarantee of health:

The problem with many, if not most, age group endurance athletes is that the low-level training gets out of hand. They overtrain in their exuberance to excel at racing, and they over consume carbohydrates in an effort to stay fueled. The result is that over the years, their muscle mass, immune function, and testosterone decrease, while their cortisol, insulin and oxidative output increase (unless you work so hard that you actually exhaust the adrenals, introducing an even more disconcerting scenario). Any anti-aging doc will tell you that if you do this long enough, you will hasten, rather than retard, the aging process. Studies have shown an increase in mortality when weekly caloric expenditure exceeds 4,000.

That's why I stopped racing and training ten years ago and why I prefer hiking, sprinting and weight-training today. But what's a competitive type-A to do if s/he wants to kick age-group butt in Kona and NOT fade away prematurely?

Given carte blanche to take advantage of all that medicine has to offer, I would aggressively consume antioxidants during my training (10-20,000 ORAC units per day), I would increase the amount of healthy fats (omega 3-rich) in my diet to 50% of total calories and I would only consume quality complex carbohydrates during my training. In fact, I would calculate my carbohydrate requirements on a daily basis and not exceed them. I would use simple sugars (e.g., gels) during long rides and races only to the extent they are necessary. That means I would do most of my training without them, saving them for races. I would work closely with a trained anti-aging doctor to monitor my fasting glucose, fasting insulin, free and bound testosterone, liver enzymes, cortisol, DHEA, hematocrit, ferritin and other parameters.

Read the whole article.

Evolutionary algorithms now surpass human designers

As computer power increases, and as grid computing becomes more common, evolutionary algorithms, which require testing of thousands of "offspring", become more practical. Evolutionary algorithms now surpass human designers:

Some of these EAs are being used to come up with more exotic versions of existing technologies. Joe Sullivan at the University of Limerick in Ireland used an EA to make a USB flash memory stick that lasts far longer than those on the market today. Typically, memory sticks can be erased and rewritten about 10,000 times. Every time data is erased, residual charge is left on the storage transistors. Eventually, this builds up and prevents the memory being rewritten. Using large voltages to read, write and erase memory, and applying them for longer causes more residual charge. However, applying too little voltage for too little time could make the memory unreliable. To see if he could extend the lifetime without making the device less reliable, Sullivan created a genetic algorithm that varied the voltages and their timings. The result was a combination that meant the memory stick lasted 30 times longer.
[...]
Manos walked off with the $5000 gold prize for combining EAs with the emerging field of "holey" optical fibres (New Scientist, 12 June 1999, p 36). These are shot through with tens of micrometre-wide holes whose exact pattern controls the wavelength of light that can be beamed down them. Previously the holes were arranged in a hexagonal pattern, which has limited the range of bandwidths. That changed when Manos's team at the University of Sydney, Australia, allowed an EA to breed exotic new hole patterns. One looked like a flower, with larger ovoids as "petals", and doubled the fibre's bandwidth. They have patented that fibre and founded a company to market it.

Other prizewinners used EAs to do what humans already do, but faster. Pierre Legrand and colleagues at the University of Bordeaux 2, France, developed an evolutionary system to configure the electrodes for cochlear implants. Up to 22 electrodes on the auditory nerve let cochlear implants restore lost hearing, but the voltages and timings of the signals applied to them are highly individual, requiring much adjustment for speech to be audible. Legrand's team took just one-and-a-half days to configure an optimal pattern for one patient whose doctors had not succeeded in 10 years.

Not content with aiming for top results however, another group of researchers is using EAs to produce designs that dodge patents on rival inventions. Koza took a 1-metre-tall, Wi-Fi antenna made by Cisco and attempted to create another that did a better job without infringing Cisco's patent. He used an EA that bred antennas by comparing offspring with how the Cisco patent works and weeding out ones that worked similarly. "Our genetic program engineered around the existing patent and created a novel design that didn't infringe it," says Koza. Not only would this allow a company to save money on licensing fees, the new design was also itself patentable.

Scientists excited by Indonesian-caught coelacanth

Scientists excited by Indonesian-caught coelacanth:

"It was an enormous fish. It had phosphorescent green eyes and legs. If I had pulled it up during the night, I would have been afraid and I would have thrown it back in," he exclaims.

Coelacanths, closely related to lungfish, usually live at depths of 200-1,000 metres (656-3,200 feet). They can grow up to two metres (6.5 feet) in length and weigh as much as 91 kilogrammes (200 pounds).

Lahama, 48, has fished since he was 10 years old, like his father and his grandfather before him. But he was unlikely to have ever run into this "living fossil" species, as scientists have dubbed the enigmatic fish.

Lahama's catch, 1.3 metres long and weighing 50 kilograms (110 pounds) was only the second ever captured alive in Asia. The first was caught in 1998, also off Manado.

That catch astonished ichtyologists, who until then had been convinced that the last coelacanths were found only off eastern Africa, mainly in the Commoros archipelago. They had been thought to have died out around the time dinosaurs became extinct, until one was found there in 1938.

Their fossil records date back more than 360 million years and suggest that the fish has changed little over that period.

Lahama, who had never even heard of the fish, initially thought of selling his white-spotted catch.

"Considering his weight, I said to myself, this will fetch a good price."

Returning to port, he showed it off to the most senior fisherman, who became alarmed.

"It is a fish which has legs -- it should be given back to the water. It will bring us misfortune," he told him. But the unsuperstitious Lahama decided to keep it.

After spending 30 minutes out of water, the fish, still alive, was placed in a netted pool in front of a restaurant at the edge of the sea. It survived for 17 hours.

The local fisheries authorities filmed the fish swimming in the metre-deep pool, capturing invaluable images as the species had only previously been recorded in caves at great depths.

Once dead, the fish was frozen.

After the fisherman was interviewed, French, Japanese and Indonesian scientists working with the French Institute for Development and Research carried out an autopsy on the coelacanth. Genetic analysis is to follow.

The site of capture, so close to the beach and from a depth of 105 metres, had intrigued the scientists. Does the Indonesian coelacanth live in shallower waters than its cousin in the Commoros?

Lahama's fish is to be preserved and will be displayed in a museum in Manado.

New Approach To Eliminating Allergies, Asthma, Developed By Hebrew University Ph.D. Student

New Approach To Eliminating Allergies, Asthma, Developed By Hebrew University Ph.D. Student:

Bachelet has identified a receptor protein on mast cells, termed CD300a. This receptor has a prominent negative effect on mast cell activity, virtually shutting down the cell from unleashing allergic responses. Unfortunately, CD300a is widely found throughout the immune system, and simply targeting it could result in undesired, overall immune suppression with serious consequences, as can happen with steroids.

In order to overcome this problem, Bachelet and his research colleague, Ariel Munitz, have designed a small, synthetic, antibody fragment that has the unusual ability of recognizing two targets simultaneously — the receptor CD300a and a mast cell-specific marker. Thus, the antibody targets CD300a only on the surface of mast cells, avoiding suppression of other immune cells. This antibody potently eliminated four different types of allergic diseases in mice. Moreover, when mice suffering from severe chronic asthma received the antibody in nose drops, they completely reverted to normal, healthy mice in less than two months.

This pioneering project, termed RECEPTRA, presents a novel therapeutic strategy for acute and chronic allergic diseases, and is currently being licensed through Yissum, the Hebrew University's technology transfer company, to pharmaceutical companies for further development and eventual clinical trials.

Bad Credit, Bad Driver

In Bad Credit, Bad Driver, Alex Tabarrok looks at a recent summary, by Luke Froeb at Management R&D, of a recent FTC study:

Some states ban the use of credit scores to price auto insurance in part because African-Americans and Hispanics tend to have lower (worse) credit scores and thus pay higher auto insurance rates. The brute facts, however, are that credit scores are good predictors of auto claims.

Dan Klein also weighs in with his defense of credit reporting.

Read the comments to see lots of emotional name-calling and poor argumentation.

Sex for the motherland

Critics call the organization the Putinjugend, and it is exhorting young Russians to have sex for the motherland:

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp's mass wedding. "They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia".

Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation — known as "Nashi", meaning "Ours" — is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

Nashi's annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear - supposedly a cause of sterility - and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp's first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia's dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country's demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

But the real aim of the youth camp - and the 100,000-strong movement behind it - is not to improve Russia's demographic profile, but to attack democracy.

Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as 'Young Guard', and 'Young Russia', is in the forefront of the charge.

Sumo Champ Seeks to Slim Down

NPR notes that the "World" Sumo Champ Seeks to Slim Down:

Champion sumo wrestler Emanuel "Tiny" Yarbrough hopes to qualify for the Olympic judo team next year. So he's gone on a diet. The 6-foot-8 athlete's goal is to drop 200 pounds, from 752 to a fighting 550.

Old-schhool MMA fans will remember Manny's quick loss to Keith Hackney in UFC 3.

The "World" Sumo Championship is an amateur competition that excludes all the "real" sumo wrestlers from Japan.

Interestingly, he couldn't compete in wrestling, even at his goal weight, because the wrestling weight classes don't include an open-ended super heavyweight class; the max weight is 120 kg (265 pounds).

In the Land of the Rococo Marxists

Tom Wolfe's In the Land of the Rococo Marxists originally appeared in the June 2000 Harper's Monthly and is reprinted in Wolfe's book Hooking Up. In it, he looks at the rise of the modern intellectual:

From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn't cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: "Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: "An intellectual is a person knowledgable in one field who speaks out only in others."

The localvore's dilemma

The localvore's dilemma points out that "food miles" are a terrible measure of a food's environmental impact:

But a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes consume more energy — and produce more greenhouse gases — than food imported from great distances. Moving food by train or ship is quite efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a relatively small part of the total energy "footprint" of food compared with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it. A head of lettuce grown in Vermont may have less of an energy impact than one shipped up from Chile. But grow that Vermont lettuce late in the season in a heated greenhouse and its energy impact leapfrogs the imported option. So while local food may have its benefits, helping with climate change is not always one of them.

This isn't new though. From Against organic farming:

The DEFRA report, which analysed the supply of food in Britain, contained several counterintuitive findings. It turns out to be better for the environment to truck in tomatoes from Spain during the winter, for example, than to grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain. And it transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day. Another surprising finding was that a shift towards a local food system, and away from a supermarket-based food system, with its central distribution depots, lean supply chains and big, full trucks, might actually increase the number of food-vehicle miles being travelled locally, because things would move around in a larger number of smaller, less efficiently packed vehicles.

Research carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that producing dairy products, lamb, apples and onions in that country and shipping them to Britain used less energy overall than producing them in Britain. (Farming and processing in New Zealand is much less energy intensive.)

New Solar Photovoltaic Cell Efficiency Record: 42.8%

FuturePundit notes that a consortium of research teams has achieved a new record in photovoltaic cell efficiency:

Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions.

That number is a significant advance from the current record of 40.7 percent announced in December and demonstrates an important milestone on the path to the 50 percent efficiency goal set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In November 2005, the UD-led consortium received approximately $13 million in funding for the initial phases of the DARPA Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) program to develop affordable portable solar cell battery chargers.

The Wisdom of Ratatouille

Lester Hunt is amazed by The Wisdom of Ratatouille:

In an animated feature that has both human and animal characters, usually the humans are the bad guys because they either a) kill and eat the cute animals or b) pollute the animals’ environment and despoil the earth or c) both a and b. This is the story of an animal who wants to be human, or at least live like a human being. In other words, human is good! And the film explains what the essential difference between the human and the animal is: humans make, animals take. Rats take other people’s food, humans invent new foods. Thus, cuisine is a symbol of what gives human beings whatever dignity they may have. Remy, the cute animal protagonist, is a rat who wants to be a chef. Throughout the movie, stealing food (even to feed hungry friends!) is treated as the one thing he must not do, or he will lose his hard-won human dignity. We repeatedly hear the motto, “Anyone can cook” (ie., even a rat). At the end, we realize that what this means is not that everyone can be a great cook (sorry, not everyone is great) but that greatness can come from anywhere.

Of course, I expected nothing less of Brad Bird.

Vaporub solves meerkat gang-wars

Vaporub solves meerkat gang-wars:

Zookeepers at Paultons Park near Romsey, Hampshire, UK have solved their meerkat brawls with Vap-O-Rub. Meerkats attack newcomers unless they smell like family. The solution was to rub all the little critters with minty chest-sauce so that they all smelled alike.

Prohibition politics

In Prohibition politics, Donald J. Boudreaux notes that the popular understanding of how Prohibition ended — that the public recognized its futility, and politicians then repealed it — is a myth:

But contrary to popular belief, the 1920s witnessed virtually no sympathy for ending Prohibition. Neither citizens nor politicians concluded from the obvious failure of Prohibition that it should end.

As historian Norman Clark reports:

"Before 1930 few people called for outright repeal of the (18th) Amendment. No amendment had ever been repealed, and it was clear that few Americans were moved to political action yet by the partial successes or failures of the Eighteenth. ... The repeal movement, which since the early 1920s had been a sullen and hopeless expression of minority discontent, astounded even its most dedicated supporters when it suddenly gained political momentum."

What happened in 1930 that suddenly gave the repeal movement political muscle? The answer is the Great Depression and the ravages that it inflicted on federal income-tax revenues.

Prior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam's annual revenue came from liquor taxes. (The bulk of Uncle Sam's revenues came from customs duties.) Not so after 1913. Especially after the income tax surprised politicians during World War I with its incredible ability to rake in tax revenue, the importance of liquor taxation fell precipitously.

By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam's revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined. In research that I did with University of Michigan law professor Adam Pritchard, we found that bulging income-tax revenues made it possible for Congress finally to give in to the decades-old movement for alcohol prohibition.

Before the income tax, Congress effectively ignored such calls because to prohibit alcohol sales then would have hit Congress hard in the place it guards most zealously: its purse. But once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell.

Prohibition was launched.

Despite pleas throughout the 1920s by journalist H.L. Mencken and a tiny handful of other sensible people to end Prohibition, Congress gave no hint that it would repeal this folly. Prohibition appeared to be here to stay — until income-tax revenues nose-dived in the early 1930s.

From 1930 to 1931, income-tax revenues fell by 15 percent.

In 1932 they fell another 37 percent; 1932 income-tax revenues were 46 percent lower than just two years earlier. And by 1933 they were fully 60 percent lower than in 1930.

With no end of the Depression in sight, Washington got anxious for a substitute source of revenue.

That source was liquor sales.

Jouett Shouse, president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, was a powerful figure in the Democratic Party that had just nominated Franklin Roosevelt as its candidate for the White House. Shouse emphasized that ending Prohibition would boost government revenue.

And a House leader of Congress' successful attempt to propose the Prohibition-ending 21st Amendment said in 1934 that "if (anti-prohibitionists) had not had the opportunity of using that argument, that repeal meant needed revenue for our government, we would not have had repeal for at least 10 years."

There's no doubt that widespread understanding of Prohibition's futility and of its ugly, unintended side-effects made it easier for Congress to repeal the 18th Amendment. But these public sentiments were insufficient, by themselves, to end the war on alcohol.

Ending it required a gargantuan revenue shock — to the U.S. Treasury.

So don't expect drug prohibition to end anytime soon.

Desktop Orb Could Reform Energy Hogs

Desktop Orb Could Reform Energy Hogs:

Mark Martinez couldn't get Southern California Edison customers to conserve energy. As the utility's manager of program development, he had tried alerting them when it was time to dial back electricity use on a hot day — he'd fire off automated phone calls, zap text messages, send emails. No dice.

Then he saw an Ambient Orb. It's a groovy little ball that changes color in sync with incoming data — growing more purple, for example, as your email inbox fills up or as the chance of rain increases. Martinez realized he could use Orbs to signal changes in electrical rates, programming them to glow green when the grid was underused — and, thus, electricity cheaper — and red during peak hours when customers were paying more for power. He bought 120 of them, handed them out to customers, and sat back to see what would happen.

Within weeks, Orb users reduced their peak-period energy use by 40 percent. Why? Because, Martinez explains, the glowing sphere was less annoying and more persistent than a text alert. "It's nonintrusive," he says. "It has a relatively benign effect. But when you suddenly see your ball flashing red, you notice."

Electricity is invisible. That's why we waste so much of it in the home — leaving rechargers permanently plugged in and electronic devices idling in power-slurping "sleep" modes. We can't see that our houses account for nearly a quarter of the nation's energy appetite; we don't know when the grid is nearing capacity and expensive to use.

So Martinez hacked his customers' perceptual apparatuses. He made energy visible.

Robot Buses Pull In to San Diego's Fastest Lane

Robot Buses Pull In to San Diego's Fastest Lane:

Over the next three years, workers will carve a narrow lane down the shoulder of the increasingly congested Interstate 805, exclusively for buses and commercial trucks modded with lane-keeping sensors and adaptive cruise control. Neither technology is new, but most automakers tune adaptive cruise control to keep cars farther apart than normal, making traffic worse. In the robot lane, vehicles will be packed like train cars. They'll still have drivers — everyone has to leave the freeway sometime — but they'll be out of the main flow. If the new lanes work, public transportation will move faster, trucks will speed safely along approximately 20 miles of the main US-Mexico shipping corridor (UPS has signed up for the test), and traffic on I-805 will be reduced. "Fixing this problem is going to require some radical thinking," says Jake Peters, founder of transportation startup Swoop Technology, which is designing the system. "And, hey, it could be a way to make a trillion dollars."

The Best Dangerous Science Jobs

I really enjoyed some of Thomas Fuchs' illustrations for Wired's The Best Dangerous Science Jobs.

The Fifty-first State?

Back before the invasion of Iraq, in November, 2002, James Fallows asked, will Iraq become The Fifty-first State? Next time we're on the brink of war, I'm going to make sure to read what he's writing. A taste of that pre-war article:

But in the generation since Vietnam the mainstream U.S. military has gone in the opposite direction: toward a definition of its role in strictly martial terms. It is commonplace these days in discussions with officers to hear them describe their mission as "killing people and blowing things up." The phrase is used deliberately to shock civilians, and also for its absolute clarity as to what a "military response" involves. If this point is understood, there can be no confusion about what the military is supposed to do when a war starts, no recriminations when it uses all necessary force, and as little risk as possible that soldiers will die "political" deaths because they've been constrained for symbolic or diplomatic reasons from fully defending themselves. All this is in keeping with the more familiar parts of the Powell doctrine — the insistence on political backing and overwhelming force. The goal is to protect the U.S. military from being misused.

The strict segregation of military and political functions may be awkward in Iraq, however. In the short term the U.S. military would necessarily be the government of Iraq. In the absence of international allies or UN support, and the absence of an obvious Iraqi successor regime, American soldiers would have to make and administer political decisions on the fly. America's two most successful occupations embraced the idea that military officials must play political roles. Emperor Hirohito remained the titular head of state in occupied Japan, but Douglas MacArthur, a lifelong soldier, was immersed in the detailed reconstruction of Japan's domestic order. In occupied Germany, General Lucius D. Clay did something comparable, though less flamboyantly. Today's Joint Chiefs of Staff would try to veto any suggestion for a MacArthur-like proconsul. U.S. military leaders in the Balkans have pushed this role onto the United Nations. Exactly who could assume it in Iraq is not clear.

In the first month, therefore, the occupiers would face a paradox: the institution best equipped to exercise power as a local government — the U.S. military — would be the one most reluctant to do so.

Robert A. Heinlein's Legacy

Taylor Dinerman looks at Robert A. Heinlein's Legacy — and starts by looking at science fiction's legacy:

Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and "populist" by university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural artifact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People magazine articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had a greater impact on the way we all live than any other literary genre of the 20th century.

When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what used to be considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C. Clarke put it: "Almost every good scientist I know has read science fiction." And the greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson Heinlein, born in Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.

Treasure trove 'found by octopus'

Treasure trove 'found by octopus':

An octopus with a porcelain plate stuck to its suckers has led to the discovery of a hoard of ancient pottery, South Korean scientists say.

A fisherman caught the octopus off South Korea's west coast in May. He said the animal appeared to be hiding under a plate.

Archaeologists searched the area and discovered a 12th Century wooden wreck buried in mudflats.

They said more than 500 pieces of porcelain had been recovered so far.
[...]
The porcelain, found near Taean, south-west of the capital Seoul, is thought to date from the Goryeo dynasty, which ruled Korea from the 10th to the 14th Century.

Experts say the 7.7m-long (25ft) wreck could contain up to 2,000 further pieces, including ancient bowls, plates and other types of pottery.

NJIT Researchers Develop Inexpensive, Easy Process To Produce Solar Panels

NJIT Researchers Develop Inexpensive, Easy Process To Produce Solar Panels:

Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. “The process is simple,” said lead researcher and author Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”

Who's writing these press releases?

The solar cell developed at NJIT uses a carbon nanotubes complex, which by the way, is a molecular configuration of carbon in a cylindrical shape. The name is derived from the tube’s miniscule size. Scientists estimate nanotubes to be 50,000 times smaller than a human hair. Nevertheless, just one nanotube can conduct current better than any conventional electrical wire. “Actually, nanotubes are significantly better conductors than copper,” Mitra added.

Mitra and his research team took the carbon nanotubes and combined them with tiny carbon Buckyballs (known as fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Buckyballs trap electrons, although they can’t make electrons flow. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons. Nanotubes, behaving like copper wires, will then be able to make the electrons or current flow.

If you're not up on fullerenes:

The fullerenes, discovered in 1985 by researchers at the University of Sussex and Rice University, are a family of carbon allotropes named after Richard Buckminster Fuller and are sometimes called buckyballs. They are molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Cylindrical fullerenes are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of a sheet of linked hexagonal rings, but they contain also pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings that prevent the sheet from being planar.

Obesity is 'socially contagious'

We shouldn't be surprised that Obesity is 'socially contagious':

The [NEJM] study — the first to examine this phenomenon — finds that if one person becomes obese, those closely connected to them have a greater chance of becoming obese themselves. Surprisingly, the greatest effect is seen not among people sharing the same genes or the same household but among friends.

An odd stat:

If a person you consider a friend becomes obese, the researchers found, your own chances of becoming obese go up 57 percent. Among mutual friends, the effect is even stronger, with chances increasing 171 percent.

Aren't most friends mutual friends?

More:

Christakis and Fowler also looked at the influence of siblings, spouses and neighbors. Among siblings, if one becomes obese, the likelihood for the other to become obese increases 40 percent; among spouses, 37 percent. There was no effect among neighbors, unless they were also friends.

The researchers analyzed data over a period of 32 years for 12,067 adults, who underwent repeated medical assessments as part of the Framingham Heart Study. They were able to map a densely interconnected social network of the study's subjects by using the tracking sheets (which had previously been archived in a basement) that recorded not only the subjects' family members but also unrelated friends who could be expected to find them in a few years.

The network map took two years to assemble and includes information on the participants' body-mass index. Among the first things the researchers noticed was that, consistent with other studies finding an obesity epidemic in the U.S., the whole network grew heavier over time.

Also immediately apparent were distinct clusters of thin and heavy individuals. Statistical analysis revealed that this clustering could not be attributed solely to the selective formation of ties among people of comparable weights.

"It's not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with," said Christakis, a physician and a professor in Harvard Medical School's department of health care policy. "Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship."

Further analysis also suggested that people's influence on each other's obesity status could not be put down just to similarities in lifestyle and environment, to, for example, people eating the same foods together or engaging in the same physical activities. Not only do siblings and spouses have less influence than friends, but also geography doesn't play a role. The striking impact of friends seems to be independent of whether or not the friends live in the same region.

"When we looked at the effect of distance, we found that your friend who's 500 miles away has just as much impact on your obesity as [one] next door," said Fowler, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego and an expert in social networks.

In part because the study also identifies a larger effect among people of the same sex, the researchers believe that people affect not only each other's behaviors but also, more subtly, norms.

"What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size. People come to think that it is okay to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads," said Christakis.

Disparate Measures

Disparate Measures presents "six of the coolest scales" devised. Here are three of my favorites:

LAB BIOSAFETY LEVELS

What it measures: Biolab protocols
How it works: Each of the four levels spells out procedures based on the infectiousness of the germs present. BSL-1 covers high school lab rules like hand-washing and no eating. BSL-4, reserved for nasty airborne agents like Ebola, means air locks and X Files-grade hazard suits.

MOHS HARDNESS SCALE

What it measures: Strength of a mineral
How it works: Developed in 1812, Friedrich Mohs' method rates hardness by staging catfights between minerals, from talc (1) to diamond (10). A rock ranks higher than substances it can scratch and lower than ones that can scratch it. As for real catfights, a finger-nail has a hardness of about 2.5.

TORINO IMPACT HAZARD SCALE

What it measures: Asteroid impact risk
How it works: Named after the Italian city where eggheads ratified it in 1999, a Torino score gauges the odds that a near-Earth object will hit us and the damage it would cause. A space rock that rates a 10 - paging Michael Bay - comes around only once every 100 millennia or so.

Fetish

A recent Wired Fetish column spoke to me:

After the apocalypse, you won't have the luxury of hitting REI for propane to cook that fillet of zombie. You'll have to make do with what's available. There's only one stove that efficiently burns any liquid fuel, from butane to biodiesel, without requiring extra parts: the Brunton Vapor. Twist the top of the burner cap (with the flame off) to tweak its variable air intake; this alters the oxygen-to-fuel ratio to ensure a hot blue flame. Oh, it's also useful for pre-Armageddon camping.
Vapor $149, www.brunton.com

I was mildly upset to find that Amazon did not carry the Vapor, at least not yet, and I was shocked that they didn't carry the Gerber Flik either, since they carry so many other Gerber knives and multi-tools. (It turns out the Flik isn't available until Fall 2007.)

While researching Gerber though, I found their ad archive, and I must heartily recommend it for some deep, manly laughs.

Pop-Up Cities

Rapidly growing China is looking to build Pop-Up Cities, "bright green metropolises" that don't make the mistakes of existing cities:

These new megacities could evolve into sprawling, polluting megaslums. Or they could define a new species of world city. Unlike New York or London, they are blank slates — less affluent, perhaps, but also free from legacy designs and technologies tailored to the world of the 19th and 20th centuries. That is a huge advantage. It took Boston 20 years and more than $14 billion just to reroute a freeway underground. New York can hardly install a second network of water pipes. Most of Los Angeles is too spread out for fast public transit or combined heat and power plants. And because these cities are so isolated from agricultural land, most of the food that locals eat gets shipped hundreds of miles. "Shanghai today is making 90 percent of the mistakes that American cities made," Burdett argues — spreading out, building up single-family homes, replacing naturally mixed-use neighborhoods with isolated zones for living, shopping, and working, and connecting it all with car travel. But fixing these problems is still possible.

Dongtan, outside of Shanghai, is meant to be such a green city:

Their first decision was big. Dongtan needed more people. Way more. Shanghai's planning bureau figured 50,000 people should live on the site — they assumed a green island should not be crowded — and the other international architects had agreed, drafting Dongtan as an American-style suburb with low-rise condos scattered across the plot and lots of lawns and parks in between. "It's all very nice to have little houses in a green field," Gutierrez says. But that would be an environmental disaster. If neighborhoods are spread out, then people need cars to get around. If population is low, then public transportation is a money loser.

But how many more people? Double? Triple? The team found research on energy consumption in cities around the world, plotted on a curve according to population density. Up to about 50 residents per acre, roughly equivalent to Stockholm or Copenhagen, per capita energy use falls fast. People walk and bike more, public transit makes economic sense, and there are ways to make heating and cooling more efficient. But then the curve flattens out. Pack in 120 people per acre, like Singapore, or 300 people, like Hong Kong, and the energy savings are negligible. Dongtan, the team decided, should try to hit that sweet spot around Stockholm.

Next, they had to figure out how high to build. A density rate of 50 people per acre could mean a lot of low buildings, or a handful of skyscrapers, or something in between. Here, the land made the decision for them. Dongtan's soil is squishy. Any building taller than about eight stories would need expensive work at the foundation to keep it upright. To give the place some variety and open up paths for summer wind and natural light, they settled on a range of four to eight stories across the city. Then, using CAD software, they started dropping blocks of buildings on the site and counting heads.

The results were startling. They could bump up Dongtan's population 10 times, to 500,000, and still build on a smaller share of the site than any of the other planners had suggested, leaving 65 percent of the land open for farms, parks, and wildlife habitat. A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.

That was the easy part. From there they needed to design ways to make efficient use of resources:

A power scheme started to take shape. Dongtan's plant would burn plant matter to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity. What to burn, though? They could have planted miscanthus, a tall, feathery grass. It sprouts fast and burns clean. But if Arup planted miscanthus fields, it would sacrifice lots of land to a single purpose. Then it struck them: rice husks. China already grows mountains of rice, and farmers just trash the husks. Dongtan could take a useless byproduct and use it to light the city.

Instead of building the plant far away and out of sight, Arup would put it up near the city center, capture waste heat, and pipe it throughout the town. With good insulation and smart design, the plant could heat and cool every building in Dongtan. "We can get something like 80 percent efficiency in our fuel conversion," says Chris Twinn, the Dongtan team's energy chief. "The Prius is probably only 20 percent efficient. The rest is wasted. Why are we satisfied with that?"

I'm not sure how burning rice husks for energy will work out, but piping heat makes good sense in a dense, urban environment — as long as you maintain the pipes.

Some of the additional ideas seem perfectly reasonable; some do not:

Arup investigated hollowing out the hills at the edge of the city and installing underground "plant factories" — stacked trays of organic crops, growing under solar-powered LEDs, that seem to yield as much as six times more produce per acre than conventional farming. Arup would run twin water networks throughout the city: one that supplies drinking water to kitchens and another that supplies treated waste water for toilet flushing and farm irrigation. Trucks delivering goods from across China would park at consolidation warehouses on the edge of the city, then load up shared, zero- emission delivery trucks to reduce traffic and save gas. Waste would be either recycled or gasified for energy, and the captured heat would be converted into more power; no more than 10 percent of the city's trash would be permitted to end up as landfill. To invite in cooling summer breezes, block winter winds, and reduce demand for heat and air-conditioning, they would position trees strategically and persuade the client to twist the city grid slightly off a traditional north-south axis (a feng shui idea that has become an almost inviolable rule of Chinese city planning).

I'd love to see an analysis of the costs and benefits of some of these ideas.

The Plague Fighters

The Plague Fighters looks at stopping the next pandemic before it begins:

Sometime around the 1930s, epidemiologists theorize, a hunter much like Sampson walked into a forest a few hundred miles southeast of Okoroba, killed a chimpanzee carrying a then-unknown virus, and became an unwitting driver of human fate. Perhaps blood — infected with simian immuno deficiency virus — dripped down his back into an open wound as he hauled the catch home. Or perhaps he cut his hand while butchering the chimp. But somehow, his own blood came into contact with another primate's blood, and the pathogen changed into a form well built to spread from one human to the next. The hunter then passed the virus, now known as human immuno deficiency virus-1 group M, or HIV, to a fellow villager, and it began its slow leach into the surrounding human population.
[...]
Launched in 1999, Wolfe's Cameroon project aims to discover viruses that, like HIV, originate in wild animals and then cross over to infect humans. Known as zoonoses, such pathogens constitute an estimated three- quarters of all emerging human diseases. The list of animal-to-human invaders includes malaria, smallpox, West Nile, Ebola, SARS, and — the threat of the moment — avian influenza. Despite these killers and the near- certainty that new devastating zoonoses will emerge, little is understood about either the range of potential pathogens in the animal kingdom or the way they enter and spread among humans.
[...]
The early results have been promising. The Cameroon project recently discovered at least three unexpected or unknown viruses — all in the same family of RNA retroviruses as HIV — by collecting and analyzing the blood of bushmeat hunters like Sampson. The findings cemented Wolfe's reputation in the world of viral discovery and were dramatic in their own right. But to him, what they really represent is a proof of concept.

Now, using $2.5 million he received in 2004 from a National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award as seed money, he's building a network of virus-discovery projects, using Cameroon as the prototype. By monitoring hunters and wild-game markets in a dozen hard-to-reach potential sites in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Laos, Madagascar, Para guay, and China, he plans to build a taxonomy of what's called "viral chatter": the regular transmission of viruses from wild animals to humans, often without any further spread among humans or consequences for the infected. It's the epidemiological equivalent of information blips on a CIA analyst's screen. "In the intelligence community, you have people monitoring intelligence and looking for keywords," Wolfe says. "Every time a keyword comes up, it's not going to signal a terrorist threat. But by studying the patterns, you can begin to understand what you might be looking for. I study some agents that are very unlikely to be pandemic. But we are asking, where did they die out? What are their features?"

Voracious jumbo squid invade California

The Sci-Fi Channel movie practically writes itself. Voracious jumbo squid invade California:

Jumbo squid that can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh more than 110 pounds are invading central California waters and preying on local anchovy, hake and other commercial fish populations, according to a study published Tuesday.

An aggressive predator, the Humboldt squid — or Dosidicus gigas — can change its eating habits to consume the food supply favored by tuna and sharks, its closest competitors, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

"Having a new, voracious predator set up shop here in California may be yet another thing for fishermen to compete with," said the study's co-author, Stanford University researcher Louis Zeidberg. "That said, if a squid saw a human they would jet the other way."

The jumbo squid used to be found only in the Pacific Ocean's warmest stretches near the equator. In the last 16 years, it has expanded its territory throughout California waters, and squid have even been found in the icy waters off Alaska, Zeidberg said.

Zeidberg's co-author, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute senior scientist Bruce Robison, first spotted the jumbo squid here in 1997, when one swam past the lens of a camera mounted on a submersible thousands of feet below the ocean's surface.

More were observed through 1999, but the squid weren't seen again locally until the fall of 2002. Since their return, scientists have noted a corresponding drop in the population of Pacific hake, a whitefish the squid feeds on that is often used in fish sticks, Zeidberg said.

"As they've come and gone, the hake have dropped off," Zeidberg said. "We're just beginning to figure out how the pieces fit together, but this is most likely going to shake things up."

Before the 1970s, the giant squid were typically found in the Eastern Pacific, and in coastal waters spanning from Peru to Costa Rica. But as the populations of its natural predators — like large tuna, sharks and swordfish — declined because of fishing, the squids moved northward and started eating different species that thrive in colder waters.

He Only Saved a Billion People

Of Norman Borlaug — Norman who? — Jonathan Alter says, He Only Saved a Billion People:

Few news organizations covered last week's Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for Borlaug, which was presided over by President Bush and the leadership of the House and Senate. An elderly agronomist doesn't make news, even when he is widely credited with saving the lives of 1 billion human beings worldwide, more than one in seven people on the planet.

Borlaug's success in feeding the world testifies to the difference a single person can make. But the obscurity of a man of such surpassing accomplishment is a reminder of our culture's surpassing superficiality.
[...]
Born poor in Iowa and turned down at first by the University of Minnesota, Borlaug brought his fingertips and mind together in rural Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s to develop a hybrid called "dwarf wheat" that tripled grain production there. Then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he brought agronomists from around the world to northwest Mexico to learn his planting and soil conservation techniques. "They [academic and U.S. government critics] said I was nutty to think that it would work in different soil," Borlaug told me last week. The resulting "nuttiness" led to what was arguably the greatest humanitarian accomplishment of the 20th century, the so-called Green Revolution. By 1965 he was dodging artillery shells in the Indo-Pakistan War but still managed to increase Indian output sevenfold.

The experts who said peasants would never change their centuries-old ways were wrong. In the mid-1970s, Nobel in hand, Borlaug brought his approach to Communist China, where he arguably had his greatest success. In only a few years, his ideas — which go far beyond seed varieties — had spread around the world and disproved Malthusian doomsday scenarios like Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best seller "The Population Bomb."

Renewable energy at what cost?

Renewable energy at what cost? looks at Jesse Ausubel's claim that renewable does not mean green, which is based on a peculiar analysis:

Ausubel has analyzed the amount of energy that each so-called renewable source can produce in terms of Watts of power output per square meter of land disturbed. He also compares the destruction of nature by renewables with the demand for space of nuclear power. "Nuclear energy is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."

Tesla: A Carmaker With Silicon Valley Spark

BusinessWeek calls Tesla "a carmaker with Silicon Valley spark" and "the un-car company":

So what makes Tesla think it has a chance? The very fact that it has been built by outsiders. After all, Detroit is hardly a model of corporate efficiency. Tesla bills itself as Silicon Valley's version of a car company. Importing executives and management ideas from the technology industry, it is handing out stock options to every employee, doing away with independent dealers, and outsourcing the manufacturing of its cars. Almost all of Tesla's $105 million in startup capital has come from wealthy California idealists and venture investors. "Silicon Valley is the best in the world at everything it does," boasts Elon Musk, the PayPal founder who sold the company for $1.5 billion before becoming Tesla's chairman and chief source of funds. "The corporate culture [in the Valley] is extremely efficient and very competitive."

Startup energy radiates from Tesla's converted warehouse space on a side street in middle-class San Carlos. All of the top executives — except Musk, who isn't involved with day-to-day operations — work together in small, cheaply decorated offices. If big decisions need to be made, no one needs to schedule big meetings, write up proposals, or go through any chains of command.

Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard, a former computer engineer, says he is trying to build a car manufacturer that is also a technology company. By outsourcing mundane parts like brakes and seat belts, Tesla engineers are able to focus on a few core technologies: the battery, the computer software, and the proprietary motor that make the car go.

Is Merck's Medicine Working?

Is Merck's Medicine Working?

In the past, Merck's science types might have spent years testing Januvia in combination with every other diabetes therapy patients might be taking so that the FDA would allow the drug to be pitched to the broadest possible audience. With advice from marketing colleagues, who were in tune with what diabetes patients and doctors were demanding, the diabetes group devised a faster path to victory: They decided that initially they would only test Januvia with the two most widely used diabetes drugs and as a solo therapy. "We didn't do studies that were nice to have," says Jay Galeota, general manager of the diabetes and obesity franchise. "We did studies that really represented where the product was most likely to be used."

Gathering input from customers such as doctors earlier in the process paid off in other ways. As Januvia moved along, reports emerged that Novartis' Galvus was causing some monkeys in the trials to suffer skin lesions. Conversations with doctors convinced Merck's diabetes team to design an extra monkey study to prove to the FDA that its drug was safe. The result: The agency approved Januvia without requiring a warning about the side effect. What's more, because there were manufacturing and marketing folks on the diabetes team, constantly trading information about the approval time line and customer demand, Merck had Januvia on pharmacy shelves four days after the FDA gave it the green light. At the old Merck, it would have taken as long as a month to launch the product. Morgan's Rubin reckons Januvia and a related product will bring in $762 million in sales this year. Meanwhile, Galvus is still awaiting FDA approval.

Merch has also formalized its own internal brand of creative destruction:

If fraternizing with insurance executives sounds bizarre, consider this: Merck is rewarding scientists for failure. One of the hardest decisions any scientist has to make is when to abandon an experimental drug that's not working. An inability to admit failure leads to inefficiencies. A scientist may spend months and tens of thousands of dollars studying a compound, hoping for a result he or she knows likely won't come, rather than pitching in on a project with a better chance of turning into a viable drug. So Kim is promising stock options to scientists who bail out on losing projects. It's not the loss per se that's being rewarded but the decision to accept failure and move on. "You can't change the truth. You can only delay how long it takes to find it out," Kim says. "If you're a good scientist, you want to spend your time and the company's money on something that's going to lead to success."

Management consultants say rewarding misses as well as hits is the right idea, and one that the entire industry will need to adopt. "The earlier you determine when something should be killed, the better," says Charlie Beaver, vice-president at consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. Still, he warns, changing a corporate culture from one that thrives on success to one that also accepts failure "is a very large hurdle to overcome."

Of Pumpkin Remedies And Drug Trials

BusinessWeek speaks Of Pumpkin Remedies And Drug Trials:

The Great Pumpkin may offer salvation to diabetics. Pumpkins are a known source of antioxidants — but that's not all. The giant fruit also contains a molecule that seems to help the pancreas regenerate insulin-producing cells destroyed by diabetes. When scientists at East China Normal University in Shanghai fed diabetic rats pumpkin extract for 30 days, levels of insulin in their blood returned almost to normal, as did the number of insulin-producing cells.

Potterdammerung

I just came across an amusing term, Potterdammerung, for the end of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

For those who don't follow German opera based on Norse mythology, the Götterdämmerung was the Twilight of the Gods — and the last of Wagner's four Ring-saga operas:

The title is a translation into German of the Old Norse phrase Ragnarök, which in Norse mythology refers to a prophesied war of the gods which brings about the end of the world. However, as with the rest of the Ring, Wagner's account of this apocalypse diverges significantly from his Old Norse sources.

The term Götterdämmerung is occasionally used in English, referring to a disastrous conclusion of events.

The Calcium Cartel

Chris Edwards examines The Calcium Cartel:

Consider the illogic of federal dairy policies. They jack up milk prices for millions of families at the same time that other programs, such as food stamps, aim to reduce food costs. And although federal law generally prohibits ca