Isegoria

Richard Wrangham, a British anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard University, argues that we are the cooking ape — and this has some not-so-obvious consequences:

Early human marriages, he suggests, were “primitive protection rackets”, in which men protected women from hungry marauders (attracted by the smoke of the fire) in return for a hot meal at the end of the day and, almost as an afterthought, babies. This is a radical notion — that domestic unions are mainly about food, not sex — but it’s not ridiculous. Anthropologists have noted that many primitive societies will tolerate a married woman sleeping around, but will ostracise her if she feeds any man other than her husband. In the ancestral struggle for survival, it seems, sustenance was more important than sex.

Human beings are unique in that when we cook, we do it to feed others as well as ourselves (other apes, even those who pair-bond, forage for themselves and don’t share). And in almost all societies it’s women who tend the stove. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered food will not be stolen, while having a wife means a man will have an evening meal.

There’s nothing natural about a raw-food diet:

Survivors of disasters who get by on raw food invariably show signs of starvation when rescued.

The Giessen Raw Food study, conducted by German nutritionists in 2005, studied more than 500 people who ate a diet that was 70 to 100 per cent raw (vegetables, fruits, cold-pressed oil and honey, plus dried fruits, meat and fish). All the raw-foodists lost weight, sometimes dramatically; the scientists concluded that “a raw diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply”. And this in the well-fed West, where the supermarket rather than the forest floor is our larder. Our ancestors would surely have suffered more parlously.

But most damning of all was the finding that many women on the study stopped menstruating. Others saw their cycles become irregular. Conception and pregnancy — that most natural of biological processes — would be a rare feat on an uncooked diet. Wrangham’s message is clear: “I’m impressed by its potential to be a healthy diet but we must be aware of its limitations. I’m amazed at the willpower of some raw foodists but some are deluded; they are wrong about it being natural. If you are cast away on a desert island and you say, ‘I won’t bother cooking’, you will die.”

(I’ve mentioned Wrangham’s work twice before, in The Small-Mouthed Ape and What’s cooking?)

If the revolver has enough chambers, you may have no idea you’re playing Russian Roulette. Derek Lowe takes a look at the terrible chemical accident at T2 Laboratories in Florida back in 2007:

Debris ended up over a mile from the site, and killed four employees, including one of the co-owners, who was fifty feet away from the reactor at the time.

The company was preparing a gasoline additive, methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MCMT). To readers outside the field, that sounds like an awful mouthful of a name, but organic chemists will look it over and say “OK, halfway like ferrocene, manganese instead of iron, methyl group on the ring, three CO groups on the other side of the metal. Hmmm. What went wrong with that one?”

Well, the same sort of thing that can go wrong with a lot of reactions, large and small: a thermal runaway. That’s always a possibility when a reaction gives off waste heat while it’s running (that’s called an exothermic reaction, and some are, some aren’t — it depends on the energy balance of the bonds being broken versus the bonds being made, among other things). Heating chemical reactions almost invariably speeds them up, naturally, so the heat given off by such a reaction can make it go faster, which makes it give off even more heat, which makes it… well, now you know why it’s called a runaway reaction.

On the small scales where I’ve spent my career, the usual consequence of this is that whatever’s fitted on the top of the flask blows off, and the contents geyser out all over the fume hood. One generally doesn’t tightly seal the top of a reaction flask, not unless one knows exactly what one is doing, so there’s usually a stopper or rubber seal that gives way. I’ve walked back into my lab, looked at the floor in front of my hood, and wondered “Who on earth left a glass condenser on my floor?”, until I walked over to have a look and realized where it came from (and, um, who left it there).

But on a large scale, well, things are always different. For one thing, it’s just plain larger. There’s more energy involved. And heat transfer is a major concern on scale, because while it’s easy to cool off a 25-milliliter flask, where none of the contents are more than a centimeter from the outside wall, cooling off a 2500-gallon reactor is something else again. Needless to say, you’re not going to be able to pick it up quickly and stick it into 25,000 gallons of ice water, and even that wouldn’t do nearly as much good as you might think. The center of that reactor is a long way from the walls, and cooling those walls down can only do so much — stirring is a major concern on these scales, too.

What’s worth emphasizing is that this explosion occurred on the one hundred seventy-fifth time that T2 had run this reaction. No doubt they thought they had everything well under control — have any of you ever run the same reaction a hundred and seventy-five times in a row? But what they didn’t know was crucial: the operators had only undergraduate degrees, and the CSB report concludes that the didn’t realize that they were walking on the edge of disaster the whole time. As it turns out, the MCMT chemistry was mildly exothermic. But if the reaction got above the normal production temperature (177°C), a very exothermic side reaction kicked in. Have I mentioned that the chemistry involved was a stirred molten-sodium reaction? Yep, methylcyclopentadiene dimer, cracking to monomer, metallating with the sodium and releasing hydrogen gas. This was run in diglyme, and if the temperature went up above 199°C, the sodium would start reacting energetically with the solvent.

Experienced chemists and engineers will recognize that setup for what it is: a black-bordered invitation to disaster. Apparently the T2 chemists had experienced a few close calls in the past, without fully realizing the extent of the problem. On the morning of the explosion, the water cooling line experienced some sort of blockage, and there was (fatally) no backup cooling system in place. Ten minutes later, everything went up. In retrospect, the only thing to do when the cooling went out would have been to run for it and cover as much ground as possible in the ten minutes left, but that’s not a decision that anyone usually makes.

Some bacteria make nanomagnets — called “magnetosomes” — for navigating the oceans, and Tadashi Matsunaga of the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan has discovered the genes for this process:

Magnetosomes are created by oxygen-hating bacteria to allow them to steer by the Earth’s magnetic field, often to deep regions of the ocean where there is less oxygen.

Now that the genes have been identified, they can be transferred to other organisms or altered to produce customised magnetic particles for practical applications.

Already, for example, the particles have been extracted from bacteria and injected into mice to improve imaging of cancers by MRI scanners. They’ve also been used as nanomagnets in tests to detect biological molecules such as the sugar-regulating hormone insulin.
[...]
Bacteria make magnetosomes by filling a fatty vesicle with iron. Next, the iron is oxidised to create magnetite, a form of iron oxide that is strongly magnetic. Finally, the magnetite is made into crystals which are arranged into a line.

A Cobalt-60 contamination incident in Taiwan 21 years ago demonstrated once again that sometimes a little poison is good for you:

The contamination occurred during the recycling of metal scrap when a Co-60 source was mixed with metal scrap, melted and drawn into steel bars in the mill. Unaware of the contamination, the steel bars were ultimately used in construction of more than 180 buildings in 1982-84. Most buildings were partitioned into about 1,700 apartments for dwelling, and some buildings for other purpose. The first contaminated apartment was discovered in 1992. The residents in the apartments totaled 10,000 individuals who had been exposed to chronic radiation for at least 9 years and as long as 21 years.

The annual average dose received by the residents in the first year (1983) was about 50 mSv/y with the maximum dosage as high as 600 mSv/y. The residents’ total doses accumulated in 21 years could be calculated using the half-life of 5.3 years for Co-60 and resulted in the average total dosage of 0.4 Sv (the highest total dosage was 6 Sv). These values are higher than the average doses received by the atomic bomb survivors in a short period of time in Japan and higher than the doses received by the Russian recovery workers in two years after Chernobyl accident.

If the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model constructed based upon data from the atomic explosions in Japan is appropriate for evaluating chronic radiation, such excessive doses received by the contaminated apartment residents could induce at least 35 excess leukemia and 35 solid cancer deaths after 21 years. However, actually no increase cancers were observed. On the contrary, the spontaneous cancer deaths of the residents totaled 243 over 21 years based upon the vital statistics provided by the Taiwanese government. The mortality rate from these cancers dropped to only 3% of the general population as shown in the following graph.

The chronic radiation received by the residents in the contaminated apartments had not only reduced their cancers, but also seemed to reduce the hereditary malfunctions of their children (though the hereditary effects had not been obviously observed in the Japanese bomb survivors). The 46 hypothetical hereditary defected children predicated among the residents based on the LNT model, and the 21 congenital hereditary defects among the apartment children were reduced to only 3, (6.5% of the general population). Therefore, the health effects of chronic radiation observed from the residents revealed that chronic radiation is greatly beneficial to the residents, even with their doses accumulated to high level.

The beneficial health effects of radiation observed in the Taiwan Co-60 contamination incident are so unique, they could also coincidentally explain the theory developed by Dr. T.D. Luckey, and his Complete Dose-Response Curve as shown in the last page of his book, “Radiation Hormesis 1991.” The dose of chronic radiation of about 100 mSv/y is optimum to health with up to 10 Sv/y still being in the hormetic range. Dr. Luckey predicted in his paper at the 1999 American Nuclear Society annual meeting in Boston that if the American population received a supplemental radiation dose through the public health service of about 55 mSv, 49 % of the cancer deaths of the US population (about 200,000 Americans) could be prevented every year. Of course, many people were shocked by his suggestion. However, findings from this study suggest the potential of radioactive vaccines to prevent cancers.

Another Mosquito-borne African virus has become a threat to the West:

Chikungunya infection causes fever, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, rash and joint pain. Symptoms can last a few weeks, though some suffers have reported incapacitating joint pain or arthritis lasting months.

The disease was first discovered in Tanzania in 1952. Its name means “that which bends up” in the Makonde language spoken in northern Mozambique and southeastern Tanzania.

The virus could spread globally now because it can be carried by the Asian tiger mosquito, which is found in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

In the United States, the mosquito species tends to live in southern regions east of the Mississippi but has been found as far afield as western Texas, Minnesota and New Jersey.

Health officials are greatly concerned about the appearance of Chikungunya in the islands of the Indian Ocean — Mauritius, Seychelles and Reunion — which have beach resorts frequented by European tourists.

“It is hyper-endemic in the islands of the Indian Ocean,” Diaz told the meeting.

“Travel by air will import the infected mosquitoes and humans,” he added. “Chikungunya is coming.”