dearScience

I know that as a scientist, I am expected to loathe all imperial measurements–inches, cups, quarts, gallons and Fahrenheit. Whining about the United States’ failure to embrace the metric system? Default behavior for dim bulbs seeking to seem sophisticated.

You know what? I don’t like metric measurements for many daily tasks. Why? Factors!

The metric system is based around base 10 numbers. Why? We have ten fingers, so our counting system is based around base 10. This makes jumping between large differences in magnitude–say between the size of my desk and the size of the State–relatively easy. But, ten is a terrible, ugly, number. With only two factors, two and five, it’s a bitch to subdivide measures.

Why couldn’t we have twelve fingers? Twelve is a beautiful number–breaking down into factors of two, three, four and six. Ahhh! Grab a ruler and try to measure a third of foot. Easy! Try to measure a third of a meter. A total pain in the ass! Nothing like an infinite repeat (33.3333333333333333333333333333333333… cm) to ruin a perfectly pleasant day.

Imperial measures for volume are even more pleasant, residing in the world of base 2. Thirty-two fluid ounces to a quart–factors of two, four, eight and sixteen. I’m practically drooling. Ever try to adjust a recipe using measuring cups in milliliters? Ack!

For the lab where I’m routinely bouncing between microliters, milliliters and plain old liters, metric measures are great. Nifty even. For daily activities like cooking? Not so much so.

(Salim Virji)

Who doesn’t love the platypus? This is a creature bizarre enough to make marsupials feel better about themselves. The platypus, lactates (mammal!) and lays eggs (reptile!), grows fur (mammal!) and venom (reptile!).

This might be the single most interesting creature, from an evolutionary point of view, on the planet. About 315 million years ago, Amniotes–a primitive vertebrate with four legs, pretty much resembling a blurry picture of every animal that comes to mind–split into two groups. The Sauropsids eventually became all reptile-like creatures, including Dinosaurs, snakes, lizards and birds. The Synapsids became, well, us and all other mammals. Almost 170 million years ago, the Platypus split off from the rest of the Synapsids and hung out on a little evolutionary twig of its very own.

This is all a bit like reading the Silmarillion or Numbers, so I’m moving on to the big, exciting, point for evolutionary biologists. 170 million years ago, we and the Platypus shared a common ancestor. If you want to reconstruct how we evolutionarily came to have external testicles, nipples, separate opening for pee and poop–all things we have but the Platypus doesn’t–we could compare how a Platypus is put together, its genome, to our own. Our common ancestor probably lacked all these things. Likewise, the Platypus has been busy since departing our common ancestor, figuring out how do things we can’t–like make poison or see the world using only electricity. How’d that happen?

Well, we now have a draft of the Platypus genome. This’ll be fun.

Right off, the male Platypus has five X and five Y chromosomes. Huh? By comparison, every other male mammal has one X and one Y. One of the more pleasant observations is how similar we are to them. Over 80% of the genes in the Platypus strongly resemble those in humans or mice.

The remaining fifth is where all the fun actions occurs! Like what? The genes for chemical receptors, that make the nose work, are totally different. Genes for making eggs? Different from just about anything. The eggs are tiny and the baby Platypus hatches much earlier than is typical in egg-laying creatures. The baby then licks milk off the belly of the mother–remember, no nipples! If you wanted a snapshot of the evolution of mammals, that don’t lay eggs and nurse their young, this is pretty much it.

Ok, enough of my wonderment. Read the paper, if you can! If you can’t, bitch to your representative about the publication of publicly funded research in private, subscription only journals.

My week is ending poorly.

Rather than go into a lengthy whine about irritatingly arrogant-yet-foolish coworkers, crappily designed and maintained websites, the evil of both the SAX and DOM XML parsers in Python and “what, you can only do one miracle at a time” management, I’d rather present you with an appropriately glum bit of my knowledge.

Thus, I present to you Science’s top five most awesomest nuclear weapons of all time!

5. Little Boy

Little Boy was the first nuclear weapon used on a human population during the decimation of Hiroshima. I happen to love the evil simplicity of the beast.

Let’s take a moment to talk about what makes an atomic bomb go boom. Every element secretly, deeply, desperately wishes to be iron–atomic number 26. The bigger or smaller you–Mr. element–are, the more you yearn for iron-ness. As the fatter elements or skinnier elements get closer to the ideal of iron, they breathe some relief–in the form of a massive release of energy. Boom!

Take Uranium, for example. At a mighty atomic mass of 92, it’s so irritable! This is a big boy, coming in isotopes of 238, 235 or 234; the rare 235 variety is particularly ready to cause some mayhem. When it spontaneously splits into two smaller atoms–a little bit closer to iron. YES!–it flings off high energy neutron bullets that have a tendency to split other obese atoms. Get enough U235 in a small space, and a chain reaction starts, resulting in a whole mess of atoms splitting in a short period of time. Comine all the energy and you have a big boom.

So, you’re tasked with building a bomb around these ideas. Some general comes to your desk and tells you “here are kilograms of Uranium enriched for 235. Make a bomb that will definitely work. We don’t want to look bad in front of the Japanese. Boom, or it’s your ass!”

You think to yourself… hmm… if I put this much U235 together it’ll explode. Let’s split this amount into two pieces, and put them on opposite ends of a loooong track. One piece will be bolted in place, the other on a little track, with wheels and shit. Put a little chemical explosive charge at the end of the piece-on-wheels, careening it towards the fixed bigger piece. When they meet, BOOOOM! Excellent. While the bomb might blow itself to pieces before all the U235 can fission, spreading incredibly radioactive half-split products all over the place, who gives a shit! They’re just Japanese! And it’s my ass if there isn’t a boom.

Ah! Little boy was invented.

Very few actual atomic bombs have this design. What if the little piece falls of the track?! No boom! No dead Japanese! It’s your ass. The Fat Man-style plutonium implosion device is quite a bit more popular. Still, not everyone has gotten the memo. The North Korean nuke, so far as we can guess, was most likely a Little Boy-like device. Hence more a fizzle than a boom. I cannot imagine what the poor North Korean bomb engineer’s week-after was like. To quote Ghostbusters, “Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!”

4. Ivy Mike

Ok, the war is won! Go team! The bombs worked! We’re done, right? Not if we still have mortgages to pay. Well, what’s next? Won’t anyone think of all the miserable, pathetic little atoms and their desire to be big and mighty like Iron? Enter the SUPERbomb, otherwise known as the thermonuclear bomb, or hydrogen bomb.

The Teller-Ulam design for a fusion bomb is as follows:

1. We can get these fission-based atomic bombs to work really well now. And we know these bombs can make a ton of high energy neutron bullets in a short order. So, let’s put an implosion-style plutonium or Uranium-235 atomic bomb in the middle to make us some neutrons that…

2. …will hit a bunch of heavy hydrogen (a proton with a neutron or two along for the ride). The hydrogen will then fuse, heading up the periodic table from atomic number 1 to atomic number 2, and become helium. This releases even MORE and even angrier neutrons that…

3. … can be rammed into a bunch of far more placid Uranium-238–the waste product from making all that U-235 for step 1, recycling atomic-style. While the U-238 cannot be made into a chain reaction all by itself, all these really crabby fusion neutrons can do the job.

The result? A HUUUUUUGE explosion. Way bigger, thousands of times bigger, than that from an old-style step 1 only fission bomb. Neat.

Well, wait, isn’t this evil or something? Ok, here’s the plan! We’ll build it, but in such a manner that it’ll be impossible to use in wartime conditions–requiring a massive apparatus, coolant, the whole mess. That way, no one will be stupid enough to actually turn these things into weapons.

Yeah, that worked well, as evidenced by #3 on the list the…

3. Tzar Bomba

So, with the three-stage bomb described above, there really isn’t any serious limit to the size of explosion one can make.

The Soviets, cranky from being second on so many, were ready to be number one. Let’s make the biggest man made explosion ever. Originally it was planned to be a 100 megaton explosion. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 11-kilotons.

The massive damage and radiation release would’ve caused too much misery, even for the soviets. They scaled it back to a mere 50 megatons. It still was (and remains) the largest explosion made by man.

2. Neutron Bomb

You’ve heard this joke: “The only problem with Paris is all the French.” Or “the only problem with Jerusalem is all the Arabs/Jews.” In fact, this next bomb is the answer to the general punchline, “the only problem with [placename] is the [some inconvenient ethnic group].”

Now you’re a really cynical bomb designer. You can’t go bigger. Why not go eviler? Take the same 3-stage design described above, but this time let’s USE those neutrons to do something other than fission Uranium. They also work at killing living things! Like inconvenient ethnic groups in places we liked to have as our own. By replacing the Uranium with Aluminum, we can make a bomb with less explosive force, but much more killing power! Go team!

(A bonus, favorite, nuclear weapon idea–the Doomsday device! Instead of replacing the Uranium-238 with Aluminum, replace it with Cobalt. The neutrons convert the Cobalt into all sorts of incredibly radioactive atoms that’ll stick around for thousands, and in special cases millions, of years. Killing everything. Everywhere. So far as I know, no one has actually built this kind of bomb, so it must stay off the list.)

1. The Davey Crockett M-388 Nuclear Device.

Remember the plan in #4, to make such a bomb so cumbersome that it’ll never be deployed as a weapon? Yeah, right.

About 54 kilograms and about the diameter of a basketball, it was meant to be used by ground troops as a short range bomb. This teeny nuke, basically able to be held in your hands, could pack the explosive force of 500 tons of TNT. Like, some lieutenant comes to you and says “if you see the Ruskies coming over that hill, grab this Bazooka with a nuclear warhead at the tip of it and fire towards them. You might live for a bit afterwards.” Hence the name “Davey Crockett” to inspire the troops to a proper suicidal zeal.

Awesome!

I think I need a hug now.

Ready? Prepared to have your mind blown?

(cartoon via xkcd)

Ideas are tested by experiment. That’s all there is to science. This is the only bar an idea must be taller than to take the ride of science as a legitimate hypothesis.

An untestable, unknowable, incomprehensible supernatural force is required for the existence of living things–the central idea behind Intelligent Design, creation science, creationism, or whatever you want to call it–is inherently unscientific. If the idea is untestable, it cannot be scientific and has no place in a science curriculum–save it for the philosophy courses, or evenings after eating too many enhanced baked goods.

This latest assault by the anti-science, pro-creationist crowd–to whine that their ideas aren’t given a fair shake in the scientific community due to some overarching conspiracy–is a three year old having a temper-tantrum upon being told he is too short to go on a roller coaster. This idea of a supernatural being, at its very core, refuses to be tested. It might be true, it might be false, but it’s certainly never going to be scientific.

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole and attempted even a gentle analysis of Intelligent Design’s ideas. “What must this designer be able to do?” “By what mechanisms could the designer do these things?” “Can we disrupt or enhance these mechanisms by any human technique?” “How was the designer designed?”

Good luck trying to get any sort of coherent answer, or even speculation, along these lines in the ID movement. Mostly it’s a bunch of whimpering about this or that in evolution theory—primarily moldy old discredited critiques from the 19th Century, buffed up for the 21st. The ID crowd wraps a handful of difficult to explain observations in living things in the wrapper of “some magical being, beyond human conception or understanding, must exist because you cannot fully explain this random observation with current technology and theory.” Here’s another shocker for you: such a critique isn’t particularly scientific.

Think of how human scientific knowledge expands: Via new technologies allowing new ways of observing, new observations from existing or new technology or new ways of interpreting existing observations. The observations underlying evolutionary theory are essentially uncontested. Most of the central observations require no technology beyond your eyes, ears and some careful recordkeeping; modern molecular biology yields new observations that are perfectly in sync with those made by Darwin and others nearly two centuries ago or earlier. Darwin’s jump was borne less of new observations, but rather new ways of thinking about the existing available information.

These are the trickiest ideas to test, and thus make scientific. One manner is to say, “if this interpretation is correct, it would predict the following…” For example, if the interpretative theory of evolution is correct, we would predict the rise of drug resistance bacteria, and the spread of drug resistance genes, shortly after the introduction of antibiotics. The predictions one can make, if assuming evolution is true, fit observed reality far better than if one instead assumes that a supernatural being is behind all life–because we can understand more of the steps completely when we aren’t saying “something magic happens.”

Accepting, scientifically, an interpretive hypothesis does not require perfect evidence, for all outstanding questions to be settled. Rather, all that one should require is that the interpretation best fits the observations of reality that we can presently make, that the predictions of the interpretive idea closely what we observe when we look. Science is the art of taking many imperfect observations together to craft a reasonable interpretation–not demanding perfect information without holes. This is testing by experiment, not demanding immaculate evidence but working with the best you can do. Requiring, or claiming, inerrant proof is the realm of religious belief, not scientific.

Who cares, you might be saying at this point. Why not let the ID crowd have their say? Because of how profoundly unscientific it is to demand perfect information before making a decision. Teaching students irrefutable evidence is required before accepting an unpleasant idea, is one of the worst lessons one can teach in a science classroom. The entire idea of what is a good experiment, what are acceptable results from an experiment, is deeply distorted by ID-like thinking.

An example:

Additives used to soften plastics, called phthalates, are currently banned in Europe but still legal in the United States. Both European and American regulators have access to the same scientific observations–that many phthalates disrupt endocrine function, particularly male sex hormones, and can readily enter the body from plastics doped with the chemcials–yet come to very different interpretations. The Europeans considered all the (imperfect and incomplete) evidence and decided the preponderance was in favor of banning the additives. The Americans continue to demand better, more complete (perhaps even impossibly perfect) evidence before acting. The net result: American children and patients (via IV tubes) continue to receive large doses phthalates, despite the majority of evidence pointing to some danger to health.

It’s crummy, unscientific, decision-making–and essentially the same illogic as Intelligent Design’s critique of evolution.

In the past few months, I bet you’ve seen at least one ad like these. When I first saw these ads, I was impressed.

Most direct-to-consumer drug advertising is loathsome, filled with moronic non sequiturs–what does kayaking have to do with a nucleoside analog used to treat herpes–or simply build up anxiety about a problem, offering no explanation as to how the drug helps.

These ads, for a combination pill meant to treat high cholesterol, are actually quite clever in explaining how the drug should work–a combination of blocking cholesterol production by your liver (a gift of your parent’s genes) and blocking the absorption of cholesterol you eat.

Memorable, clear, informative; too bad the drug doesn’t work.

The results of our study showed that the addition of ezetimibe to the highest recommended dose of simvastatin did not reduce the intima–media thickness of the carotid-artery wall in this cohort of patients with familial hypercholesterolemia, despite significant incremental reductions in levels of both LDL cholesterol and C-reactive protein. The primary outcome, the change in the mean intima–media thickness, did not differ significantly between the two study groups, nor did the secondary outcome measures.

In plain English, this combo pill didn’t stop the arteries from getting clogged with cholesterol any better than the older drug alone. In fact, the older statin drugs–available as much cheaper generics now–do a better job on what you, as a patient, would care about.

The vast majority of people exposed to these ads probably don’t know this, and will never know that the drugs didn’t work, that you’re better off with a vastly cheaper drug, that the company that makes Vytorin sat on the negative results in this study while racking up billions of dollars in sales. My suspicion is that many people will continue to ‘ask your doctor about Vytorin,’ as the ad suggests. And this is why even exemplary direct-to-consumer drug advertising is so damn irritating.

Have you heard Obama’s Cooper Union Speech? You should.

The key except:

A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s why we’ve put in place rules of the road: to make competition fair and open, and honest…
I think that all of us here today would acknowledge that we’ve lost some of that sense of shared prosperity. Now, this loss has not happened by accident. It’s because of decisions made in board rooms, on trading floors and in Washington. Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we’ve failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practice. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both. Nor is this trend new. The concentrations of economic power and the failures of our political system to protect the American economy and American consumers from its worst excesses have been a staple of our past: most famously in the 1920s, when such excesses ultimately plunged the country into the Great Depression. That is when government stepped in to create a series of regulatory structures, from FDIC to the Glass-Steagall Act, to serve as a corrective, to protect the American people and American business.

Ironically, it was in reaction to the high taxes and some of the outmoded structures of the New Deal that both individuals and institutions in the ’80s and ’90s began pushing for changes to this regulatory structure. But instead of sensible reform that rewarded success and freed the creative forces of the market, too often we’ve excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system…

Partial deregulation of the electricity sector enabled (inaudible). Companies like Enron and WorldCom took advantage of the new regulatory environment to push the envelope, pump up earnings, disguise losses and otherwise engage in accounting fraud to make their profits look better, a practice that led investors to question the balance sheets of all companies and severely damaged public trust in capital markets. This was not the invisible hand at work. Instead, it was the hand of industry lobbyists tilting the playing field in Washington as well as an accounting industry that had developed powerful conflicts of interest and a financial sector that had fueled over-investment. A decade later we have deregulated the financial sector and we face another crisis. A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change, because the nature of business had changed. But by the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework. And since then we’ve overseen 21st century innovation, including the aggressive introduction of new and complex financial instruments like hedge funds and non-bank financial companies, with outdated 20th century regulatory tools. New conflicts of interest recalled the worst excesses of the past, like the outrageous news that we learned just yesterday of KPMG allowing a lender to report profits instead of losses so that both parties could make a quick buck. Not surprisingly, the regulatory environment failed to keep pace. When subprime mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn, a patchwork of regulators were unable or unwilling to protect the American people.

For someone like me, a total wonk, this is an enrapturing; it’s just so damn Keynesian. It would be hard to write a clearer, more succinct or compelling dissection of our present financial fiasco.

Any person willing to make the difficult historical connections, to appropriately share the blame for the present crisis’s origins, to see and relate the ugliest truths about our present economic crisis–in midst of a vicious campaign no less–deserves some respect.

The deadly, fraudulent, heparin sold by a Chinese manufacturer to Baxter shares much with the deadly, fraudulent, wheat gluten and gluttonous, fraudulent, financial crisis.

These frauds are not accidents, slips of care, but rather deliberate attempts to game tests of quality, to turn garbage into gold.

The toxic wheat gluten was doped with melamine, in a brilliant gambit to fix the protein content tests and make filler look like high quality protein. Overcompensated financial wizards, thanks to deregulation, managed to sell aggregates of dubious mortgages as high quality investments, cleverly bypassing all of the financial tests.

In the case of the fake Heparin, the actual drug was replaced with cheaper Chondroitin sulfate, aggressively modified chemically to fake quality control tests. At least nineteen people have died from this clever gambit, thousands made ill.

Such trickery requires canny chemistry or shrewed accounting–deft minds deriving novel solutions to their problems, rather than the actual, deeper and more pervasive problems leading to shortages of protein, of drug or worthy investments.

In a world that can sustain, at most, about two billion people in the voracious Western lifestyle–in a world of nearly eight billion, all of whom promised the Western middle class lifestyle–a thin veneer of success, of false protein and medicine, of false wealth and material growth, must obligately coat a massive, deep and dark well of exaggerations, lies and despairing intelligence.

Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist at the IMF and now a professor at Harvard University, said the greenback may drop another 12 percent on a trade-weighted basis.“This recession will be long and deep and when we get out of it, we’ll have inflation,”

How did this happen? This stick-figure cartoons sorts it out for you. The short of it? “Really smart guys” at financial services companies figured out a legal (but ethically dubious) means of recycling crappy mortgages into something resembling actual investments. How did they get it past the audits, the financial controls, the rating agencies? Well, it’s easier when they’re all the same few companies, each profiting from the bigger lie.

Why is this legal? It didn’t use to be. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, regulations were written into law specifically to prevent this sort of Ponzi scheme from occurring again, like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. It worked, until the laws were written out of existence in the late 90’s. In a great triumph of conservative economic theory, the laws, protections and regulations were evaporated, leading to an orgy of mergers resulting in the flailing financial service monsters of today.

Not every economist was happy about this turn of events.

Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other financiers periodically played the role of arsonists, setting the entire economy ablaze. Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, he believed, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. The only way to break this pattern was for the government to step in and regulate the moneymen.
…
You might think that the best solution is to prevent manias from developing at all, but that requires vigilance. Since the nineteen-eighties, Congress and the executive branch have been conspiring to weaken federal supervision of Wall Street. Perhaps the most fateful step came when, during the Clinton Administration, Greenspan and Robert Rubin, then the Treasury Secretary, championed the abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was meant to prevent a recurrence of the rampant speculation that preceded the Depression.

As pleasant as it would be to lay the current financial crisis entirely at Bush’s feet, a significant amount of the blame should go to Rubin and Clinton. Signing the (now clearly disastrous) Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in November of 1999–dismantling most of the Depression-era protections–was a classic bit of Clintonian triangularization, a gigantic sop to Wall street firms at the expense of Bill’s base of liberal and working class supporters. What could they do? Who could the people hurt by this act vote for? Nader? Let the checks from the financial services industry roll in!

Some might call this experience that matters.

Eat more drumsticks:

Broiler (meat) chickens have been subjected to intense genetic selection. In the past 50 years, broiler growth rates have increased by over 300% (from 25 g per day to 100 g per day). There is growing societal concern that many broiler chickens have impaired locomotion or are even unable to walk. Here we present the results of a comprehensive survey of commercial flocks which quantifies the risk factors for poor locomotion in broiler chickens. We assessed the walking ability of 51,000 birds, representing 4.8 million birds within 176 flocks. We also obtained information on approximately 150 different management factors associated with each flock. At a mean age of 40 days, over 27.6% of birds in our study showed poor locomotion and 3.3% were almost unable to walk. The high prevalence of poor locomotion occurred despite culling policies designed to remove severely lame birds from flocks. We show that the primary risk factors associated with impaired locomotion and poor leg health are those specifically associated with rate of growth. Factors significantly associated with high gait score included the age of the bird (older birds), visit (second visit to same flock), bird genotype, not feeding whole wheat, a shorter dark period during the day, higher stocking density at the time of assessment, no use of antibiotic, and the use of intact feed pellets. The welfare implications are profound. Worldwide approximately 2×10¹⁰ broilers are reared within similar husbandry systems. We identify a range of management factors that could be altered to reduce leg health problems, but implementation of these changes would be likely to reduce growth rate and production. A debate on the sustainability of current practice in the production of this important food source is required.

Or eat at Juliano’s:

Gluten sensitivity is widespread among humans. For example, in celiac disease patients, an inflammatory response to dietary gluten leads to enteropathy, malabsorption, circulating antibodies against gluten and transglutaminase 2, and clinical symptoms such as diarrhea. There is a growing need in fundamental and translational research for animal models that exhibit aspects of human gluten sensitivity…

When fed with a gluten-containing diet, gluten-sensitive macaques showed signs and symptoms of celiac disease including chronic diarrhea, malabsorptive steatorrhea, intestinal lesions and anti-gliadin antibodies. A gluten-free diet reversed these clinical, histological and serological features, while reintroduction of dietary gluten caused rapid relapse….

Gluten-sensitive rhesus macaques may be an attractive resource for investigating both the pathogenesis and the treatment of celiac disease.

Dogs still don’t belong in restaurants, but for one less reason:

In many countries in the world, livestock and humans are affected with hydatid disease, which is caused by the development, in the viscera, of the larval stage of the cestode Echinococcus granulosus. They become infected by ingesting the eggs of this parasite, which are passed in the feces of the dog—the host of the adult worm. Domestic dogs are key in the transmission to livestock and humans….
…we propose that a recombinant oral vaccine given to the small number of dogs keeping the herd would decrease the number of Echinococcus granulosus adult worms and, consequently, the number of infective eggs. This measure would help reduce the contamination risk factors for humans and livestock, and would be cost-effective for the owners of the dogs.

A video of Echinococcus Hydatid cysts being removed from a patient’s brain:

(Not safe for anyone to view. Ever.)

Attention fellow nerds worldwide–eat better, work out and clean up:

Basic daily healthy practices including nutritious diet, hygiene and physical activity are common approaches in comprehensive health promotion programs in school settings, however their relationship to these aggressive behaviours is vague. We attempted to show the advantages of these healthy lifestyle behaviours in 9 developing countries by examining the association with being frequently bullied, violence and injury…

Healthy lifestyle showed an association to decreased relative risk of being frequently bullied and violence/injury in developing countries. A comprehensive approach to risk and health promoting behaviours reducing bullying and violence is encouraged at school settings.

Today, for the first time ever, oil ended the day above $100 a barrel.

It won’t last.

The last time oil hit these levels (adjusted for inflation) was in 1980, after the throes of the Iranian revolution. The sudden drop in supply shot prices upwards. Before that, during the oil embargo of 1973, oil simply ran out in many places.

This time a supply shock doesn’t take the blame. Sure, concerns about a sudden loss of supply feed into the high price, but more energy is being produced and consumed globally than any other time in human history. Massive demand–unprecedented thirst for oil products like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from both the developed and developing world–takes the blame this time around.

In unprecedented numbers, people around the world have the financial, social and economic means to consume energy at a time when traditional crude oil production is leveling off. It brings up an interesting question: Why is there gas to be purchased, at any price? Where are the gas lines? Ask Canada.

At about $30 a barrel, it becomes profitable to scoop up the tar sands of Alberta–4500 pounds of sand per barrel–heat it up to separate out the tar from the sand and then chemically crack the tar into something resembling crude oil. Needless to say, all of this comes at a hideous environmental cost. Thanks to all of the energy intensive processing before the sands become oil-like, about fifteen to forty percent more carbon is ultimately released per barrel of oil equivalent–all of the reduced carbon emissions from increasing CAFE standards? Instantly canceled out in Canadian rockies–plus vast pools of toxic water, destruction of the boreal forest and the unearthing of heavy metals. Production is expected to expand for the next twenty-to-thirty years, helping fill the gap between global energy consumption and traditional crude production.

Oil sands are the among the easiest of the synthetic fuels to manufacture. Oil shale or coal liquifation? Profitable at current oil prices. Of course, the further the input material is from oil, the worse the environmental hit. Coal liquifaction, for example, doubles the carbon impact per barrel compared to the already hefty impact of crude oil. Technologies like carbon sequestration could help substantially in reducing the greenhouse gas impact of this steady switch, but are too expensive to be implemented without being required for everyone.

What about biofuels? Aren’t we already subsidizing plants? Isn’t that the more environmental way to go? Nope, not when you consider these alternatives with a proper life cycle analysis--considering the impact not just of running the plant, but building and decommissioning it as well. In fact, the only current technologies better than fossil fuels? Wind and geothermal. Solar might get close to the total environmental impact of fossil fuel at a large scale of manufacturing.

Where the hell are all the better alternatives? We’ve been asking private industry, individual companies, to start their own private Manhattan projects. Thanks to how our patent system works, to how intellectual property is handled, all of the prize goes to the first–the second gets nothing. No single company can take on that risk, sink that much R&D money into something that might not work, or be scooped by a competitor before the investment can be recovered–pretty much the same problem the biotech industry has developing basic enabling technologies. The solution that works? Publicly funded research, results shared to any company that would want to commercialize the results.

The longer a barrel of oil stays around or above $100 a barrel, the more likely these “unconventional hydrocarbon” technologies will be unleashed, with the predicable environmental devastation. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Another failure of the market. The amount of oil shale and coal available for conversion is so vast–an order of magnitude larger than crude oil reserves, far larger than the oil sands–that everyone assumes once these plants get built, energy prices will collapse below profitability. The reserves of energy are too big, the potential bonanza too great, for an unregulated market to maintain profitability. The large coal companies are begging for regulation–busy demanding a price floor before they proceed.

In comes our opportunity. The United States contains an overwhelming amount of the global coal and oil shale reserves–making us the most hydrocarbon endowed country on the planet. The coal industry wants a price floor? Give them a carbon tax and strict regulations to where, how many and what kinds of liquifaction plants can be built. Demand that all plants implement carbon sequestration. Use the huge sums of money generated by the tax to fund basic scientific research into genuine alternatives to fossil fuels. A cleverly crafted policy now–and the window is so vanishingly small for this to happen–could bring us a rare win: New technologies to finally get us beyond fossil fuels, reduced energy prices, less money sent to despotic regimes worldwide and an eventual real positive environmental impact.

If we continue on the hands-off style, continue to ignore that hydrocarbons will remain the dominant form of energy for at least a few more decades, the profit motive will become overwhelming. The plants will be built, but without a carbon tax, without the carbon sequestration, without the regulations that would make the impact at least less than the worst case scenario. Cheaper energy is inevitable. How much it costs us isn’t.