Under the Radar: April 2007

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Amazing potential treatment for genetic diseases

Each cell in the body must make thousands of protein molecules to function properly. From start to finish, the protein molecules must be correct and complete.

Thousands of genetic diseases are caused by mutations that produce an erroneous stop signal in the production process of just one type of protein molecule in a cell. The cell needs to make the entire protein molecule, but comes to an erroneous sequence that tells it to stop prematurely, and so it makes just the beginning part of the protein molecule, which is useless. Since one type of protein molecule performs a specific job in a cell, that job is not done, resulting in disease.

Suppose there were a way to make the cell ignore the erroneous stop signal. The cell would then produce the complete protein molecule, and it could then do its specific job in the cell. The disease should theoretically be greatly relieved. And it seems that one drug may do just that for some fraction of thousands of genetic diseases!

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/uops-fdo041807.php

Monday, April 23, 2007

If you've never heard of Joost, I think you soon will

The inventors who made Skype (free or really cheap internet telephone calls) sold it to eBay for 2.6 billion dollars.

Their next project is Joost. TV shows, on demand, on your computer, for free with just a few commercials (certainly fewer commercials than you see on broadcast TV now).

If you don't have broadband, now is the time to get it.

If you don't have a computer that can handle video easily, you should consider that when you buy your next one. The internet has already transitioned into video, and video demands are only going to increase, so you have to buy your computer for the world of 2009, not 2007. You will find that a 20-inch iMac for 1,500 dollars is more than satisfactory and is in fact cheaper when you consider what it includes (like a built-in camera). Macintoshes are designed to handle video and run much cooler than many other computers.

www.joost.com

It is now in beta testing and is expected to be available soon.

I signed up a while ago and am now one of the testers. There are only a few hundred programs available during the testing, but you can expect tens of thousands in a year or so.

It is just amazing. The quality is comparable to what you would purchase on iTunes. When you click, it starts playing in just a few seconds in full screen mode. I have so far watched six episodes of various programs and only one had a glitch. For free. In Japan. Showtime! scifi and documentaries...

This kind of change is happening in broadcasting around the world. The BBC is planning on making one million hours of audio and video available online on demand. Some of it is available in the UK now, and the only thing blocking worldwide release is they have to figure out how to collect subscription fees or license broadcast outside the UK. Imagine. NHK and many other channels are planning on making their content available. In a few short years, nearly every program that still exists will be available online, for free or for a subscription, on demand.

Eating lots of bacon, ham, hot dogs, and coldcuts containing nitrite preservative

People who eat cured meats more than 14 times per month had a 78% higher risk of a developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease such as chronic bronchitis.

These kinds of lung diseases are very common as we age.

Even those who ate cured meats 5 to 13 times per month were found to have a 50% higher risk.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?alias=study-ties-cured-meats-to

Monday, April 16, 2007

The Mind of Leonardo Exhibit and the Annunciation at the Tokyo National Museum until June 17, 2007

There is a great exhibit of da Vinci's inventions and works at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno. The highlight is the earliest known painting attributed to Leonardo: Annunciation.

Go to the Heisei Hall and see Parts I and II of the inventions and works exhibit. At the end of Part II, there is a short film that will show you some of the secrets of the Annunciation.

Tickets are easiest to purchase at the ticket window just inside the Ueno Park Exit gate of JR Ueno Station or at the Museum itself. Tickets are for one day only, but are undated. When you enter the Heisei Hall exhibit, they will stamp the ticket with the date, and when you enter the Annunciation room in the Main Hall, they will tear off a stub. However, you can later reenter both exhibits on that day by showing the ticket.

I went early on Sunday morning, but this was a mistake. It was really crowded in the morning, but nearly empty just before closing.

This is what I suggest.
Have lunch somwhere.
Go to the museum after lunch.
Walk around the garden and see the other exhibits.
Go to the inventions and works exhibit, which will take about one hour (explanations in Japanese and English; audio guide in Japanese only).
Go to see the Annunciation in the last hour before closing. (There were only a few dozen people viewing the painting at the end of the day, whereas there were thousands in lines stretching all the way to the front gate in the morning! Closing times vary.)

Closed Mondays (but open Monday, April 30, until 20:00, or at least that's what the website says)
Tuesdays to Fridays 9:30 to 17:00
Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays 9:30 to 18:00
Golden Week special hours, April 27 to May 6, 9:30 to 20:00

YouTube video.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5H8-NuKuTcY

Information in English
http://www.tnm.jp/en/servlet/Con?pageId=A01&processId=02&event_id=3859

Information in Japanese
http://www.tnm.jp/jp/servlet/Con?pageId=A01&processId=02&event_id=3859

Sunday, April 8, 2007

When will we have electric or electric plug-in hybrid

Great Science Friday show about future cars. It will take 20 years to replace the US auto fleet... even the most optimistic estimates anticipate the oil beginning to decline 20 years. I think the cheap oil will start to decline much sooner.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9428253

Saturday, April 7, 2007

20 million stoves in the US are unstable and can tip over with just a push

20 million stoves in the US are so unstable that they can topple forward with a little weight on the open oven door. So far, more than 100 people have been burned, lost limbs, or been crushed to death. A very dangerous situation is a child standing on the open oven door. In another incident, a woman lost her balance and grabbed onto the stove for support, and the stove flipped over onto her and killed her.

The only video of this I can find is currently at CNN. It is absolutely shocking. The reporter pushes down on the open oven door, and the whole stove comes crashing forward! If there is hot food on the stovetop, you can imagine what will happen.

Go to: cnn.com

Click on: video

Search for: stove tip over

Here are some quotes from various sources.

“There have been more than 100 reported cases of death and injury from scalding and burns due to hot foods and liquids spilling from the stove top, and from the weight crushing anyone in the path of the tipping ranges,”

This design flaw has particularly affected children and the elderly. CPSC accident reports include cases of a 24-pound toddler who stood on an open oven door, tipping the range so that boiling chicken soup spilled over him, causing severe burns; a 3-year old who climbed onto the range door and was killed when the stove fell over on him; and an 88-year old woman who slipped as she was cleaning her range and grabbed the oven door for support – which caused the oven to flip over and crush her in her own kitchen with her upper body wedged into the hot oven in which she had just finished baking cookies.

And the solution is simple: Install brackets to hold the stove down. They cost less than a dollar. (And that should also help in case of an earthquake.) Even if you don't have children around often, you yourself could still lose your balance from time to time or slip... imagine leaning on the door while cleaning the oven or putting food in it...

You can see more info at

http://www.killerstoves.com/

Really try to see the CNN video... words just don't convey how easy it is to make a stove tip over.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Amazing octopus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQWxIrSRDQQ

The crows in Japan are annoying, but smart

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7329182515885554944

Cool 360 degree volumetric display

Amazing volumetric display lets you walk around it and appears to show video floating in midair.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YynD1BVaus

The weather is strange this year

The winter was unusually warm. The cherry trees were confused and started blooming early. Then it turned really cold again. Today, April 4, 2007, a huge high pressure system swept into Japan from Asia, bringing with it dust from the deserts in China and a lot of cold air. By 3:00 pm, it was dark like twilight, the sky was yellow-green, there was thunder and lightning... and there was snow and hail in downtown Tokyo!

ISBN-13: 978-0295985350

みなしご元禄津波
The Orphan Tsunami of 1700

One winter's night in the year 1700, a mysterious tsunami flooded fields and washed away houses in Japan. It arrived without the warning that a nearby earthquake usually provides. Samurai, merchants, and villagers recorded the event, but nearly three centuries would pass before discoveries in North America revealed the tsunami's source.

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 tells this scientific detective story through clues from both sides of the Pacific. The evidence uncovered tells of a [magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest] a century before Lewis and Clark...

You can see a summary at
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/

http://www.amazon.com/Orphan-Tsunami-1700-Japanese-Earthquake/dp/0295985356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204357404&sr=1-1

Video simulation of the megaquake.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=72698052150208427&q=pacific+northwest+megaquake&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Map of simulation of the megaquake.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/supercomputer/02-08Virtual90Megaquake.asp

A tsunami is unlike any "wave" you have ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jixyBvjJZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl8giZ66j7o

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

Liberal, optimistic, exhilarating. The most spectacular lectures you will ever see.

www.ted.com

Try these to start

The best presentation ever... legendary... your view of the world will change in many ways... and there will be hope...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

The World Now Eats (and Dies) Like Americans
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/10

Extremely graphic... even made me queasy... but you cannot understand the light without knowing the darkness...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/142

The Law of ACCELERTING Returns

You have probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns: more effort gets you only marginal increase in reward (for example, if you exercise for half an hour a day, you get most of the health benefits; if you exercise for an hour a day, you get almost all of the health benefits; and exercising for two, three, or four hours a day will give very little added health benefits).

However, there are situations in which reward does not diminish (at least for a long while) and actually speeds up over time. People tend to see progress in technology as proceeding in a linear fashion, so they expect the 21st century (barring something truly unfortunate) to progress something like the way the 20th century did. But according to Ray Kurzweil, the technical progress in the 21st century will be more like 1,000 times that of the 20th century.

Here is an example. Cost to read the DNA of one person
in 1990: 3 billion dollars
in 2005: 2 million dollars
in 2006: 200,000 dollars
target for 2010-2015: 1,000 dollars

Being able to read your DNA will allow medical treatments to be tailored specifically for you, vastly improving outcomes.

This BBC Horizon program is, granted, sensational infotainment, but it is probably the most efficient introduction to this topic.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3882715179234602208&q=human+v2.0&hl=en

The article below is very long, and there may be parts that are difficult to follow, but look over the entire article because it is a map of the world we are already living in, and it shows what looms up the road.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Step 1: Slow the ageing process

Something that humans have seen only once is about to happen again: functional lifespan will vastly increase.

This happened the first time in the 20th century with improvements in public health, sanitation, nutrition, vaccination, and pharmaceuticals. Someone from the 19th century would not believe how low our risk of death is, how free of disability and pain we are, and how long we live now. Things are hardly perfect, but to all humans who lived before the early 1900s, the world we live in now would be an unbelievable paradise.

In the next leap, we will not only live even longer, but disease and disability will often be delayed by years if not decades. If we can just make it through the next 15 years or so, the interventions will be unbelievable. It is quite possible that many of us, even those in middle age, will live to see the dawn of the 22nd century, looking and feeling like 40. I am not joking.

So, how do we improve our chances of getting there? Doing basic things to take care of your health is obvious, but there are other things that can be done.

We have known for 70 years how to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of the diseases of old age: eat less. Or more exactly, reduce the number of calories while maintaining adequate amounts of protein, fats, vitamins, and other nutrients. The difference is shocking, and it has been shown in animals from ameba to monkeys without exception. Basically, when calories are low, cells turn on genes that fix damage, so you age more slowly. Fasting at least once a month seems to produce most of the desired effect.

If you have not seen this New York Times article, take a look at the monkeys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/health/nutrition/31agin.html?ex=1163480400&en=193a4a4fe169ec69&ei=5070

The monkeys are both about 25 years old. The one on the right ate a normal diet and is old, frail, gray, scruffy, and has the shrunken skull of an old monkey (like a 90 year old human). The one on the left ate a diet with the same nutrients, but with about 30 percent fewer calories. The contrast is shocking. The monkey that ate fewer calories still looks young and healthy (like a 60 year old human).

So, step one is avoid excess calories, especially from sugar, white bread, white rice, and white potatoes.

But the amount by which you have to reduce calories is quite difficult for most people to maintain. Is there another way we can turn on the damage repair genes? The answer seems to be yes.

Throughout human evolution, we have always eaten plants that were far from perfect. They were drought stressed, attacked by fungi, and attacked by insects. Ironically, this seems to have been good for us. When plants are attacked or do not receive enough water, they produce huge numbers of chemicals to defend themselves. In seasons when there were a lot of these chemicals in plants, animals eating the plants used that as a signal that hard times may be coming, so their cells turned on the damage control genes to protect what the cells already had. We also did not have steady supplies of food, so whenever we didn't eat for a day, again the damage control genes turned on. Specifically, unnecessary molecular tags are removed from the DNA, returning gene expression to the way it was when we were younger. In modern life, all the plants we eat are completely protected from fungi and insects and are watered carefully. All the stress response chemicals that they would normally produce are not there. We never go for a day without eating. Therefore, our damage control genes are never turned on, so the molecular tags on our DNA become more and more different from the way they were when we were young, our gene expression becomes more abnormal, and we age at a high rate.

If we consume chemicals that plants make in response to stress, it turns on the damage control genes, and voila, the effect is the same as caloric restriction, although it is unclear what dose is necessary. One chemical that has been shown to turn on damage control genes is resveratrol, which is found in the skin of grapes, especially when the grape plants are stressed by drought or fungus infection, and is found in many other plants as well. Since people who drink red wine made from grapes harvested and processed in the French way seemed to have extremely low levels of heart disease, researchers tried screening red wines from France to find out if there were compounds which produced the effect. Resveratrol is the most potent found so far. When given to laboratory animals, it slows ageing by 20% and even much more, and it decreases risk of cancer by up to 70%. Further evidence comes from numerous studies showing that consumption of 3 glasses of red wine per week is associated with 70% reduction in colon cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and other cancers.

I have been taking resveratrol for two years now, and I think the effects are apparent. When I stopped for 6 months because I ran out, the skin started to look old and wrinkled. Resveratrol is easily destroyed by exposure to air, heat, and light. I take the one from Longevinex at
http://www.longevinex.com
because it seems to be the most biologically active. It costs about a dollar a day, which is much cheaper than a glass of wine, though much less fun, so I do both.

These results are not obscure, but you may not have heard about them. Do a Google search for any of these topics and you will find thousands of hits.

So, step 1, let's at least do simple basic things to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of serious diseases of old age. You may be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. 万歳！

Under the Radar