Under the Radar: September 2009

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

glutinous is different from gluten

Glutinous rice does not contain dietary gluten (i.e. does not contain glutenin and gliadin), and thus should be safe for gluten-free diets. What distinguishes it from other types of rice is having no (or negligible amounts of) amylose, and high amounts of amylopectin (those are the two components of starch). Amylopectin is responsible for the sticky quality of glutinous rice.

glutinous rice = sticky rice (that does not contain gluten)

gluten = elastic protein material, especially of wheat flour, that gives cohesiveness to dough

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker says

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113032763

That's funny. I said exactly the same thing 25 years ago, and people said, "No, this is normal. Everywhere is like this."

Having lived elsewhere for 40 years, I can now assure them that, no, it is not normal.

Could turning plants upside down make them grow five times better?

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/omega-hydroponic-vertical-garden.php

What English would sound like to a nonnative speaker

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAA_qbiOQ5k

Resource depletion as a predator-prey interaction

This is a really interesting idea.

There is also the increasing energy necessary to extract the oil, which was 1 : 1,000,000 in 1860 and is now 1 : 15.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5731

Let's go back to whaling in 19th century; at that time the main problem related to killing whales was finding one. Once it was found, killing it and making whale oil out of it was a relatively quick process. In the case of crude oil, instead, the length of delay between discovering a field and getting oil out of it often amounts to several years. But, the main point is discovery: once a field is discovered, it will be put into production at some point--that's almost automatic. So, prospecting for oil is the main "predation" activity, and also the most expensive one. So, the production parameter in the model is the amount of oil found , not the produced oil. At that point, you can think that a measure of the effort (the capital) placed into prospection is the number of wildcats drilled. Once we found this idea, it was bingo again. The relationship of predator to prey was there, although it was not as good as for whaling. Here are the results for the US 48 lower states (the case studied by Hubbert).

Maybe I am seeing ghosts created by my own mind, but I tend to see many things that I have done in my life in these terms. I see it even with the research grants for my lab, at the university of Florence. Despite having stepped up our efforts, we are getting less and less money to run the lab. "Peak grants" has taken place a few years ago and my lab is being destroyed by the same mechanism that, long ago, brought down the Roman Empire.

1. There exists a non renewable or slowly renewable resource which is limited in amount and "graded" in costs of extraction/production.

2. People will extract/produce first the low cost resource and will re-invest an approximately constant fraction of their profits in more facilities for extraction/production. This is the positive feedback that generates the rapid initial growth of the curve

3. As the resource is consumed, increasing costs of production reduce profits and - as a consequence - investments in extraction/production. This is the negative feedback that generates the decline.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Everything most people "know" about Columbine is wrong

It wasn't supposed to be a shooting; it was supposed to be a bombing.

"The book gained considerable media attention for dispelling the Columbine myths ... the massacre had nothing to do with jocks, Goths, Marilyn Manson or the Trench Coat Mafia. In fact, it was not intended primarily as a school shooting, but as a bombing. Cullen reports that Harris and Klebold intended to perpetrate the worst terrorist attack in American history. The book garnered glowing reviews from Time, Newsweek, People, The New York Observer, and The New York Times Book Review. One of the few dissenting views came from Janet Maslin."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_(book)

The miracle of compound interest

$100 compounded at 7% for 200 years is more than $100 million, by which time it will be worth nothing.

We were so absorbed in our own problems that we did not even notice this

Absolute must-see.

After a few minutes, you will say to yourself: Hmm... huge foreign debt, bank collapse... why does this sound familiar?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6_i8zuffs

How the crash is rewriting investment rules

They said we would get 8% return on investment in our pension plans... Ha! Madoff level returns.

Now they say 4%.

I think we will be lucky to get 1% because the last 30 years of "normal" growth required 10 dollar a barrel oil, and we will never see that again.

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/business/2009/09/21/D9ARURPG0_us_meltdown_investing/index.html

Scientific American is hosting videos

They are quite good at piquing your interest.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/video.cfm?id=35620919001&lineup=1406165298

If you had the Swine Flu vaccine in 1976

You may have some immunity to the current H1N1 Swine Flu.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=single-vaccine-dose-even#comments

Term of the day: EROEI

Energy Return On Energy Invested

1859

1 unit of energy invested returns 1,000,000 units of energy (wells were shallow and were gushers)

1950

1 unit of energy invested returns 100 units of energy

2010

1 unit of energy invested returns 15 units of energy

Clearly, when 1 unit of energy must be invested to return 1 unit of energy, it no longer makes sense to try to extract the energy.

Unfortunately, we may run into problems even sooner: when 1 unit of energy invested returns only 8 units of energy. We are almost there.

http://www.odt.co.nz/print/74315

So it is not a matter of whether or not the oil exists, but rather whether it can be extracted and delivered for a reasonable price.

Rush says "There is 700 years of oil in the ground! There is no oil problem!"

Ayn Rand said, one can evade reality, but one cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

I would say, "Everything seems simple to the simpleminded".

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

The crater Cabeus A1

NASA plans to crash a rocket into the Lunar crater Cabeus A1 on October 9.

The floor of the crater is in perpetual darkness, and so over the eons, some water ice may have condensed there.

The crash should shoot a plume up, and the plume will be examined to see if there is water ice.

If there is, this will be a huge discovery because it would mean we would not have to launch so much water from the Earth for a base on the Moon.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/59090432.html

Parasite eats fish tongue and takes the place of the tongue

This is so strange, I thought it was a joke from Cracked or The Onion or something.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/tongue-eating-parasite-discovered.php?dcitc=TH_rotator

Zoom in on The Milky Way

http://www.gigagalaxyzoom.org/B.html

Stellar Cartography on the Enterprise is here now

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=allosphere-ucsb

Monday, September 14, 2009

Where would the world be without the extraordinary growth in Russian oil supply this decade? Not in a good place... Russia’s near 50% oil production increase since the year 2000 did a lot of heavy lifting. And it’s concerning that this very fast growth rate has now topped out.

North American crude oil production (Canada + US + Mexico) saw, during the current decade, its highest levels in 2003 at an annual average of 11.358 Mb/day. The high month of production that year was in September, at 11.450 Mb/day. In that year, 2003, the average price of oil was 31.08. But by 2008, North American crude oil production had fallen to 10.338 Mb/day. Thus, as the price of oil went from 31.08 in 2003 to the 2008 average of 99.67, North American crude oil production lost over a million bbls a day.

Russia... has become the world's biggest exporter of oil.

Russia toppled Saudi Arabia from the number one spot. It is already the world's largest exporter of gas, and supplies around a third of the European Union's consumption.

Stiglitz says the bank problems are even WORSE now than they were

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aYdgQkXu9eBg

The many missions NASA is running now

People think NASA spends a huge amount of money, but it is a drop in the bucket, and they think it only does the shuttle, but see how many missions are currently running... you never hear about them, but they are fascinating.

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html

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