Tag: science

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Atlantic Monthly

On Wings of Amateurs

The Journal of Ornithology published a paper that illuminates the “vagrant bird” effect — what happens when migratory birds go off-course.

The splendid Effect Measure, a relentless tracker of avian influenza news, explains the paper’s relevance to public health. If diseases are human-borne, we have to watch human movement patterns (spraying planes before they touch down in New Zealand, vaccinating pilgrims before they join the scrums in Mecca); if they are bird-borne, we have to figure out where these ailing avians are going, and why. The birds in question here are leaf-warblers and thrushes who start off in Siberia and head toward South Asia. Some end up confused and end up in Europe, instead, where they die. The paper suggests that a longtime hypothesis — that birds end up in the wrong place because they get blown off-course — isn’t right. According to decades of reports by birdwatchers across Europe, the fat birds go off-course just as regularly as the skinny ones (who would presumably be more affected by winds). The paper says the lost birds have a genetically warped sense of direction: it tells them how far to go, but steers them wrong.

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Atlantic Monthly

Science of the Apocalypse

A suit filed in District Court in Hawaii demands that the U.S. halt construction of the Large Hadron Collider (L.H.C.), the $8-billion particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border, on the grounds that it could cause the destruction of the earth, the solar system, or the universe.

The L.H.C. could reveal the nature of matter and confirm physicists’ best guesses about the validity of string theory. These would be advances comparable to Einstein’s or Newton’s — but they are possibilities only because we do not know what will happen when we switch the contraption on. Scientists protest that the probability of their experiments’ causing the end of the universe is astronomically low, and they are telling the truth. But tinkering with the unknown is what experimental science is all about, and even the scientists must admit that there is a chance of doomsday (and, indeed, a chance of many other things) in any project like this.

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Atlantic Monthly

Head Case

Originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com

The English Surgeon, a documentary about a London neurosurgeon who operated on Ukrainians’ brains using a Bosch power-drill, raised questions about medical ethics.

Henry Marsh, the sawbones in question, has traveled to the Ukraine serially for fifteen years, always with the goal of helping Ukrainian colleagues make do with poor equipment, or none. Cutting open patients’ heads and using screws and drills bought at a hardware store would be grounds for license-suspension and possibly imprisonment in England. Here, it appears to be an act of compassion — and one that reveals a pernicious double-standard in medical ethics.

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Atlantic Monthly

Anthrax and English Breakfast

Originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com

In the current issue of Microbiologist, researchers report that tea could be an antidote to anthrax.

Anthrax, scourge of tabloid staffers, has infected exactly one person in the U.S. during the last five years — a New York musician who contracted it from the raw African animal skins he used to make drums. Those of us who procure our hides from reputable sources face no danger. But if anthrax does break out, commonly consumed plants (slightly modified) do seem to be one of our best defenses. A few years ago, researchers rejiggered the genomes of tobacco cells to produce anthrax antigens, a first step toward making a safer vaccine. And now it appears that Earl Grey, in addition to his supposed aphrodisiac effects, could fight off the bacillus, without any modification at all.

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Atlantic Monthly

The Las Vegas Treat

The Las Vegas police found ricin, a chemical weapons agent, in a Las Vegas hotel room rented by Roger Von Bergendorff, a 57-year-old computer graphics artist and pet enthusiast.

Extracting ricin — so potent that a single drop could kill you and your whole family — isn’t difficult, which is why a man with obvious social handicaps and no relevant training apparently succeeded in producing enough to poison himself half to death. Governments have made breathless claims about Al Qaeda’s desire to weaponize the chemical, and the dubious success of this poor man’s homebrew will stoke the fears of the stokeable.

My reaction: It’s good that the guy has a hobby. I hope Al Qaeda’s hobby is the same. Ricin is, first of all, one of the more pitifully ineffective chem-bio agents — botulin, sarin, and anthrax are much worse. But even if Al Qaeda produced those, their scientists would be far more likely to poison and kill themselves than to poison and kill others.

The recipe for ricin has been publicly available since 1962 (amateur chefs, click here), and almost no one has died by malicious ricin poisoning. Even if they were capable of buying ricin off the shelf, they’d have to figure out a way to inject or spray victims with the stuff, and anyone who’d submit to an injection or puff of mist from a stranger on the street probably would be easy to kill by conventional means anyway. Let us hope that Al Qaeda is following the fearmongers’ cue and ordering chemistry sets through the post right now, rather than conventional weapons available for the same price.

Originally appeared at TheAtlantic.com

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Atlantic Monthly

Unencrypted?

Princeton researchers published a paper describing a devastating attack on standard encryption — including encryption used to secure government secrets.

Data remain safe, most of the time.  The attacker needs access to the computer minutes after the user has walked away, and if he arrives later the data stay locked.  If the user guards the computer jealously, by clutching it close to the chest, or, as Atlantic employees with company-issued laptops are required to do, entrusting it during nights and weekends to a Gurkha security team, then even the geeks of Princeton can’t get in.

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Atlantic Monthly

Elsie’s Revenge

The USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef that had passed through a California plant — more than all the recalled meat in the previous decade combined.

Workers at the Westland-Hallmark beef factory poked very sick cows, prodding them into the abattoirs with with the prongs of forklifts.  What makes a cow non-ambulatory?  Mad cow disease, for one thing.  The dreaded kuru relative attacks the central nervous system and leads to immobility and a terrible demise.

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GOOD

Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death-Row Inmates

GOOD magazine, issue 009 (“All You Can Eat”)

An unfortunate side effect of hanging or poisoning a man is that his organs go sour before they can be transplanted. Death-row inmates have repeatedly asked to donate their organs, but their requests are always denied. The simple reason is that execution generally ruins organs before they can be harvested. By the time you cut someone down from the gallows or pronounce the injection lethal, the heart and lungs will have thumped and puffed for the last time. Soon after, the kidneys start rotting, and before long nothing is useful but the corneas. Even with beheading— still practiced in Saudi Arabia—the heart and lungs probably wouldn’t make it, says Douglas Hanto, chief transplant surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

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