Ordo Ab Chao

Many of you will be familiar with the concept of two separate genus of man existing side by side in prehistoric times. I'm talking about Neanderthal and Homo-sapien. Recent studies have shown our homo-sapien ancestors may have contributed to the extinction of the neanderthals. It seems 3 factors were at play

1. Neanderthals were unable to deal adequately with cold stress at a time of climactic change, 25-30,000 years ago


2. Neanderthals needed to increase their energy intake and hence food consumption to keep warm. Homo-sapiens were more anatomically suited to keeping warm, making better use of increasingly scarce food resources


3. Homo sapiens devised high-tech ways to keeping themselves warm including furs, boots etc.

Throughout the rest of the US stem-cell researchers are weighing up the costs (and funding issues) of another 4 years of Dubya. However, California has neatly sidestepped these issues by finding a way to supplant it's stem cell research initiatives with state funds. Cunning!

In the Golden State, stem cell researchers will see a windfall of $3 billion over the next 10 years, averaging about $300 million a year, thanks to the passage of Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative. It shouldn't be difficult to entice the best minds in the country to move to a place where their work is fully supported by a state known for its mild climate.

Read a very interesing article on Wired about a company called Cell-life which is developing SMS and Internet based monitoring software to enable a small team of doctors to effectively monitor the side-effects of Anti Retroviral (ARV)drugs used in the treatment of AIDS. In this case, many side-effects such as lactic-acidosis are life-threatening unless treatment is received quickly. The cell-life system enables fast diagnosis of these issues using SMS text messaging to communicate with doctors and interface with the system databases. It's a wonderful example of technology having a beneficial effect on the lives of thousands of people and (as someone pointed out) a balance to my earlier techno-dystopia remarks...

Ever wondered what it would be like to pilot one NASA's Apollo missions. Well thanks to Ron Monsen and his team you can find out using the eagle lander 3d flight simulator

Eagle Lander 3D (EL3D) is an authentic simulation of the Apollo lunar landings and includes accurate renditions of scenery, flight dynamics and the lunar module. EL3D has developed from a freeware first generation Apollo 11 simulator to one that will recreate every Apollo landing mission. Currently EL3D includes Apollo 11,12, 15, a LM racing course and an orbital module. Other missions will easily 'plug-in'.

EL3D is designed to realistically render the physics and dynamics of the lunar module as well as the terrain of the lunar surface. EL3D uses the latest in graphical 3D technology to provide high resolution renditions of the LM, it's instruments, and the lunar surface in the region of the current landing site. All primary flight instruments work like the originals with many operating control panel switches too. The Apollo Guidance Computer has been modeled and works just like the original including the famous 1201 Alarm Code on Apollo 11!

Would be very old indeed if a recent article in Scientific American is to be believed. It appears that proof has been found that Chinese villagers brewed alcoholic beverages more than 9000 years ago. A technique known as mass spectrometry was used by researchers at the Pennsylvanian Museum of Archaelogy to detect tartaric acid (a bi-product of grape fermentation) on shards of pottery that dated from around 7000 BC. The tests revealed that:

"13 of the 16 remnants came from containers that had held the same liquid, a "mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey and a fruit"

"Mass spectrometry is a powerful analytical technique that is used to identify unknown compounds, to quantify known compounds, and to elucidate the structure and chemical properties of molecules. Detection of compounds can be accomplished with very minute quantities (as little as 10-12g, 10-15 moles for a compound of mass 1000 Daltons). This means that compounds can be identified at very low concentrations (one part in 1012) in chemically complex mixtures. Mass spectrometry provides valuable information to a wide range of professionals: physicians, astonomers, and biologists, to name a few."

Just read a great article on wired.com about Microarrays (silicon chips that light up to reveal which genes are active in a DNA sequence). These chips produce huge volumes of information that scientists have found extremely difficult to process and interpret. Enter the helping hand of s/w company Salk Institute. Top code chairman, Jack Hughes, is a paraplegic who also works as director of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation researching cures for ameliorating spinal cord damage. Top coder is making a search tool in the form of the Gene Chip Data Interface available to all researchers in this field This should enable scientists to better understand the genetic effects of spinal chord damage in particular and microarray data in general.

National Geographic has an article about the indonesian island of flores where the 18,000 year old fossilised remains of a pygmy race of 1 meter tall people. I thought I'd keep readers up to date as one of my first posts to this blog was about this very subject. (I can confirm that there are currently around 30 irregular readers of this blog, some of them aren't even friends of mine!)
Anyway the Flores tourist authority has stated that the number of visitors has increased by 21% in 2005 over this period last year. The main attraction seems to be the site where the remains were unearthed. So if you want to play hunt the hobbit on an Indonesian island here's a map courtesy of indo.com

Picked this up from Justin Mason's wonderful taint.org. NASA's earthobservatory is a collection of topographic maps of the world showing details such as elevation, geoloogical and geographical information about countries, continents and landmasses in general. Here's the link to my own country of Ireland.

Elevation data used in this image were acquired by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, launched on Feb. 11, 2000. SRTM used the same radar instrument that comprised the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) that flew twice on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994. SRTM was designed to collect 3-D measurements of the Earth's surface. To collect the 3-D data, engineers added a 60-meter (approximately 200-foot) mast, installed additional C-band and X-band antennas, and improved tracking and navigation devices. The mission is a cooperative project between NASA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) of the U.S. Department of Defense and the German and Italian space agencies. It is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Washington, D.C.

I've filed this in science as it's basically a mathematical conundrum. I was chatting about this subtle problem with R last night. She's a self-confessed numbers phobic but interested in how the world works. I worship at the altar of Phi and am perfectly willing to believe a logical mathematical prediction even if it flies in the face of a more immediate intuition. The Monty Hall problem is called after the presenter of a 60s/70s game show called "Let's Make a Deal". It's a weaker version of the 3 prisoners problem and is generally stated as

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

We're also asked to assume that the host is honest, the show isn't rigged, we have no prior knowledge of the appearance of the goat and a whole bunch of other "butterfly wings" that could influence the result in any way. The answer is that it IS to your advantage to switch doors. For example if you pick door A and the host shows you a goat behind door C your first pick was made with a probability of 1 in 3 of correctly identifying the one door with the car behind it from 3 equally advantageous probabilities. The mistake that most people (almost everyone) seems to make is that they then misunderstand the probabilistic basis for switching. I also don't particularly like the Goat-1,Goat-2 explanation presented by some including professional smart person Marilyn Vos Savant.
When A was picked I had a 1/3 chance of finding a car but I had a 2/3 chance of finding a goat. I suppose it depends on how you feel about goats but I'm indifferent and would prefer a car. The resale value is generally higher, unless it's an Alfa of course! Changing to door B doesn't have a 2/3 chance of finding a goat. There's only one goat left. Damn, I've halved my chances of finding a goat. So let's let the probability that switching to door B is a good by P(SwitchB).
P(SwitchB) = P(A was a goat) = 1 - (1/3) = 2/3
The probability that switching is a good idea is DIRECTLY affected by the probability the first choice was a goat. You can't ignore the past and must treat the problem as a continuation of the same game. This in itself makes sense but for several reasons our brains find it difficult to combine temporal and logical context and we get a bit confused.

I've lost count of the times I've used the Engineering Fundamentals website to research an engineering or financial calculation. It has some of the most practical and useful explanations of relatively complex concepts that I've seen. The calculators section is excellent and available here

I'll leave the politics out of this one. I'm quite concerned about the "Boil Notices" that the Galway county council have being issuing in relation to the recent contamination of the water supply with cryptosporidium. There are 2 issues at play here and the guidelines provided by the British Columbia Ministry of Health are worth noting. The first is that there appears to be some dispute about whether quick boiling is enough to kill cryptosporidium. I could be wrong here but I'm basing my comments on the US EPA's statement advising people in affected areas to "bring their drinking water to a full boil for one minute". From research and querying friends in the US this is often taken to imply stove boiling where the steam, which is hotter than 100 deg celsius boiling water, is effective in killing Cryptosporidium.

So the EPA clearly request a full boil for a one minute period. The problem is that the kettles we use in Europe tend not to boil for a one minute period. They're efficiently designed to do a 15-20 second boil. Watch your kettle the next time your boiling water for tea and see when you can observe steam and for how long it lasts. This efficiency is a great energy saver but lessens the effectiveness in killing the pathogen.

If in doubt then a possible solution is to boil the water in a pressure cooker where the higher-temperature steam has a better chance of killing the bacteria. The second is a combination of boiling and (one micron) filters to remove cryptosporidium oocysts. (A human hair is around 50 microns thick for reference).

One of the problems with this pathogen is its resistance to chlorine-based disinfectants. In many cases the amount of bleach required to kill the pathogen would render the water poisonous to drink. Success has been had with Ultra Violet light but this is relatively recent research and isn't recommended by any government that I'm aware of.

Those interested in genetics should really watch Craig Venter's presentation on TED. Craig is one of the world's greatest scientists who has evolved the field of genetics over the past 15 years with feats such as the mapping of the human genome by his former company, Celera. His TED presentation is about creating synthetic life, in this case designing a bacteria (unicellular micro-organisms). This has important repercussions in the design and creation of new fuel sources which reduce the worlds reliance on fossil fuels by creating designer fuels with better characteristics. Currently they're using mechanisms to essential recombine the chromosomes of existing organisms (e.g. e-coli) but the future is full biodesign and assembly without the need for a transformative process on existing organsisms. "Life from scratch".