I haven’t got much done these last few days. I’ve been too busy watching the Nasa TV live feed from the Hubble servicing mission.

The problems they have on a mission like this are so wonderfully groan-in-sympathy familiar: stuck bolts. Like working on old plumbing, with the same issues. They’re too professional to say it, but if I was in the control room there’d be a lot of, “Watch out! Don’t strip that thing. Omigod. You stripped it.” And so on.

Yesterday, Mike Massimino had to get at a failed power card inside the telescope. It wasn’t designed for removal, so the access plate was held down with over a hundred screws of a bunch of different sizes, which was itself behind a great big steel bar of a handhold on the surface of the telescope. The steel bar had a stuck bolt. It would not come off.

They have mockups on the ground of the same setup. Some smart tech figured out you could break the whole thing off. They showed video. The thing snapped with a bang like a rifle and shot across the room.

I love the language they use in the astronaut business. When they were going back and forth about this maneuver with Massimino on the telescope — a maneuver that could shred his suit and the telescope if it went wrong — ground Control said, “We’re a bit concerned about the stored energy in the handhold.”

One of the striking things, watching the astronauts work, is how slowly everything goes. They move slowly, slowly, slowly, like fish in glycerin. They can barely bend their hands to grasp tools because of all the pressure keeping them alive inside their suits. But when I was watching Massimino on that one space walk, everything seemed way speeded up. At first I thought they were running file footage at double speed. Then I learned he’s from New York.

And now, folks, sorry, but I have things to do. Got to watch them putting the new thermal insulation “blankets” around all that great new equipment they’ve successfully put in. As Jack Horkheimer says, “Keep looking up!” There’ll be great new Hubble pics coming out of this.

update below

The news is spreading everywhere: Mexico flu ‘a potential pandemic’. In the next few days we’ll probably have a replay of the bad old bird flu days. Tamiflu! Hide in your house! Shoot the postman! Or whatever level of idiocy we achieve this time.

I did one of my POPs (Pissed Off Posts) on that occasion, and I think it’s time for a rerun.

First, this newest flu strain, H1N1 (CDC info), sounds vicious. It’s communicable between people (in the US, as of this morning, there were 11 cases with no fatalities) but it’s already killed dozens of people in Mexico. This makes it a far more serious threat than bird flu, which was almost never caught from another person. So being worried about this new flu is not a mark of loopiness in the same way as setting your hair on fire over bird flu. But panic is still an intensely foolish reaction, and the points I’ll run through below are still valid.

Fiction 1: We’re all going to die. It makes for a good movie script, but this is not the way flu works. Even SARS, which had an exceptionally high rate, had about 15% fatalities. Obviously, the only good rate is zero. The point I’m trying to make is that exaggerating risk does not help anyone to deal with it.

Fiction 2. Quarantine will stop the disease. Imagine two different scenarios. You feel the first twinges of something that could be flu. In the first scenario, you go to the hospital, get tested, receive free medication, your whole family and all your contacts are tested and also receive any necessary medication. People who see how you were treated are also alert to any sign of flu and go to get treatment as fast as possible. In the second scenario, you go to the hospital, and get tested. Then you’re quarantined for an unspecified length of time, your family is quarantined and unable to go to work, pay the rent, go to school, or do anything they have to do. The money spent on finding and quarantining you and yours is not available to provide an adequate supply of drugs. Obviously, in the second case you’ll rush to the hospital at the first sign of flu. Not.

Quarantine is useful in some situations that epidemiologists know all about. They’ll tell you when quarantine is necessary. Really, they will. Public hysteria is never useful.

Fiction 3. I’ll take Tamiflu and save myself! No, you won’t. Save yourself, that is. Here’s why.

Flu viruses mutate. Flu viruses mutate a lot. They develop resistance to antivirals incredibly fast, much faster than bacteria do to antibiotics. Way back in 2005, in the bird flu days, this was already a problem, and Tamiflu had barely been invented. Flu viruses are growing resistant to antivirals: “…in a special online edition of The Lancet, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 12% of influenza A strains worldwide have developed resistance to the most widely used flu medications.” (That referred to A-series, not H-series, viruses and not to Tamiflu specifically, but the principle is exactly the same.)

So, by trying to take care of number one, instead of everyone, we’ll end up breeding resistant disease, potentially in a matter of weeks, and we’ll all be defenseless, including the people who took it “preventively.”

When is it sensible to take an antiviral? When it is part of the public health measures to contain an outbreak. On an individual level, it’s prescribed preventively when you or someone you live with has a diagnosed case of flu. This is the main reason why outfits like the CDC don’t stock enough doses of antivirals for “everyone.” We don’t need enough for everyone. We need enough to blanket regions with outbreaks, and we need those viruses not to be already resistant to the only drugs available because people have been using them wrongly.

Another consequence of viruses’ rapid mutation rate is that new lethal strains appear all the time. Case in point, H5N1 bird flu in 2005, H1N1 swine flu in 2009. That’s another reason why quarantine, by itself, doesn’t solve the problem. All you’re doing–if it works!– is putting out brush fires, while the viruses keep pouring on fuel just out of reach.

So, that’s what not to do. What are the sensible things that actually work?

First and foremost: vaccines. Obviously, we don’t have a vaccine for this new strain yet, and it’ll take several months before we do. Once it’s available, that’s the most effective protection and the best way to stop the spread (since the virus can’t hop from person to person as easily).

Once there is a vaccine, there’s a useful priority list as to everyone’s place in the line. It really helps to control the spread if people help with that. The most vulnerable people need to go first because they’re the likeliest to catch it and, therefore, to spread it. That puts everyone in greater danger. The priority is, more-or-less in order, frontline public health workers (nurses, ambulance drivers, and the like); school-age and day care-age children (the main vectors); the elderly, infants, and the immune-suppressed; people who deal with the public a lot (teachers, hairdressers, police, funeral workers, and so on), and, finally, the rest of us.

The next most useful thing is not to spread virus particles around. (I mean, duh, right?) The problem is we still don’t really know how they’re spread. The CDC thinks droplet infection (i.e. by air) is an important route. Other research points to touch as the main route. E. g. a BBC report on a study by Oxford & Lambkin, Journal of Infection, August 2005, pages 103-9.

One proven source of droplet infections is airplane trips. Since air travel is by far the biggest way viruses hop continents and spread long distances, I’d say that forcing the airlines to deal with their bad habits is right up there with vaccination as an important preventive measure. The airlines really are part of the problem. It’s not just a matter of many people in close proximity for a long time. The airlines save money by recirculating air without filtering it well enough, by keeping the air too dry because that’s cheaper, and by keeping its oxygen content too low, likewise because that’s cheaper. Airlines should be kicked, repeatedly, until they do what is necessary for the safety and health of their passengers and flight attendants.

For the rest of us, however, the most effective ways to stop the spread are:

1) Stay home at the first sign of sickness. That, up to the point when the disease peaks, is the time of highest infectivity. (I know. The feeling tends to be, “I’m already sick. I can’t get any sicker. And I’m sure not wasting any days off on this.” Or, “I have an exam. I have to go to class.” It’s another case where worrying about number one makes it worse for everybody, including eventually number one.)

2) Wash your hands or use alcohol wipes after touching doorknobs, phones, toilet handles, and anything else touched by many different people. Basically, you should be cleaning your hands about six times a day. The next most important thing is cleaning and disinfecting surfaces that are touched often (counters, phones, desks, etc.). The virus is activated when virus-laden fingers touch our mouths, nose or eyes. It is truly amazing how difficult it is not to touch one’s face, and how unconscious and automatic the process is. One of the interesting effects of wearing rubber gloves is that you find out how often you touch your face. Most face masks are useless for stopping viruses. Viruses are tiny. They’re just big molecules, after all. Any face mask that is easy to breathe through has a pore size that looks like chicken wire to a virus. However, what face masks can do, and do very effectively, is stop you from touching your nose or mouth.

So, as the hysteria mounts in the next weeks and months (unless we’re lucky and this bout is caught early enough so that it fizzles) remember what you know. There’s no need to shoot the postman. It wouldn’t help anyway. There’s no need for any heroic high noon standoffs at the OK Corral pharmacy for the last magic pills. Just wash your hands and don’t panic. (If you need to do something violent, kick the airlines.) And tell everyone you know to do what works instead of what feels good.

Update April 26, 5 pm: Then again, the BBC has a series of very worrisome comments from a whole series of people in Mexico City and Oaxaca, many of them health professionals. Not good.

Technorati Tags: swine flu, H1N1, influenza

Actually, what I’m about to discuss is the search for ET life, but you have to start somewhere and it’s getting more clear by the day that alien intelligence is the best hope for us blog denizens to find someone to talk to.

The idea that we’re not alone has a long and fascinating history, going back to Giordano Bruno who got burned at the stake for it. By the time SETI came along, things had advanced from that point. But not too far. You pretty much got burned at the academic stake for being involved in it, if they could get at you, so the field was heavily populated with tenured professors. By now, the astronomers have found so many planets orbiting other stars (including one, maybe more, exoplanets with evidence of water!) that scientists have gone from thinking SETI was for kooks to looking for the life-bearing planets they know are out there.

Just recently, March 9th to be precise, an article came out with such an elegant method of checking for life that we may be hearing about the first find in a matter of years instead of centuries. Life is peculiar in that it prefers molecules that polarize light a certain way (technically termed chirality). Whether or not light is polarized can be seen right across the universe, and whether that polarization has a given chirality or not, likewise.

The only problem is that we’re talking about very, very, very faint light here. The light has to bounce off, or pass through the atmosphere of a life-bearing planet before it acquires that signature polarization. Passing through gives the brightest signal, but for that the planet has to transit in front of its parent star, from our perspective, when for two brief moments (coming and going) the star shines through the planet’s atmosphere. That’s a somewhat rare event, and we don’t have too many candidates to check yet, but we do already have the capability to see the signal if we get it.

They could be looking at, for instance, Gliese 581e in the next few months. We might actually know any day now that there’s life besides ours among the stars. Being a total nerd, I’m wildly excited and waiting with bated breath. What do you think? Fun, huh?

This is beautiful beyond words. Admire it, or also get extra points if you know what it is.

Answer here. There’s also a video, which I can’t stop re-running. (Give it some time. It seems that nothing is happening for quite a while.)

The global warming news is grim. Just two recent headlines: Acid oceans need urgent action and Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. If you follow anybody’s writing on the topic (e.g. mine 2005 and 2007) you know all too much about the grimness. But where we make our mistake, you and me, is assuming that once the slower people finally recognize the facts, they’ll want to stop poisoning the planet.

Ha.

Now that they’re finally noticing that we’re headed to a hot place in a handbasket, they have a better answer. Geoengineering! We’re so good at controlling planetary processes, the best thing to do is mess with them!

Here, just for kicks, are some of the bright ideas, ranging in light level from black hole to guttering-candle-in-the-darkness. (To be fair to some of the scientists involved, they’re perfectly aware that the best of these are stopgaps, not solutions.) Read more »

NASA – Scientists Detect Cosmic ‘Dark Flow’ Across Billions of Light Years

Using data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. The cause, they suggest, is the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe.

“The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe’s expansion and does not change as distances increase,” says lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky

Hot gas in moving galaxy clusters (white spots) shifts the temperature of cosmic microwaves. Hundreds of distant clusters seem to be moving toward one patch of sky (purple ellipse). Credit: NASA/WMAP/A. Kashlinsky et al.

Betraying my essential nerdery, I have to admit I’m so excited about this I’m practically speechless. New physics! Other universes! Boldly going!

Ahem.

Right. Sorry about that. I’ll get back in my basket now.

I’m sorry. I just can’t take it any more. I’m going to stop the world and get off. Yes, that’ll make the oceans slosh and drown everyone else. You should have thought of that before you bored me.

Okay, you ask. What is it now?

Drivel framed in drivel. (No, I don’t have a link to the original. I can’t be arsed. It’s in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.) Study: men with genetic variant struggle with commitment Or this one from the New Scientist: Monogamy gene found in people

What if you could tell whether a man is husband material just by peering at his genes?

Read more »

Your Blogscientist has been falling down on the job. A few days ago I saw plenty of headlines about new nanoscale batteries. Everything’s nano-whatnot these days. I figured I’d read about it later. No doubt somebody had an extra 5% improved energy yield or something.

Turns out, no, this is really new. A team at MIT has genetically engineered bacteriophages — a kind of virus that normally attacks bacteria — to assemble batteries. Put them in a soup with the right ingredients and they pull out what they need to assemble anodes, cathodes, and, in short, batteries. (Abstract of Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences article.)

It’s lab bench work at this point, but as Belcher says,

“[R]ight now the thing is trying to make the best material possible, and if we get a really great material, then we have to think about how do you scale it.”

Scaling up means laptop batteries, car batteries, and — shoot for the stars, any damn fool can hit the ground — electromagnetic rail gun spaceship launching batteries.

Technorati Tags: batteries, nanoscale, virus, Belcher, Hammond, Chiang, MIT

Via Slashdot I found this Science News article which links to a mathematics site that’ll blow your mind up like bubble gum. It’s visualizations by mathematicians and graphic artists of four- and more-dimensional shapes. Plus, if you have any mathematical ability, in other words if you’re not like me, you may even understand what they’re talking about. But understanding isn’t needed to feel your mind expand.
Read more »

The annoying thing about all the clean energy technologies is that we can’t buy them and use them. Breakthroughs keep being reported, and then . . . nothing. If I had a solution to that problem, I’d be a lot richer than I am, but I’m a dreamer like everyone else. So, just to give you some more things to dream about, here are three advances on the energy front. (Life happened, so this is a few weeks past due, as usual for me.)

First is the discovery of how to channel light so that any window can act as a solar collector. Channeling light has been done since the first days of fiberoptics, and collecting light is the big problem facing photovoltaics. So it seems like somebody should have done this decades ago. As it happens, they tried in the 1970s. But there were no materials at the time capable of efficiently channeling light in the precise way required, nor did we have the right light-absorbing dyes. Materials scientists are the unsung heroes of the tech world.

(Photo / Donna Coveney) Read more »

Interesting times. From universetoday.com (via Slashdot):

The White House is Briefed: Phoenix About to Announce “Potential For Life” on Mars
It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more “provocative” than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface. … Whilst NASA scientists are not claiming that life once existed on the Red Planet’s surface, new data appears to indicate the “potential for life” more conclusively than the TEGA water results. Apparently these new results are being kept under wraps until further, more detailed analysis can be carried out….

These new MECA results are, according to the Phoenix team, a little more complex than the water “discovery.” Scientists are keen to point out however, that this secretive news will in no way indicate the existence of life (past or present) on Mars; Phoenix simply is not equipped make this discovery. What it can do is test the Mars soil for compounds suitable to support life. The MECA instrument does have microscopes capable of resolving bacterial-scale life forms however, but this is not the focus of the forthcoming announcement, sources say.

They seem a bit desperate not to find evidence of life. Mustn’t upset anyone entitled to their own facts, I guess.

The likeliest scenario is that this will turn out to be evidence of some carbon-based compounds. That, together with the earlier evidence that the Martian soil at the Phoenix site has water and Earth-like pH all points toward increased probability that there was or is life on Mars.

It’s bacterial life, at most, but that would be huge. Vast. Impossible to overstate. Because it means one of two things: either that life generally appears when there is carbon-based chemistry in the presence of water, or that some bacteria can make it through space often enough to seed life wherever conditions support it. Or both.

Either way, it would mean that life is common in the universe, not rare.

Technorati Tags: Mars, Phoenix, water, life

This is one of those feel-good stories that just lights up my day. (It’s night here, but you know what I mean.)

NZ dolphin rescues beached whales.

… The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said.

But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.

The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island. …

Technorati Tags: dolphins, whales, interspecies, communication

The Second Law, that is. This should not be possible unless you add energy to the system. For instance, if there were a giant fan in Los Angeles, blowing their so-called air out to sea.

But there is no giant fan.

I saw this while hiking northwest of LA, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it. This is what the plume of LA pollution normally does. It’s not a matter of ground and upper level winds either. The pollution is near ground level and so was I, going from sea level to about a thousand feet up a coastal mountain.

How does dirty air move out into the ocean against the wind? How? This is really bothering me. If anyone knows how this happens, tell me!

Update: a commenter on this post at Shakesville suggests what I think may be the answer:

OK, maybe…
The polluted air is denser and lies along the ground. Ground drag doesn’t allow it to move as readily as the cleaner, eastbound air above, which thus moves across the top of the smog bank and, being cooler, sinks, displacing the polluted air, which moves west because it is blocked by the coastal mountain range to the east.
cory | 03.11.08

Technorati Tags: pollution, inversion, convection, Los Angeles

What’s not to love?

(Via Wired.com)

(Well, to be absolutely honest, I’d still rather have an Aptera….

)

The planet’s big problems relate to energy. Using it is warming the planet. Getting it is causing wars. Running out of it will end in poverty and famine. Now that we’re getting closer to the apocalypse, it looks like the four horsemen are all riding one cloned horse.

The first task is to figure out the scope of the problem. How much energy do we use? How much will we need in, say, 2050? (That’s a favorite year for projections: it’s nice and round, and within many current lifetimes, but not so close that there’s no hope.) The next task is to consider which types of energy could supply the needs. And the final task would be to go out and do it. The system breaks down at that crucial point. There are solutions to the energy crisis. We’ll soon find out if there’s a solution to the “people’s heads in a place where the sun don’t shine” crisis.

(Fair warning: this is another one of my interminable posts…) Read more »

What can I say?   I love these things.

These are some new friends I recently met at Point Dume near Malibu.  During very low tides, such as we had at the end of December, you can just wander around among the tide pools and find things that you’d normally only see snorkeling.

Crossposted to Shakesville.

Technorati tags: sea squirts, tunicates, Malibu, Pyura haustor