Category Archives: Science And Society

Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Cure For Diabetes?

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It seems to work in mice:

Last year, Dr Terry Strom and his team demonstrated that they could stop the on-going destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in mice using a combination of three drugs, although they were unable to regenerate the cells.

However, when they added an extra ingredient – an enzyme called alpha 1 anti-trypsin – a significant rise in the number of beta cells was seen.

I’m not sure what the point is here:

It is exciting that these drugs could stop the immune system from attacking insulin-producing cells, but it is too early to tell whether these cells recovered in the mice or if new cells were produced.

Does it matter, from a practical standpoint? I can understand why the researchers would be curious, but a cure is a cure.

Anyway, here’s hoping that it can work in higher mammals.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society

Proves Her Point About The Math Thing

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Charlotte Allen is embarrassed to be a woman. She gets the math wrong here, though:

Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women.

Since the statistic is on a per-mile basis, the fact that men drive more miles a year is irrelevant. So the disparity–5.1 versus 5.7–is actually quite small, and perhaps within the statistical error.

Of course, the thing that statistics like this don’t reveal is how many accidents they cause, unbeknownst to them, because they are oblivious to their surroundings. I’m always bemused by someone who I know to be a terrible driver bragging about the fact that they’ve never had an accident. Not to imply that men don’t do this as well, of course.

General Science, Science And Society

Eating Themselves To Death

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A new theory about the end of the Neanderthals:

“TSE’s could have thinned the population, reducing numbers and contributing to their extinction in combination with other factors (such as climate change and the emergence of modern humans),” he said.

Such diseases have very long incubation periods, he further explained, so affected individuals may not show symptoms for a very long time. Similarly, people who consume TSE victims may not exhibit signs of illness immediately after eating.

“Neanderthals would have been unlikely to spot any causal relationship between cannibalism and TSE symptoms,” Underdown said.

No kidding.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Are Americans Stupid?

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Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts:

See how deftly it’s done? Stupid religious Americans, clever “heathen” Europeans. Unfortunately, in the context, this doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. Americans are opposed to stem cell research because we’re ignorant religious bigots. Okay, sure. But we’re opposed to nanotechnology for the same reasons? And GM foods?

GM foods? Now wait a second…a lot of Europeans are opposed to GM foods. I bet they would even say it’s on moral grounds! Yet somehow, they manage to pull that off without being either 1) religious or — more importantly — 2) stupid. Personally, I think being morally opposed to GM foods is kind of stupid, and being “morally” opposed to nanotechnology is idiotic. However, I don’t see how American stupidity is dumber than European stupidity; one may be informed by religious belief, the other by a paranoid superstitious dread of scientific progress. Advantage: Europe? If you say so.

I just hope that Americans aren’t stupid enough to fall for Obama, as the Democrats currently seem to be.

General Science, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Not So Identical

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Apparently “identical” twins don’t even have identical genetics:

Identical twins emerge when a zygote — the fertilized egg that develops into an embryo — splits into two embryos. As such, they should have the same genomes. The researchers speculate that as the cells making up each embryo divide over and over again during development in the womb, mistakes occur as dividing cells shuffle copies of their DNA into daughter cells.

But genetic differences between identical twins might also accumulate after development over a twin’s life as well. “I think all our genomes are under constant change,” Bruder told LiveScience.

I think that this has implications for cloning as well. It may not be possible to exactly clone an individual, and the differences could turn out to be quite noticeable.

[Update in the evening]

Per some comments, the key point in this story is that it has long been known that there are differences in twins (personality, eyesight, fingerprints, etc.). But those are things that can arise even from an identical genome. The genes are not a blueprint, but rather a recipe, and even if a recipe is followed carefully, the results are not always guaranteed to be the same. The point of the article is that, contrary to previous theories that obvious differences in twins could be attributed solely to different environments, that the genome itself wasn’t necessarily the same. That is new.

Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Which Is Greener?

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Driving, or walking? John Tierney stirs up a hornet’s nest of vegans and other morally overrighteous high-horse riders (see comments). I mean, to question Ed Begley, Jr. Isn’t that just the height of apostacy?

This reminds me of a piece that I’ve been thinking of writing about overall energy and fuel costs, including human fuel. With the ethanol boondoggle, we’ve gone back to the point at which we’re using crops for transportation (something we largely left behind at the end of the nineteenth century) and we now have increasing prices in both food and fuel as they compete with each other for the same farmland. This isn’t a good trend for the Third World (consider that one of the effects of the ethanol subsidies has been a dramatic increase in corn and tortilla costs in Mexico, making a poor country even more so).