I saw on the news last night about the NYC steam pipe explosion, and was greeted by more news this morning of the same. Except this time they took a moment to tell me that there was a fair amount of asbestos in the dusty debris, but none in the actual air. And also not to worry about any health problems (they being the city’s Office of Emergency Management).

I have two thoughts, neither particularly brilliant, but see my coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.
1) OF COURSE there was asbestos. Everybody and their donkey used to use asbestos to insulate and fire retard building materials. It was good. And then it was bad. And now it’s in limbo.
2) The health track record of those involved in 9/11 is less than heartening. I mean we had the World Trade Center cough, and now, we’re bracing for a terrifying glut of cancer.

The moral of the story is: cities and buildings are full of gosh darn disgusting stuff that was never meant to be pulverized and aerosolized and breathed into our delicate little lungs.

A couple years ago the 14 year old Rajesh Kumar from the town of Rampur started spouting english to huge effect, according to the Indian superstitious news wires and IBNLive.com:

The boy talks gibberish with a few words of science thrown in here and there. And the people in his village Rampur claim that “Rajesh Kumar is explaining scientific formulas and concepts,” although he has never studied science or has been overseas.

Watch the video of his garble here. Anyways, it turns out that he’s nothing near a reincarnation of some American egghead. Doubts surfaced when his many grammatical errors came to light (which, if you watch the video is a generous way of describing his blathering) and he appeared incapable of understanding the language himself.

After Zee News grilled the poor teen for five hours (no one devotes the airtime to live interrogations anymore - clearly a very effective means of cutting through the bull) he finally confessed. “It was a Hollywood movie, Total Recall, and the constant exposure to Western culture that gave him a cursory knowledge of English,” Zee News triumphantly reported. And yes, the irony of that movie title is not lost on me. Here’s the 411:

In 2005 on the eve of 26th January, Rajesh was insulted by his teacher when he failed to read out a speech in English. The incident left a scar on his mind, and a humiliated Rajesh vowed revenge. He took up this challenge, and set out on a spree of watching English movies and listening to English songs.

Anne and I share our office with some fabulously lovely persons (and two cats). Yesterday, two of said awesome dudes consumed one square of an energy bar they got free at a street market. Said chocolately-like bar is called Red Rush. It’s active ingredients are caffeine (160mg for the bar, about one really big cup of coffee); taurine (a normal metabolite of amino acid cysteine that helps with detox processing in the liver); D-Glucoronolactone (again a normal metabolite of glucose) and guarana (a South American, coffee-like bean that manufacturers use to pack in LOADS of caffeine, in an unregulated way. Anyways).

The combo of caffeine, D-gluc and taurine is found in many energy drinks and some studies have found it to increase athletic performance. For an overview of the three, check this page from the European Commission. Highlights of the report include: “There is a lack of scientific evidence to support the safety of taurine present in beverages at concentrations that may result in intakes several-fold higher than that usually obtained from the rest of the diet.” AND “While there is no indication from the available data that there is any risk to health from consumption of high amounts of glucuronolactone, there is a lack of scientific evidence to support the safety of glucuronolactone present in beverages at concentrations that may result in intakes as much as two orders of magnitude greater than that obtained from the rest of the diet.”

But I digress. Knowing my interest in all things medical, these two boys came over to my desk to report on their experience with the bar (actually in hindsight, they were probably high and you know how high people are). I should note that both boys had at least one, if not two cups of of coffee today, which likely compounded the effects of eating the bar.  Within five minutes, they both felt hot flashes and an increase in heart rate. They said their eyes were glassy, irritated and they had reduced depth perception (”...it’s like you and the brick wall are in the same plane...."). One mentioned it was a feeling similar to a medication he’d taken that mimicked psychosis - at least in the visual field “...I feel like I could jump that far right now...”.  Both were sweating on the upper lip and forearm. They both promptly left and went for a bike ride. 

We humans like to think we’re extremely important and responsible. We wring our hands in guilt over driving animals to extinction, feeling that it’s only with our intervention that said animals can ever make a comeback, and survive in this tricky and challenging world. How will they manage without our interference? How will they cope? Just fine apparently. The endangered desert pupfish has been pushed to the brink of dying out by habitat destruction, and is facing an uncertain future. However, it seems that some of these fish have beaten the odds, and found themselves a shiny new habitat - man-made ponds, designed to study the steady pollution of an inland body of water called the Salton Sea. The ponds are designed to study the effect of the pollution in this pond on the local seabirds, but are now acting as a sanctuary for the fish. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that the only way the fish could have got into the pond is by swimming along a 1.5 mile long pipe. Resourceful little creatures, we should really give them more credit! 

Appearing in the most recent issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute is a study finding insufficient evidence to allow food manufacturers to label their tomato-containing products as Cancer Fighters.

I find myself pleased and then generally disquieted about the whole affair.

First of all we’ve been told for years now that lycopene - the molecule that gives tomatoes their red color - can fight cancer. The original, and still best studied cancer is prostate. Various studies tracking dietary habits have found that men who eat more tomato products have lower rates of prostate cancer - the relationship holds for foods like pizza and lasagna and spaghetti as lycopene is a fat-soluble antioxidant, so eating it with a small amount of fat is good.

Of course there have also beens studies that find a very limited effect, such as this one (though it did find significant protection for men with a family history of prostate cancer who ate fatty-tomato foods). And then there was the super-fun realization that lycopene on its own doesn’t seem to have any cancer-fighting ability, at least in rats.  You need the whole tomato.

But see here’s where it gets interesting. In 2004 the FDA received applications (from people like Heinz) for a qualified health claim.  When evaluating food claims that go on labels, the FDA doesn’t count dietary survey or observational studies. To count, it must be a controlled trial where researchers manipulate diet (ie this group eats 5 tomatoes a day, that group 3 and that group 0), or they don’t think it’s strong enough evidence.

And because no one has really done this work, they can’t recommend that food companies be allowed to label their pizza, ketchup or pasta sauce with NOW FIGHTS CANCER!!!!!! NOW FIGHTS EVEN MORE CANCER! STOP USING SUNSCREEN, JUST SLATHER ON KETCHUP!

Which, to be honest, is good. Especially in the case of dubiously health foods like pizza or lasagna, where sure! they have tomatoes! but they also have lots of shitty cheese, sugar, preservatives and refined carbohydrates, but now they are HEALTH FOOD. Sort of like Oreos with ZERO TRANS FATS!  Adding a simple health claim for a very non-simple food/health relationship is could, in theory, promote worse overall food decisions because it removes the brain from the equation.

And let’s be honest. Who hasn’t said - I will eat these very healthy and delicious potato chips because they are made with OLIVE OIL, OKAY?

But then again, I can’t really kick up my heals at this one, either. Because a) I hate that companies even ask for this kind of over-simplifying, research-distorting slogan crap, because my guess is that eventually there WILL be enough evidence for them to go through with it because b) tomatoes really DO seem to help ward away cancer. And the FDA rejection is just another kind of mixed message. And why don’t observational studies count for anything when they make headline news (hence public information) all the time? And is anyone really stupid enough to think that their Pizza Hut Meat Lovers Deep Dish is good for you?

This is a very short post to say that I’ve found the best icons ever. See?

For all those science geeks out there who miss the days of staring at beating cilia in high school bio labs, this is for you: Single Celled Icons from Icon Icon available for both Mac and PC. You’ve got your choice of amoeba (nine types) and paramecium type (another nine of these) critters.

For directions on how to welcome these beasts into your life and change your icons, check out these great instructions from Apple. 

In a remarkable feat of investigative reporting that will probably turn the entire next issue of the New Yorker green with envy, the Washington Post has wrapped up a four-part series outing Cheney as the dark force in the White House. The neutrally titled ”ANGLER: THE CHENEY VICE PRESIDENCY” by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker topped 16 broadsheet pages of 20,000 words.

Lucky for those of us who are behind the curve, it’s all available online, with a handy ”cast of characters” index reminiscent of those in the equally criminally bent Perry Mason novels.

All four sections make for fascinating reading that leave one feeling wide-eyed and naive in the face of such manipulative prowess (this man makes the O.C.’s Julie Cooper look like Mrs. Claus).

So what does this have to do with science? Well the fourth section on environmental policy, Leaving No Tracks uncovers some new nuggets in ”The Republican War on Science” - as coined by Chris Mooney in his aptly titled bestseller. 

But from what I’ve read its less of a war and more of a guerrilla ambush. Witness the controversy over the Klamath river basin in Oregon. Precious and scarce river water could not be diverted to water farmer’s fields in order to protect two endangered species of fish, as per the Endangered Species Act.

The thing to do, Cheney told Smith [former Republican congressman from Oregon who represented said drought-suffering farmers] was to get science on the side of the farmers. And the way to do that was to ask the National Academy of Sciences to scrutinize the work of the federal biologists who wanted to protect the fish.

...Cheney got what he wanted when the science academy delivered a preliminary report finding “no substantial scientific foundation” to justify withholding water from the farmers…

When the lead biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service team critiqued the science academy’s report in a draft opinion objecting to the plan, the critique was edited out by superiors and his objections were overruled, he said. The biologist, Michael Kelly, who has since quit the federal agency, said in a whistle-blower claim that it was clear to him that “someone at a higher level” had ordered his agency to endorse the proposal regardless of the consequences to the fish.

So the farmers got their way. But not long after some 77,000 Coho and Chinook salmon washed up dead on the banks of the trickling river. The commercial fishery on the West Coast crashed in the following years and Congress doled out $60 million to help fishermen recover their losses. Add to that the $15 million which Congress paid the farmers to stop farming and you’ve got a pricey bill.

Remember Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA’s ex-chief who resigned in 2003 for personal reasons? Turns out “it was Cheney’s insistence on easing air pollution controls” that drove her away. She simply couldn’t sign his energy task force’s rule change, which excused the nation’s dirtiest plants from installing costly new pollution controls

A federal appeals court later deemed that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act.  The administration’s legal rationalizations would only hold up in a “Humpty-Dumpty world,” the judges said. This begs the question, if Cheney operates in a Humpty-Dumpty world, where’s his great fall? 

(PHOTO: Jyn Meyer)

I saw this press release from Imperial College London about a new pediatric research clinic opening up in London (at Imperial and St. Mary’s Colleges). Which sounds a little boring. But let me assure you, it’s not.

Why you ask? Because kids suffer when treatments and medications are not tested directly on them. Children are not just scaled-down grown ups. Some examples:

1. Antidepressants: they make adults happier and want to kill themselves less. They make under 18s (and maybe even under 25s) want to kill themselves MORE.
2. Aspirin. The basic, the wonderful, the good and great heart disease, cancer and fever fighter, can kill under 16s via Reye’s Syndrome.

So poke, dope, inject, measure and test away. Kids of the future will be grateful.

(PHOTO: T YOUNG)

Everyone just loves a giant squid. Could be the whole Captain Nemo, mysterious whale-hunter of the deep dark oceans, the tentacles. Or the thought of one NEVER ENDING plate of calamari. Yum.

Anyways. A rather large squid has washed ashore in Australia, measuring some 26 feet long. But what piqued my interest most was the statement that giant squids are filled to the brim with ammonia, which they use as a buoyancy aid.

Nothing like a little Windex cooked right into your fried mollusk appetizer. 

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been reading up on death. Morbid stuff. But I come across some really interesting crap too. Again morbid, but how about this:

In 1986, Clifford Warwick, a vet in the UK, wrote a letter to the editor of the Canadian Veterinary Journal. It was in regards to the appropriate method of euthanasia for snakes a reptiles. He was advocating against decapitation because, it seems, a reptilian head can stay alive and responsive for up to 59 minutes (!!) after being severed.

“One hears of anecdotal accounts where snakes and lizards indicate consciousness following decapitation, as the head may be seen to react to an approach by attempting to defend itself, respond to touch with movement and respond to light with pupil dilation and contraction. Klauber (7) was one of the first to document such reactions as much as 59 minutes after decapitation. However, he made no conclusions regarding the 13 rattlesnakes, used in his experiments, ability to feel pain. “

They manage this extra-ordinary feat because of their extreme tolerance to hypoxia or oxygen deprivation.