mar 2010 / greg goebel / public domain
* This weblog provides an "online diary" to provide notes on current events, interesting items I run across, and the occasional musing. It promotes no particular ideology. For update notifications, follow "gvgoebel" on Twitter.
* CASE CLOSED -- LEE HARVEY OSWALD (5): Conspiracy theorists have wondered why Lee Harvey Oswald was not harassed by American authorities when he came back from the USSR, but the truth was that his temporary stay in the Soviet Union did not break any US laws. He could not have betrayed any secret information to the Reds for the simple reason that he had no secret information to betray. Of course, he was now automatically disqualified from ever obtaining even the most casual security clearance -- but since he wasn't in any position to obtain a job that required a security clearance, or for that matter any job that required more than menial skills, that wasn't an issue either.
American authorities did have some interest in him, which of course conspiracy theorists also try to make out as suspicious. Not long after Oswald had arrived in Fort Worth, the FBI gave him a call; the bureau had opened up a file on him when he went to the USSR and wanted to talk to him. The interview was on 26 June 1962 and it was confrontational, with the FBI agents finding him evasive and uncooperative. Incidentally, the CIA later claimed the agency hadn't spoken to Oswald after his return, but documents were later uncovered that suggested a CIA official had debriefed him. When the news came out, some who had been CIA staff at the time confirmed that Oswald had in fact been interviewed, and that the interview had amounted to nothing. Whether the CIA had simply dropped the ball in claiming the agency hadn't talked to Oswald or had been trying to "cover its ass", the ultimate result was to help fuel conspiracy theories.
In July, Marguerite Oswald showed up in Fort Worth, rented a tiny apartment, and asked that Lee move in with his family. Lee didn't like the idea but Marguerite was as always inflexible, and they moved in on 14 July. He got a job as a sheet-metal worker with Leslie Welding Company three days later. Marguerite got to picking on Marina, with the tension escalating until Lee took his family out of the apartment on 10 August, with Marguerite throwing a screaming fit, chasing after the car when Robert Oswald took them away.
Lee took his family to a broken-down rental house. On 16 August, the FBI dropped by; they wanted to talk to him again. This time the conversation went more smoothly, and the FBI decided to close Oswald's file. It could be opened again when needed, but for now Oswald had disappeared off the FBI's screens. Some conspiracy theorists insist that the FBI visited Oswald in order to recruit him, but no credible evidence supports this notion.
Oswald was frustrated. He and Marina were not getting along well, leading to quarrels and occasional sessions of wife beatings. He was involved with a group of Russian emigres through Marina, and they tended to judge him as "not quite right in the head". Oswald remained a noisy Communist -- although he didn't have a high opinion of the USSR, he shrugged it off as a bad implementation of a good idea -- which didn't go over well with the emigres either, since most were anti-Communist. Oswald remained in character in his ability to win friends and influence people. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* SCIENCE NOTES: It is known that the human genome includes some sequences that were obtained from "retroviruses" -- the class of viruses, the best-known member being the HIV pathogen that causes AIDS, that have a genome made of the RNA molecule instead of the DNA molecule, and insert their genome into the host cell genome. At some occasions in the past, retroviruses inserted their genomes into the human germ cell line and left their markers with us. Fortunately, the genomes of all such retroviral hitchhikers in our genome are broken by mutations, so they can't be expressed and produced.
Somewhat to their surprise, a team of Japanese researchers found copies of the genome of a "bornavirus", a virus that causes diseases in horses and sheep, inserted into the human genome in several places. The bornavirus is an RNA virus but not a retrovirus: it normally does not insert its genome into that of a host cell. The bornavirus genome has also been found inserted into the genomes of other mammals, with bornavirus "fossil" patterns common to us and other animals indicating that such insertions went back when we shared common ancestors. Using that for a very rough clock, the oldest insertions are about 40 million years old.
* DISCOVERY CHANNEL Online had an interesting little photoessay on the Hawaiian bobtailed squid, a charming little thumb-sized creature that has an interesting relationship with symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria, Vibrio fischeri, live in an organ provided by the squid; the microorganisms, which are luminescent, return the favor by illuminating the bottom of the squid so that predators looking up don't see a shadow going overhead.
The squids are active at night. In the morning, they eject a large portion of the bacteria, allowing them to "infect" other squids, and then bury themselves in sand to hide out for the day while their bacteria replenish themselves. Once the sun goes down, the squid venture out, camouflaged by the bacterial light, which is reflected downward and, it seems, modulated to a degree to match lighting conditions by the structure of the organ in which the bacteria live. The squid otherwise does not need the bacteria to stay alive.
Incidentally, humans have tinkered with using illumination for camouflage as well. During World War II, the US experimented with rigging up aircraft with lights arranged so that they wouldn't be as easy to see from a distance in daylight conditions, allowing them to sneak up on German submarines cruising on the ocean surface before they could dive and escape. The scheme actually worked as planned, but nobody could figure out a really satisfactory way to mount the lights on the aircraft and it was judged generally impractical.
* There was a buzz in the science blogosphere concerning the "Dark Energy Camera (DECAM)", being developed by the US Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The DECAM is no ordinary camera: it has a resolution of 570 megapixels, is cooled to -100 degrees Celsius, and is the size of a minicar. The DECAM uses an array of 74 CCD imagers to achieve its high resolution; it has to crunch so much data that it takes 17 seconds to obtain a single image.
In 2011, the DECAM, will be installed in a 4 meter (157 inch) telescope known as the "Blanco" at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Using the DECAM, the telescope will map the southern skies, obtaining floods of data on the reddening of light or "redshifts" of distant galaxies and other cosmic objects due to the expansion of the Universe. The detailed redshift maps are expected to provide new insights into the mysterious "dark energy" that seems to control the expansion rate of the cosmos.
* While the arts and the sciences don't have a reputation for getting along well, there are those who do make the attempt to bridge the gap. One interesting example is UK visual artist Luke Jerram, who has taken to rendering pathogens -- the flu virus, HIV, and so on -- as glass sculptures. Jerram's work tends to illustrate the mixed feelings we have towards pathogens: as deadly as they are, they can be absolutely fascinating and even, to the properly tuned eye, downright beautiful.
* VENTER DOES BIOFUELS: The rush to develop biofuels over the last few years seems to have slowed somewhat, partly due to fluctuations in oil prices and partly due to the fact that expectations for biofuels have proven a bit overblown. However, as reported in THE ECONOMIST ("Craig's Twist", 15 July 2009), oil giant Exxon is now investing $300 million USD in biofuel research and, if things seem to work out, may invest $300 million more. The money is going to Synthetic Genomics, a startup in San Diego, California, run by Craig Venter. Venter's credentials are good, since he ran Celera Genomics, the for-profit firm that helped decipher the human genome.
Synthetic Genomics has a different target: algae. Currently, biofuels are made by fermenting corn or sugarcane to produce ethanol, or processing plant oils to make biodiesel. Both processes leave something to be desired in terms of delivering a cost-effective product. Venter would like to "biomanufacture" fuels using algae that have been genetically modified to directly produce fuels with little or no additional processing.
Many startups are tinkering with biofuels from algae, some species of which produce oils that can be used for biofuels. One of the issues in this process is to get the oil out of the algae; Venter's team has managed to genetically modify algae so it actually releases the oil, which floats to the surface of the culture tank. The oil still needs processing to turn into fuel, and that's where the Exxon money comes in. The oil produced by the algae is a "triglyceride" that contains oxygen atoms, along with carbon and hydrogen; Synthetic Genomics plans to further tweak the genome of the algae to get rid of the oxygen, resulting in a pure hydrocarbon that could, in principle, be used as a fuel with no further manufacturing steps.
Once Synthetic Genomics has the genetic tweaks in place, the last task is to find a species of algae best suited for biomanufacturing, capable of handing intense sunlight and the associated heat so it can photosynthesize like mad. Since the algae will be cultivated in large batches, it will also need to be disease resistant. If no one algae species has all these desireable properties, Synthetic Genomics will cut-&-paste the genomes of several to come up with one that does.
Carbon dioxide will be needed to drive the growth of the algae, and since the atmosphere can't provide enough, it will be obtained from the exhaust of a power plant or other major industrial facility. Since the power plant is driven by coal or other fossil fuels, the process is not carbon-neutral -- the CO2 ends up escaping in the end when the biofuel is burned in an automobile or other vehicle. However, there's no additional carbon footprint from burning vehicular fuels obtained from the ground.
Venter believes that his biofuel scheme can turn out at least ten times more fuel per hectare than can from corn or sugarcane, and will not take up land needed for food production. That's not an entirely level comparison, since the production system for his algae biofuels will be more complex and capital intensive, more like a chemical plant than a farm, and will need to be sited near power plants or other facilities to provide the CO2 -- though if it works out, admittedly a big "if", it might be profitable to simply build pipelines to pump the CO2 to the fuel synthesis plants. Right now it's a dream, but it can pay off sometimes to dream big.
* SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Online had several other articles on efforts in biofuels:
There are thousands of diatom species in India alone, with the organisms found in both fresh and sea water, and they grow rapidly in a benign environment. The IISc researchers propose building "solar panels" full of water loaded with nutrients and diatoms. The panels would be cheap to build and more convenient than the ponds used to raise algae for biofuels. The only trick is getting the oil out of the diatoms: trying to extract it from their bodies would be troublesome. The researchers are seeking ways to genetically modify diatoms so they will secrete their oil, which would then float to the surface of the water in the panel, where it could be skimmed off.
The last item included a comment that could apply to most biofuel efforts -- the researchers pointing out that at present what they have is essentially a blue-sky idea, one saying: "With R&D, it can look easy on paper, but you can run into all sorts of challenges."
* WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY? As reported by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Crying For Freedom", 16 January 2010), international human rights activists have noticed an unsettling trend: democratic rule seems to be on the decline around the world. Twenty years ago, with the fall of the Soviet empire, it seemed like the rule of authoritarians had been given a sharp rap that would, thanks to the unfortunate lessons of the past, provide a new drive to liberalize societies with open elections, the rule of impartial law, respect for the rights of individuals, freedom of expression and association, and free enterprise.
Even then, the sensible were keeping their fingers crossed, understanding that a hopeful outcome is not an inevitable one. They were wise to be cautious. Many of the states that arose from the rubble of the USSR are authoritarian, some downright tyrannical, and authoritarian states are now collaborating on how to maintain their grip on power. Worse, democratic states have lost their traditional, sometimes bubbly optimism over their own merits, and in fact seem increasingly apologetic about what they have to offer.
That weary spirit of apology partly owes its origins to the US war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which at the outset was enthusiastically proclaimed as a campaign for democracy. That wasn't the way things worked, and in fact much of the world saw American talk of democracy for Iraq as a cover for overbearing imperialism. The attempt to set up a democratic regime in Afghanistan has similarly proven rocky, with the corruption of the Afghan government undermining attempts by outsiders to impose a peace on the country. In contrast, emerging China seems to show that authoritarian rule can work, with countries such as Syria and Cuba taking China as a role model. Many poor countries are also fond of China, since the Chinese are inclined to do business with them without pestering them about little defects like miserable records on human rights and gross misgovernance.
That leads to the question of whether democracies are still a reasonable option for the undecided. Arguments can be made that they are, the most significant one being that authoritarian rule tends to be so bad. It is a concentration of unrestrained power in the hands of a few that is all but inevitably corrupting, the worst examples being the vicious "kleptocracies" of the nastiest African states, with leadership that loots a country to ruin and crushes anyone who dares protest. Even in their milder forms, authoritarian states are not generally inspiring places to live, their merits generally being enthusiastically praised by those who give the orders, but not by those who have to obey them.
Authoritarian regimes like to defend their ways by pointing out they ensure stability and promote efficiency. There is no strong evidence that they do either, and fair evidence that they don't. It has been observed that India, with its wide array of different ethnic groups and their tensions, could not have survived except as a democracy; stability imposed by repression is brittle, prone to ultimate fracture when the pressure finally becomes too great, and rigid authoritarian rule in India would have led to violent disintegration. Authoritarian states are particularly bad at transitions of power, with the passing of a strongman ruler often leading to chaos. As far as promoting efficiency goes, the reality is that authoritarian states are much more interested in denying accountability and perpetuating the rule of the leadership class than getting things done.
Corruption and inefficiency also seemed to be bred by state control over the economy. China has, as noted, been doing very well for itself economically, but that is very much due to the government releasing its grip over commerce. To the extent that it hasn't, is Chinese success due to the repressiveness of the leadership or in spite of it? Does a country that spends such resources trying to monitor its citizens on the internet really seem all that efficient or forward-looking? Is a government that is so neurotic, so confused in its priorities, that it hands out long prison sentences to harmless citizens who politely suggest nonviolent reforms really a model worth emulating?
On the best face of it, democracies have authoritarian states beaten in every way. Checks and balances dilute concentration of power; representative government ensures that different groups have a say in their own governance; transparency helps suppress corruption; free enterprise releases the energies of entrepreneurs; abuses of law are uncovered and corrected; transitions of power are orderly. Certainly, though elections don't always produce good leaders, they help prevent bad leaders from staying in charge indefinitely.
The problem is that it is possible to have all the formalisms of a democracy and end up with a system that is indistinguishable from the worst authoritarian states. Modern Russia is an unfortunate example: much care has been put into setting up a structure that resembles a Western parliamentary democracy, but the end result is a system that is notably corrupt and repressive. Freedom of speech on paper means little if it translates in reality to being gunned down on the street by goon squads.
The obvious truth is that democratic formalisms are nothing in themselves if underlying conditions that make them work are lacking. There has to be a culture where corruption, though it may exist, is not a normal and tacitly condoned practice; where differences of opinion, however loudly expressed, do not lead to violence; where there is a spirit of tolerance, if sometimes grudging, for individual expression; where factions are willing to make meaningful concessions and not insist on imposing their will on everyone else at any cost; and where the basic principle of government, however muddily expressed in practice, is that the state serves the citizens and not the reverse.
The ultimate fact is that while democracies can go wrong, authoritarian states are on the wrong track from the outset on ever going right. As Winston Churchill once observed, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." Democracy, for all its failings in practice, still remains worth defending -- though the defense has to be tempered by the realization that it's not always particularly easy to attain.
* PARASITIC WASP GENOME (1): Parasitic wasps are not pleasant beasts: they lay eggs on or in insect or spider hosts that hatch to devour their hosts alive. As reported by an article in AAAS SCIENCE ("The Little Wasp That Could" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 15 January 2010), however unpleasant they are, parasitic wasps are far more common and ecologically important than we realize. Says Daniel Janzen, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania: "You get one in your eye and you pull it out with your finger and think it's a piece of dust. There's millions of individuals out there, and you don't know they exist."
Despite their obscurity, parasitic wasps are significant in human affairs. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that parasitic wasps save the US about $20 billion USD a year by killing off vast numbers of insect pests. Scientists have certainly long appreciated the wasps: entomologists are fascinated, in a ghoulish sort of way, by their elaborate life cycles; ecologists are intrigued by their influence in ecosystems; and genetics researchers are increasingly finding them a rewarding and convenient lab subject -- "yeast with wings", as one geneticist put it.
Now an international group of over 150 researchers has published the genomes of three parasitic wasps of the genus Nasonia, which preys on flies. Geneticists see the new genomic data as not merely establishing the Nasonia wasps as a genomic model for the "hymenoptera" -- the insect order of ants, bees, and wasps -- but as lab organisms whose importance now ranks equal to traditional favorites like the Drosophila fruitfly and the C. elegans roundworm.
* Daniel Janzen got into parasitic wasps by an indirect path. He'd been a butterfly collector since boyhood, capturing caterpillars to see what kind of moth or butterfly they ultimately changed into. While engaged in this pursuit in Costa Rica in the early 1980s, he was confounded to find too many of his caterpillars turning to mush, with parasitic wasp larvae emerging from the debris. Instead of getting frustrated, however, Janzen started collecting the wasps, documenting their target hosts and visiting a wasp expert once a year to get identification on his specimens. Now Janzen has about 20,000 samples of wasps and an appreciation of just how common they are.
Some species of wasps will lay up to 200 eggs on a caterpillar, while others will only lay one egg that hatches to clone itself rapidly. Sometimes the larvae will lie dormant in a host, evading its immune system, and wait for the host to fatten up; when it does, the larvae rapidly eat it up from the inside out. Some treat their host as a nest, with some of the clones in the nest becoming sterile "soldiers" that take on intruders, significantly including other parasitic wasps.
Parasitic wasps also have interesting interactions with pathogens that live in them in turn. Many wasps are infected with the bacterium Wolbachia, which can skew the sex ratio of offspring. Other species of wasps carry a "male-killing" microbe that kills off males in a brood but not females. Some wasps even have a hitchhiker virus that ends up being injected into a host along with an egg to disable the host immune system.
One of the problems with the study of parasitic wasps is the fact that the wasps tend to look alike, even if they are different species with very different behaviors. When DNA barcoding began to become popular, Janzen offered his collection of wasps for analysis; 2,597 specimens were analyzed, yielding 313 species, instead of the 171 that had been assumed. Analysis has shown that one wasp believed to be a single species was actually 36. While almost 60,000 parasitic wasps have been identified, that seems to be merely the tip of the iceberg. When researchers sampling insects in a tropical forest fog a tree, parasitic wasps make up a high proportion of the samples collected. Says John Werren, an entomologist at the University of Georgia in Athens: "There's a really compelling argument that these parasitoid wasps may be more common than beetles." [TO BE CONTINUED]
* CASE CLOSED -- LEE HARVEY OSWALD (4): After getting married, Lee Harvey Oswald focused on getting out of the USSR. In May 1961, Oswald wrote the US embassy in hopes of arranging his return to the US along with his bride. It took some effort to get agreement, but in July, Oswald went to Moscow and finally managed to get the embassy to give him authorization. Marina submitted paperwork to obtain an entrance visa to the US as well. Marina was pregnant at the time and gave birth to a baby girl, named June, in February 1962.
Soviet authorities continued to be troublesome, though it is unclear why since the KGB had passed down the word that nothing was to be done to discourage Oswald from leaving. He wasn't wanted; possibly it was the issue of taking Marina with him that made matters difficult. Some conspiracy theorists have read volumes into Oswald's misadventures in his effort to go back home to the USA, but in hindsight it was an ordinary bureaucratic nightmare, the inconsistencies in the process being due to the occasional screwups that occur in a stream of paperwork. He did get a loan from the State Department for $435.71 USD, which has of course been seen as suspicious -- why would the government subsidize a disloyal citizen? However, the regulations allowed loans to help resolve situations embarrassing to the USA, and Oswald was judged such an embarrassment.
Finally, on 1 June 1962 Oswald and his family left the USSR on a train to Rotterdam. There they took passage on a ship and arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, on 13 June. Astoundingly, Oswald thought that reporters would flock to him to ask him about his defection and even wrote up a script for what he would say to them. To no surprise of no one but himself, nobody was there. It should be noted that there had been an article in the US news service when Oswald departed for the Soviet Union -- at the height of the Cold War, people noticed such things -- and there was an article when he came back, but he was hardly front-page news. Effectively penniless, he and his little family ended up living in the house of his brother Robert in Fort Worth, Texas, until he could get settled.
* Yuriy Nosenko had drifted away from the Oswald case even before Oswald had left the USSR, but after Oswald became globally infamous, KGB brass immediately ordered Nosenko to obtain the files on Oswald from Minsk and determine what official Soviet dealings had taken place with the American visitor. The files would have indicated if there had been any contacts by other Soviet intelligence services, such as the military GRU. Nosenko was able to give the files a reasonable looking-over, finding no evidence of any such contacts, before he was ordered to hand them over to the high-level KGB First Directorate. The KGB wanted to be able to reassure the Kremlin that Soviet intelligence had no interaction with Oswald, and a First Directorate report was felt to carry the maximum weight.
It is possible to have legitimate suspicions about what Oswald had actually been doing in the Soviet Union, that all the information revealed on his activities there was actually bogus, intended to cover the KGB's tracks. It is, however, also hard to dismiss the fact that Oswald was an emotionally unstable nobody; that the KGB had no reason to regard him as anything more than an obnoxious nuisance; and that no credible source of information has ever indicated anything different. Certainly it is difficult to believe Oswald was recruited as a Red agent before he went to the USSR, since defecting would have blown his cover permanently. One hint that makes it hard to believe that he was recruited after he went was the fact that he came back with Marina: sending Oswald back to the USA with a Russian wife in tow would have been like painting a big Red warning sign in blinking neon lights on him.
The KGB didn't even think Oswald might be an American spy, since they couldn't believe the CIA or FBI would employ such a loser. When asked if Oswald had any KGB connection, Nosenko replied: "Absolutely none. The files were clear. The KGB didn't want Oswald from day one." Unclassified KGB documents later said the same sorts of things. Again, nobody would judge the KGB a good source of reliable facts -- but it should be noted that the Soviet press, an instrument of the government, was publicly critical of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald was a lone operator. Had Oswald been a Red agent, the Soviets would have had an incentive to agree that he had been on his own, lest the trail of investigation lead back to the USSR. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As reported by BUSINESS WEEK, Adobe Systems -- maker of the effectively universal Adobe Reader / PDF and Adobe Flash schemes -- is now increasingly the target of writers of malicious software. Adobe Flash has been manipulated by banner ads to redirect incautious users to malware-loaded websites, while viruses have been written that lurk in Adobe PDF document files.
Adobe is being victimized in part because Microsoft has become a harder target. Adobe has been releasing fixes for and upgrades of its products more recently over the last year, but the company is only a twentieth the size of Microsoft and doesn't have the same level of resources to fight malware. Adobe is trying to release fixed versions of its software quarterly, but has tended to lag behind schedule. Adobe officials say they are gaining on the problem and think they can deal with it; in particular, they've trained their programmers on appropriate design practices to avoid loopholes in the software. Even if Adobe gets the upper hand, however, malware writers have other options; for example, Yahoo's Instant Messenger is now being increasingly targeted. Never underestimate the persistence of parasites -- they never stop trying to find a way in.
* As reported by DISCOVERY CHANNEL Online news, the era of gesture recognition appears to be approaching rapidly. Softkinetic, a Brussels-based software firm, is now collaborating with US semiconductor giant Texas Instruments and several French high-tech firms to introduce cheap 3D gesture recognition for consumer products. The collaborators are shooting for introduction of gesture-driven TVs and other products by Christmas 2010. A gesture-driven TV wouldn't need a remote; changing channels or volume could be performed with a wave of the hand. Gesture-driven videogames wouldn't need a Wii controller, with body movements and any convenient prop able to do the job. Softkinetic's system involves use of a little camera, like a webcam, on top of the TV or other product.
It seems like several other groups are working on related or similar tech -- Microsoft has been pushing a gesture-based Xbox 360 concept codenamed NATAL -- and visualize adding voice input and recognition. Ultimately, the system might be able to recognize specific individuals and operate as per the profiles for the individuals. Although NATAL has been dismissed as a gimmick, for myself I would like gesture-activated consumer products just so I wouldn't have to fumble around for different remotes all the time. Of course that leads to the interesting question of how to "address" a particular device when there's several of them in the room.
* Also as reported by DISCOVERY CHANNEL Online news, two researchers at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities, Martin Saar and Jimmy Randolph, have come with an intriguing, if admitted speculative, scheme in which carbon dioxide capture and sequestration is used to generate geothermal power, neatly killing two birds with one stone. It turns out that CO2 does a pretty good job of soaking up heat, and so the two researchers envision pumping the gas underground where it gets hot, then drawing a fraction of the hot gas back to the surface to run a steam turbine through a heat exchanger system. The CO2 would then be driven back underground again.
Saar and Randolph suggest that the efficiency of CO2 as a "working fluid" would be high enough to permit exploitation of geothermal power from locales where the underground temperature is too low to be useful with current technology. However, even they admit that they need to do much more homework on the idea to determine if it's practical -- but even at that, they certainly get points for a clever idea.
* SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN had a little photoessay on a new crane being worked on by Danish wind-power giant Vestas for servicing wind turbines. The "Tower Crane", as it's named, is a platform about the size of a pickup truck; it winches itself up the turbine tower using cables strung from the top, and locks itself into place against the tower with two oversized sets of clamps when it gets topside.
The platform has a crane that can be used to swap out turbine systems like gearboxes and generators. The Tower Crane is stable in wind gusts of up to 54 KPH (33.5 MPH). Vestas is developing the machine because large standard cranes are expensive, hard to come up, and relatively cumbersome to use. Ultimately, Vestas officials would like the Tower Crane to be an unmanned robotic system. Other wind energy companies are investigating comparable crane systems.
* THE CHAGAS THREAT: In one of the well-known minor stories of the history of science, the 19th-century English naturalist Charles Darwin suffered ill health most of his grown life, laid low by intermittent fits of vomiting, spasms, tremors, skin problems, and general malaise. It is not known what afflicted him, but one of the candidates is "Chagas disease" -- a parasitic infection common in South America, where Darwin may have picked it up after being bitten by the "great black bug of the Pampas" of Argentina in 1835.
As discussed in an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Kiss & Kill", 8 April 2009), the disease is caused by a single-celled protozoan, a spindle-like "trypanosome" with a single whiplike flagellum, the particular species being Trypanosoma cruzi. All the trypanosomes are malign parasites, with others being responsible for African sleeping sickness and the infection known as leishmaniasis. The T. cruzi protozoan is transmitted by a species of biting assassin bug known as the "reduviid bug", which tend to bite sleeping victims on the face -- and so they are also known as "kissing bugs".
The bug bite itself actually doesn't transmit the protozoan infection; the protozoans are in the bug's droppings and infect a host who rubs the bites, smearing the droppings into the sores. There may be a swelling around the bites early on, and the infection can then be treated. If not, it goes quiet for one or two decades, and then resurfaces with wide range of troubles with the internal organs -- heart, esophagus, colon, peripheral nervous system -- with about a third of the victims dying of heart and bowel problems. The disease was not understood at all until 1909, when a young Brazilian doctor named Carlos Chagas, then working in Buenos Aries, published a paper describing it. The paper was a remarkable piece of work, describing the pathogen, insect vector, circumstances of occurrence, and symptoms; Chagas was nominated for the Nobel Prize but never got the award. Brazil still honors his memory, however, having even printed currency with his face on it.
In northern lands, Darwin's mysterious illness is about all most hear about Chagas -- and it's even unclear that Darwin suffered from it, since his symptoms didn't exactly match those of Chagas disease. Latin Americans are not so ignorant of it, since Chagas disease kills more of them than any rival parasitic infection. About 18 million suffer from Chagas; rough estimates suggest it causes about 2.5 times more damage than malaria, leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis combined. Two drugs have been available from the 1970s that can kill off the trypanosome infection if it is caught early on, but that's not likely to happen and so prevention is really the key to fighting Chagas disease. The most effective measure is to spray the walls and thatched roofs of adobe houses with pesticides to kill the assassin bug vector, and such measures have reduced the incidence of Chagas disease in the southern "cone" of the South American landmass.
Unfortunately, Chagas seems to be resurging in the north. Fighting the disease has been a low priority, partly because the long latency makes it seem less urgent. Although the incidence of the disease has been rising in the northern provinces of Argentina, there has been more concern about increasing outbreaks of dengue fever. It's the same old story: current hot emergencies tend to shove other worries onto the back burner. With focus and funding elsewhere, Chagas diseases seems to be rallying for an unwelcome comeback.
In Bolivia, up to 70% of children in rural areas are infected with Chagas. Bolivian migrants to northern Argentina have carried the infection there, to be transmitted to assassin bugs that then pass it on to locals. Central America is suffering and Chagas has risen again in Mexico. The Chagas threat is now being increasingly recognized; an awareness program conducted in a poor district of Honduras, funded by the International Development Research Centre of Canada, stopped infections there in their tracks and cured almost 90% of the childhood infections.
That isn't enough: evolution ensures that the threat is a moving target. Assassin bugs are becoming resistant to insecticides, and the trypanosome seems to be acquiring new insect vectors in regions such as the Amazon basin. In Brazil, homemade fruit juice contaminated with insect droppings also seems to be doing its part to spread the parasite. Although traditionally a rural disease, Chagas is moving into urban areas.
Along with renewed and refined preventative efforts, there is a real need for a true cure of the infection. The problem is the will to develop it. All of Latin America's pharmaceutical market is only a tenth that of the USA, and as mentioned Chagas disease is prevalent mostly in rural areas, where people are poor to begin with. Pharmaceutical companies can't afford to find a cure on their own; it is becoming clear that an alliance of governments, commercial firms, and non-governmental organizations will have to be formed to get the job done.
* In closely related news, THE ECONOMIST ran an article ("Hello Again, God Of Plague", 20 June 2009) on the threat posed to China by the Schistosoma japonicum fluke, or parasitic flatworm, which causes the disease known as "schistosomiasis" -- the second most common tropical disease after malaria. The fluke is hosted during part of its life-cycle by fresh-water snails; when the worms mature, they leave the snails and then burrow from the water through the skin of mammal hosts. Victims suffer chronic diarrhea, fatigue, and fever; in severe cases, schistosomiasis can lead to swollen bellies, bladder cancer, liver damage, and death.
The better part of a million Chinese suffer from schistosomiasis. Back in the 1950s, the number was 12 million, but the Communist Party instructed the people to spear snails with sharpened chopsticks, with infection rates then dropping rapidly. Chairman Mao, encouraged, wrote a poem to honor the achievement titled "Farewell, God of Plague". Unfortunately, the disease proved harder to completely eradicate, even after the arrival in the 1980s of a drug named "Praziquantel" that can treat the disease. Drugs are all very well and good, but a vaccine would be better, and there is no vaccine against schistosomiasis.
Chinese authorities have been making inroads on the disease as of late by improving sanitation and replacing water buffaloes -- which also can be infected with the flukes, helping propagate them -- with tractors. Alas, it is an uphill struggle. Tractors are expensive and many peasants can't afford them, and peasants are often shockingly ignorant of how to deal with schistosomiasis even though it is prevalent among them. Many refuse to take Praziquantel, believing it will debilitate them, and balk at government programs to use pesticides to kill snails since the pesticides hamper shrimp and eel production in aquaculture. The new Three Gorges dam may prove disastrous to the health of locals, creating new environments where the snails, and their fluke parasites, will proliferate. The God of Plague may be poised to make a major comeback.
* CARBON PLANETS: Our Solar System has given us stereotypes of what planets should look like. We have the rocky Inner Planets like our Earth, and the Outer Planets like Jupiter -- giant gasballs with a rocky core. However, as discussed by an article from SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ("A Large Lump Of Coal" by George Musser, January 2010), planetologists are now starting to suspect that planets in other star systems may be much more diverse than we have thought.
The range of possibilities is dependent on the ratio of carbon to oxygen in a star system. After hydrogen and helium, carbon and oxygen are the most common elements in the Universe, and in an primordial planetary system the two can join as carbon monoxide. The evolution of the planetary system is heavily influenced by which one of them is in excess.
In our solar system, although we think of carbon as common, oxygen predominates. The Inner Planets are dominated by silicates -- oxides of silicon -- while the Outer Planets are dominated by water, which is of course mostly oxygen in terms of mass. A recent study by researchers at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, suggests that the predominance of oxygen here meant that most carbon remained in the gaseous state, with it then being blown out of the Solar System by the emerging solar furnace. The carbon that dominates life on Earth is just a fraction of the carbon that once was present in the solar environment.
So what would have happened had carbon predominated instead of oxygen? Then most of the oxygen would have been lost, with other studies showing that the result would be the emergence of "carbon planets", consisting of silicon carbide and carbon instead of silicates. The crust would be primarily graphite, and a few kilometers down pressures would form a stiff shell of diamond and other crystals. A carbon planet might have fields of carbon monoxide or methane ice; it might have oceans of hydrocarbons, tars.
Carbon planets may actually be common: computer models suggest that in most star systems carbon predominates, and that our oxygen-dominated planetary system may well be in the minority. Regions like the galactic center, where production of heavy elements in stars has led to a higher ratio of carbon to oxygen, may be rich with carbon planets; in fact, since even heavier elements are more common than they are out here in the galactic boondocks, there may be planets with a wide range of bizarre chemistries. However, some are not so sure carbon planets are common, suggesting that on the basis of specific observational data, there's no reason to believe our Sun and its family of planetary bodies are anything but average. Further work on observing planets in other star systems should reveal whether carbon planets are the norm, or the exception.
* ANOTHER MONTH: I'm always a bit puzzled by traffic to my website. Some items that I hope would get traffic end up being ignored -- I put a lot of work into the US Civil War history, but nobody pays it any mind, they don't even belittle it. I get a bit frustrated over the history of balloons, too; there's nothing on the web that comes close to it, but though I never expected it to be a "best-seller" by any means, even the ballooning community ignores it. Nobody seems to pay any attention to the space stuff I've written.
I don't complain too much, since other documents do well for themselves. The document on codes is highly ranked on Google, as is the radar tutorial. There being no other comparable radar tutorial on the web, that shouldn't be surprising -- but then why is the balloons history ranked so low? It doesn't have any real competition either, and it's hard to think there's a grossly different level of interest in radar than there is in balloons. I'm very gratified that the introduction to relativistic physics is high on the Google charts, since that's the one document I would save if I was forced to choose among them all. It doesn't break any new ground in physics of course, but as far as explaining how relativistic physics works ... well, the best way to put it is that it's the document on the subject I wish I'd read 30 years ago, since it would have saved me a lot of headaches trying to understand things.
Google rankings can be funny to figure out. Of course ranking depends on the search term used -- the EVOLUTION PRIMER comes up with different rankings depending on whether I search for "evolution primer", "Evolution Primer", or "primer evolution". Duh, no surprise there. What is strange is that the ranking of the EVOLUTION PRIMER can change so abruptly over a short period of time. One week it's ranked first, the next week it's ranked 30th, and the week after that it can be ranked first again. It's pleasant that it can be ranked so high given that there's so much competing material on the web, but why the drastic changes? Jittering up and down would be expected, but when it drops in rank it ends up below listings for "Evolution of Primer Explosives" and so on.
In the end, I have to concede that whether anyone reads a word I say or not isn't really the point. I write to learn things, if anyone else is interested, great, if not I soldier on. I can't really complain about a lack of attention, either: I get well over a hundred thousand unique visitors a month; even if only a tenth of the visitors are actual readers, that's a visitor every five minutes, all day, every day. If half are, it's one a minute.
Besides, experience has demonstrated that I have no control over the traffic. I have tried to promote particular documents, but nothing I ever did had the slightest effect -- not surprisingly, if I can figure out a silly promotional trick, so can everyone else, meaning it's back to square one. I rarely try any more. It's more neurotic effort than it's worth.
* Having cleaned up the pile of drawings I had to work on -- as discussed last month -- I have been able to set aside a small block of time to deal with the "picky things I've been wanting to do that demand some effort but are way low priority". The first was to inventory all the files on the website. I do keep a spreadsheet for such an inventory, with thousands of files I need to keep control over them all, but I hadn't validated it with the actual files on the website and on the mirror of the website on my PC.
The tally came to almost 14,000 files -- granted, about 8,500 are in the photo archive, with three files of increasing resolution for each photo, but that's still a pile. The tricky part was picking out the anomalous files from the crowd. I came up with some simple tricks to spot them and kill them -- some of them I couldn't even figure out where they came from. Now the inventory spreadsheet and the two website images match. Next picky task: write up notes from the manuals for the calculators and cameras I use, so I actually know the features they offer. It's annoying to have a piece of gear and know I'm missing tricks with it.
Incidentally, as far as the pile of drawings goes, I was at a bit of loose ends for a few days trying to think of what I needed to draw next, but now the queue's filling up again fast enough to keep me pressured to drain it out. Considering how much work it is to deal with on an ongoing basis, it's not surprising that it took me 14 months to get rid of the backlog.
