Category: Uncategorized

Ator at ArsTechnica points out how bizarre it is that the whole Y2K story went from pretty much being the only story this time last year to completely disappearing from the radar screen today (when was the last time you heard the phrase Y2K?). He links to a News.Com story that points out the controversial law designed to forestall waves of Y2K lawsuits has been invoked a grand total of 18 times (the most bizarre case has to be someone suing Circuit City and Best Buy for selling non-Y2K compliant software. Why go after the middle men instead of the manufacturer? CC and BB should be sued for their salespeople’s complete lack of understanding about computers, but not for this nonsense).

Now if we could only get the national media to stop reporting every single non-development in the Jon Benet Ramsey case, I’d be happy.

River blindness is a disease that today is one of the leading causes of blindness. The disease is caused by a parasitic worm, Onchocerca volvulus, that gets under the skin and eventually finds its way to the eye where it blinds its host among other things. A few years ago a treatment for river blindness, the drug ivermectin, was discovered which it was hoped could eradicate river blindness.

For the most part, ivermectin works as advertised, but in a few cases it appeared to cause an occasionally fatal swelling of the brain. It is now believed that the swelling is caused somehow by another parasitic worm, loa loa, which is similar to the river blindness parasite.

Scientists need some way to decide where to screen people for loa loa infection before giving them ivermectin, since screening everyone would be cost prohibitive. In a recent study in The Lancet researchers report they’re using satellites to map the likely territory of the fly that transmits loa loa so that people living near the fly’s habitat can be screened before having the river blindness treatment administered. A map of likely loa lao territory has already been produced and will be used to help reduce or prevent altogether the brain swelling side effect of the medicine.

This is an extraordinary example of how, on the one hand, modern technology often enlarges disease vectors and so makes the outbreak of diseases more likely, but on the other hand is more than offset by the enormous surveillance capabilities that allow scientists to monitor and effectively target treatments of diseases to patients.

Source:

Danger worms tracked from space. The BBC, September 22, 2000.

It was fascinating to watch the media coverage of Carl Rowan’s death. Right up to his death, Rowan was one of the nation’s most prominent journalists and a pioneer who broke racial barriers down in the new business.

On the other hand, many of the reports I saw were using footage of Rowan outside of a courthouse with lots of people, including fellow journalists, following him. None of the reports I saw, however, identified where this footage was from.

Given the courthouse and the reporters following him, this footage is almost certainly related to events following Rowan’s shooting several years ago of a man who was intent on breaking into Rowan’s home. The only problem being that Rowan was an ardent opponent of private gun ownership who repeatedly wrote columns maintaining that the Second Amendment does not give individuals the right to own guns (Rowan was one of a large number of celebrities who oppose guns but own them or hire body guards to own them — it’s only we uncouth rabble who don’t deserve to protect our homes and persons).

Ironically, although he worked with the Freedom Forum, Rowan was also more than willing to join in the anti-free speech forces who equate some speech with violence. After the horrible bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, Rowan wrote that “I am absolutely certain that the harsh rhetoric of the Gingriches and Doles … creates a climate of violence in America.”

Although, of course, you’d never find Rowan or other liberal columnists wondering whether something like the U.S. bombing of television and radio stations in Yugoslavia might create an atmosphere where terrorists feel justified in indiscriminately bombing civilians.

One of the things I’d prefer not to do is die (I’m going to need at least a couple centuries to get my web site updated!) Anyway, Lisa thinks the whole notion is absurd, but I think the odds of never having to die are now higher than they’ve ever been and increasing on an almost daily basis. The odds of effective immortality within my lifetime (I’d like to live at least 200 years) are still exceedingly small, but I am optimistic.

Something I don’t think people who don’t regularly read scientific journals realize is the extent to which human discoveries about biology are accelerating. I don’t know how to quantify it, but I believe there is a sort of Moore’s Law-style principle for biology in that not only are new discoveries being made, but the actual rate at which medical knowledge is being acquired is increasing over time.

Anyway, two news items last week strongly improved the price of my immortality futures.

Another advance was added to nanontechnology (Eric Drexler’s looking less and less like a nut every day) a few months ago. Researchers developed a robot small enough to do repair work at the single cell level. The full article on the robot was published in Science this past June.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology made newspapers around the world for discovering why some animals on calorie-restricted diets live so much longer. In mice given diets that contain all the necessary nutrients but just exactly the number of calories required to maintain life, the mice tend to live 40 percent longer than mice given higher, but still normal, calorie diets. Why this happened was a mystery until the MIT researchers announced that their experiments with yeast strongly suggest that the calorie restriction interacts directly with the SIR2 protein which functions to “shut off” certain cells and whose absence in yeast was found to shorten life span.

The good news is that the reason all of this works is that the SIR2 protein needs a chemical NAD, which is also needed by the body when it converts food to energy. At least in yeast and mice, it is now believed when they eat high calorie diets, there is less NAD available for the SIR2 protein since all the NAD is used to metabolize food. Restrict the calories, and all of a sudden there’s more NAD for the SIR2 to do its work and the result is a more efficient system that extends the lifespan of the organism.

Assuming all of this applies to human beings, it is not inconceivable that in a few decades we might all be taking medication to increase our NAD levels, thus getting the benefits without having to eat a 1,200 calorie diet from birth to death. And for people like me who have already lived a substantial portion of our lives, we can send in the nanorobots to repair pre-existing cellular damage.

It’s a cyberpunk future without the fascist governments (what I really want is the “suntan” lotion in one of Bruce Sterling’s Islands In the Net that literally changed skin color, although I’d want to get to choose more skin colors. Think of the market for teenagers — my nephew had green hair, I’m sure he’d have loved green skin!)