Bad Medicine and Microwaves

I have just finished reading Christopher Wanjek's Bad Medicine, a book that in my opinion everyone on the planet should read. It is thoroughly well written and well set out with easy to understand debunking of most health fallacies.

However a review of the book is not my main reason for this post. One of the topics covered was radiation and the worry people have of microwaves. Chris covers the topic well but I realised something rather ironic when I read this section and that is: Infra-red (IR) radiation has a higher frequency than microwaves so standing in front of the stove while cooking is more likely to cause cancer than the the microwave.

For the physics of it all, electromagnetic radiation (light, UV, IR, microwaves, gamma rays, x rays and radio waves) interacts with matter as a photon. The energy of a photon is determined by the frequency of the radiation.

There is a cutoff in energy level for a photon to remove an electron from an atom (called the photoelectric effect), and this is required for their to be any harm (esp. to DNA) other wise the only effect is heating (which is short term and goes away as soon as you remove the source of radiation i.e. cell phone).

Now the cutoff frequencies for this is in the spectrum of visible light, so anything with a lower frequency (IR, microwaves, radio waves)than this is not going to do any lasting damage (like cause cancer).

So to reiterate, although neither is going to cause cancer, IR radiation from your stove top is more dangerous than your microwave.

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Well Since My Baby Left Me

I found a new place to dwell
Down at the end of lonely st
Heartbreak Hotel.

The King IS Dead. Long Live the King

Thank you, Thank you very much, You're beautiful.

PS Today is the anniversary of the passing of Elvis Presley.

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It's another Boy

Well my family seems to be expanding at a rapid rate with nieces and nephews coming from all over. But this time it was our turn.

Yep that is right our second child was born at 8.20 pm yesterday (Saturday) and no he will not in any way be named for the Harry Potter book that came out the same day.

I had better get back to hospital and spend some time with Mother and baby but you never know I might even get some photos up in the next few days.

(Update 16/08: For those of you interested in names we went with Quinn - it means the wise in Celtic - and no we did not take this long to decide just to post the update)

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The Skeptics' Circle

Well the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle is up at NeuroLogica Blog. It is the 65^th edition and is an exciting trip to the Museum of Skepticism where you can see exhibits on cranks and crackpots of all shapes, sizes and colours and of course how to see the reality of it all. Well worth the trip, especially since admission is free.

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If I were American

I saw this on The Greenbelt and decided that it would be fun just to see roughly whose policies are in line with my own. Now since I am not a US citizen this is rather pointless, and of course I have never heard of about half of them (and some of the rest by name only) but I am not too surprised at some of the names at the top and the bottom of the list.

Thank you for visiting this Selector.
For more information on this selector and your results, go to 2008 President Selector

Rankings:

1. Theoretical Ideal Candidate (100 %)
2. Dennis Kucinich (85 %)
3. Barack Obama (81 %)
4. Alan Augustson (campaign suspended) (75 %)
5. Joseph Biden (75 %)
6. Christopher Dodd (74 %)
7. Hillary Clinton (74 %)
8. Al Gore (not announced) (71 %)
9. Wesley Clark (not announced) (70 %)
10. Michael Bloomberg (not announced) (69 %)
11. John Edwards (67 %)
12. Mike Gravel (not announced) (65 %)
13. Bill Richardson (62 %)
14. Kent McManigal (campaign suspended) (55 %)
15. Ron Paul (53 %)
16. Elaine Brown (38 %)
17. Rudolph Giuliani (28 %)
18. John McCain (25 %)
19. Mitt Romney (24 %)
20. Mike Huckabee (23 %)
21. Chuck Hagel (not announced) (19 %)
22. Tommy Thompson (17 %)
23. Newt Gingrich (not announced) (15 %)
24. Fred Thompson (not announced) (14 %)
25. Tom Tancredo (14 %)
26. Jim Gilmore (withdrawn) (11 %)
27. Sam Brownback (10 %)
28. Duncan Hunter (3 %)

And all that with no real science questions asked, despite the fact that that would be one of my big priorities.

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Where do Stem Cells come from

A lot of the debate about the use of Embryonic Stem cells (ESC) in research comes from objections that are based about the murder of all those babies to get the ESC. You know the sort of thing where on The Simpsons, Mrs Lovejoy comes along and cries out "oh won't somebody please think of the children".

However this is a very unrealistic point. As anyone who has ever been a parent will know, how and when you find out you are going to be a parent is quite variable. Normally the first signs are morning sickness, or extreme tiredness, but neither of these are themselves a reliable test that you are pregnant. So how do we confirm pregnancy? Usually it involves a take-home pregnancy kit, some urine and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).

Well now that we know that what does it actually mean. hCG is produced during pregnancy to fulfill some role (that is unimportant to this discusion but can be found at the link above), and so once you are pregnant this hormone starts to be produced (by the embryo/placenta), and it takes some time for the levels to build up such that it is excreted from the mother's body.

For the test to be accurate you want it to cut down on the false readings. The way this is dealt with is by having a threshold concentration for the hCG, this at least cuts down on the false positives (where the test reads positive when you are not pregnant). However because it takes time for that concentration to build up it is possible to get false negatives (where the test reads negative when you are pregnant).

An example of this was with our first child, my wife got pregnant just before I left for Europe for a conference. Now she had her best friend's hens night several days after I left she was worried that she might be pregnant and didn't want to drink if she was. So she took the test and it came back negative. A week or so later the tiredness really kicked in and she went to the doctor and took another test there, it came back negative. Only another week of so later when the morning sickness was started up did a test finally come back positive (note that the timing of the morning sickness and the positive test are incidental).

So in this case my wife was pregnant for three weeks before actually knowing for sure that she was pregnant.

This delay is long enough such that the harvesting of ESC from a mother is not really an option.

So if this is not an option what is? Well as I see it there are two options either we specifically create embryos to take the stem cells from or we make use of the vast numbers of spare embryos that as we speak are sitting in freezers in IVF clinics all around the world. Spares that will most certainly never be anything more than they are now.

In fact since storage capabilities of any organistion are finite then eventually many of these will be destroyed. They clearly are surpluss to the parents IVF requirements and are unlikely to all be adopted. Since they can't be kept forever they will end up being destroyed, but why then can't they be put to a good cause, that of research in to finding cures to many debilitating diseases and conditions.

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8 Random Facts

Well this meme about 8 random facts has been doing the rounds and suprisingly enough I have been tagged (thanks to Ken at Open Parachute).

All right, here are the rules.

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Ok so those are the rules to live by and here are the facts.

1. I have lived in Dunedin all my life. But have been fortunate enough to travel to many other places.
2. I like to write, although this is the most of my public output thus far.
3. I am keen on photography and have won an online photo competition. (one day I may even upload the photo).
4. I am married with a two year old boy and another on the way (due end of this month)
5. Both my wife's family and my own consist mainly of boys (I have one brother and she 4 - neither of us have any sisters).
6. The next generation has 4 boys and 2 girls (with one boy due this month and an as yet unknown for December).
7. I had 13 years of Catholic education and logically I became an atheist.
8. I have been working on my PhD for 5 years now and I just want it to be finished.

Alright and now for people to tag hmmmm, actually I am goona cheat (but only cause the pooflinger cheated first) and I am going to tag anyone who reads this blog that has not done it yet and you have to leave a comment here saying that you did it.

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BZP and party pills

In an article in the local paper (the Otago Daily Times - note that link is probably only good for a day or so) raises some interesting oppostion to legislation that proposes to ban party pills that contain BZP.

THE party-pill ingredient BZP will be forced underground following the Government’s decision to make it illegal, a Dunedin party-pill seller says.

Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton announced yesterday BZP would be reclassified as a Class C1 drug, making its sale and manufacture illegal. He hoped the legislation could be passed by the end of the year.

Surprisingly enough the move was condemned by the industry which makes and sells them and welcomed by critics (and one must assume Emergency department staff).

But maybe that Dunedin retailer (John Cockburn, owner of South Dunedin BZP retail outlet Herbal Heaven) might also have an ulterior motive

A ban would put him out of business, because he only sold BZP related products,he said.

Hmmmm, maybe he should be selling something other this, which is as herbal as drain cleaner, to kids who want a high.

His decision to recommend a ban to Cabinet was based on research, analysis of submissions and advice from experts and Government agencies. There would be a six-month amnesty for possession of less than 5g of the drug for personal use after the ban came into effect.

That sounds like a reasonable and well thought out action on the part of the minister.

However the comments of the reaction from some of the other points of view quite interesting.
First we have one of the more extremist parties in Parliament:

Green Party drug law reform spokeswoman Metiria Turei said the party was disappointed by the move, but pleased the Government had chosen to make the changes using the full legislative process, rather than by resolution, so the decision was open to full public and parliamentary scrutiny and debate.

Well at least they are all for the process. This guy sounds like he is from an industry lobby group:

Social Tonics Association of New Zealand (Stanz) chairman Matt Bowden said prohibition was not the right way to minimise BZP harm.

‘‘P is prohibited and look at the problems there,’’ Mr Bowden said.

The right answer was regulation, a power Mr Anderton had under the Misuse of Drugs Act, he said.

The main opposition in Parliament clearly have their head screwed on as to this issue but still manage to get a jibe at the government

National Party Otago MP Jacqui Dean said the process had taken too long, but she welcomed the move.

And more importantly from the people who have been studying the issue:

Meanwhile, a doctor who led a major study of party pill use said yesterday’s decision was ‘‘a tough call’’ but on balance was probably the right one.

Dr Chris Wilkins, from Massey’s Centre for Social and Health Outcomes, said there had been no research on the longterm effects of BZP or the role it might play in psychological illness.

‘‘Consequently, there was a strong case for stricter regulation of the use and sale of party pills and on balance a ban appears to be the low-risk decision,’’ he said.

Surely there have to be more fun things for today's youth to do than this. Although just thinking that last statement made me feel very much older than 27.

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Lightning and Hurricanes

I found this recent paper by a couple of Israelis that I have had the pleasure of meeting, and that our group has had some ties with. They have come up with an interesting correlation between lightning activity in the East African sector and Atlantic Basin hurricanes. Hopefully the abstract at least should be viewable to the general public at the link. But the crux of the idea is that:

In this paper we provide evidence showing the connection between lightning activity over eastern Africa, and the AEWs that leave the west coast of Africa, some of which develop into hurricanes. We have analyzed the 2005 and 2006 hurricane seasons, one a very active hurricane year (2005), and the other a very quiet year (2006). More than 90% of the tropical storms and hurricanes during these 2 years were preceded by periods of above average thunderstorm activity in eastern Africa.

Before we go to much further we need to define a few things. AEWs are African Easterly Waves, disturbances in the African Easterly Jet a (high altitude?) wind that forms a the region of strongest gradient of the temperature gradient between the relatively cool equatorial Africa (due to the Guinean coast) and the hot hot air above the Sahara - this is the reverse of the usual gradient where it is warmer at the equator than either side.

It appears that ~60 of these AEWs can form in a year mainly in the months of April - November, and they travel west across Africa (in a matter of a few days to a week) and then move out into the Atlantic ocean where they may or may not form Tropical Depressions, Storms or Hurricanes. There appears to be no correlation between number of AEWs and the number of Hurricanes although some 60% of minor Hurricanes and Tropical Storms and 85% of major Hurricanes can be traced back to AEWs.

Now the central African region is the global hot spot for lightning with a rate of over 50 flashes per square km per year. The lightning flash rate here is higher than any where else on the planet, though lightning is a very seasonal and time of day dependant. Lightning seems to prefer the late afternoon-early evening sector so at varying times of the day it will peak in different longitude sectors. Surprisingly enough lighting is more common in summer than winter. Which naturally fits with our increased AEW occurrence in this time period.

The AEWs are associated with deep convection and intense thunderstorms over tropical Africa... One of the key questions relating to these tropical waves is whether the waves trigger the convection, or whether the convection triggers the waves... We investigate whether the intensity of the convection, measured by lightning activity, is related to the AEW intensification.

So we have pressure instabilities that are related to strong lightning activity that originate in East Africa (in the paper they specifically look at 10–20 N and 30–40 E, in the region of the Ethiopian Highlands), and propagate across the continent and out into the atlantic where these drops in pressure can sometimes become hurricanes.

Now to get the local lightning rates for this region you can either stand there and count or you can make use of a network set up to detect lightning. That is all well and good if you are in a developed country which has one of these. Most lightning detection networks are extremely localised and need many stations to cover any decent sized area - mainly because of the frequency range that they use to detect the lightning (MF - 300kHz to 3MHz). Now if you use a much lower frequency range (VLF 3 - 30 kHz) it turns out that the absorption of the wave is less and hence you can see the waves at a much greater distance.

So using this long distance propagation and a few other nifty tricks, a former Professor here at Otago Prof Richard Dowden set up a company (LF*EM Research Ltd) and a World Wide Lightning Location Network (or WWLLN - pronounced "woolen" as wool from a sheep). Because the VLF part of the signal from the lightning travels much further then you need a much lesser density of stations. In fact there in the WWLLN there are currently about 30 stations, (we host one here in Dunedin) and this covers the whole globe since we are able to see the signals of lightning strikes happening many thousands of kilometers away.

This network is far from perfect, it requires at least four stations to register the signal from a lightning strike and then the timing of the reception must be with certain limits (other wise you cannot be sure that the stations are all looking at the same flash) or the network will not register the lightning. So this means you have a trade off between number of "legitimate" detections and the accuracy of these detections but then I imagine that is true of any similar system. So this tends to mean that the detection efficiency (number of "legitimate" detections versus total lightning) is lower than one would like, however those detections are favoured to more intense lightning strikes - since these are the ones more likely to be detected at more stations, as they radiate more power and the signals are likely to be observed further away.

So this is the technique that the authors used to look for lightning (they host a station in Tel Aviv and as such have acces to the full data set rather than just the summary on the web). But I think that the interesting issue here is the one that they clearly are not getting all the lightning happening in the region buit we are reasonably confident that they are getting the locations of all the storms and most of the stronger lightning. The authors certainly see a link between the strong lightning, and the AEWs and hurricanes, but I don't think that this could ever be a forecasting tool for hurricanes.

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Religious Freedoms

Two items from Bob Park's What's New newsletter both of which deal with religion or at least the religious imposing their ideas on every one else.

STEM CELLS: BUSH DECLARES "ALL HUMAN LIFE IS SACRED."
Peace activists say the same thing. The President said this while issuing his second-annual summer-solstice-veto of legislation to lift his ban on embryonic stem cell research. He said that the United States is "founded on the principle that all human life is sacred" – unless you’re in Iraq, where 80 American lives have been sacrificed so far this month. I couldn’t find such a principle in the Constitution; instead I found the First Amendment. By imposing his bizarre religious belief that embryonic stem cells are people on the rest of us, the President has violated the constitutional rights of every living, breathing American.

POPULATION: HOUSE REVERSES BAN ON CONTRACEPTION AID.
Before you applaud, it faces a veto, and there are not enough votes for an override. The ban is a key element of Bush foreign policy, though why the U.S. opposes birth control in other countries is beyond comprehension. Uncontrolled population growth will, in time, overtake every advance in human condition.

But of course you might say that these are Bush's policies and he has every right to act on them. However even the religious among us can see that these policies are grounded in his religion.

And hopefully everyone should understand that having someones will imposed upon then especially when it comes to religion is outlawed by among other things the first amendment to the constitution of the USA and Article 18 of the Universal declaration of Human Rights.

I am not claiming that Bush is not allowed to have his beliefs but what he is not allowed to do is to force others to have those beliefs too.

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