Hey Maw, the Youngin's Getting Dirty Again..That's A Good Thing!

It has been said that the Internet is causing heavy search engines users to think less deeply. In fact, I just read the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, It's not as corny as the title might lead one to believe. It concerns itself with neuroplasticity. While this is, in and of itself factual, the good news is that out search engine transformed noodles can--thankfully--be switched back to modes of heavier lifting in very short order.

So, just what does this have to the topic at hand? Good question. The answer is that it really doesn't have a thing to do with dirty misbehaving rugrats. However, I do have a method. The Internet is a great big messy database of some useful, but mostly it seems, useless information. That said, the Internet allows hacks like me to tunnel tight into hard science journals. That, gentle reader is the reason for the tortuous route I've had you folliow to get to the heart of the matter.

Without further ado, this segment of "as my stomach turns" burrows right into The Journal Of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Here's where those carpet roaming fresh humans come into play.

Yes, the link gives you access to the full journal paper. Is that so shallow? Nah. For those not inclined to read dry scholarly treatments, the paper can be summed in a few simple words.

Let your infants get some exposure to allergens and bacteria. In other words, let 'em get dirty! The payoff can be enormous. Heck, I'll even quote from the paper:

Methods

The Urban Environment and Childhood Asthma study examined a birth cohort at high risk for asthma (n = 560) in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and St Louis. Environmental assessments included allergen exposure and, in a nested case-control study of 104 children, the bacterial content of house dust collected in the first year of life. Associations were determined among environmental factors, aeroallergen sensitization, and recurrent wheezing at age 3 years.

Results

Cumulative allergen exposure over the first 3 years was associated with allergic sensitization, and sensitization at age 3 years was related to recurrent wheeze. In contrast, first-year exposure to cockroach, mouse, and cat allergens was negatively associated with recurrent wheeze (odds ratio, 0.60, 0.65, and 0.75, respectively; P ≤ .01). Differences in house dust bacterial content in the first year, especially reduced exposure to specific Firmicutes and Bacteriodetes, was associated with atopy* and atopic wheeze. Exposure to high levels of both allergens and this subset of bacteria in the first year of life was most common among children without atopy or wheeze.

Conclusions

In inner-city environments children with the highest exposure to specific allergens and bacteria during their first year were least likely to have recurrent wheeze and allergic sensitization. These findings suggest that concomitant exposure to high levels of certain allergens and bacteria in early life might be beneficial and suggest new preventive strategies for wheezing and allergic diseases.

I know what you're thinking.."Hey, this study only applies to urban cradle crawlers. I live in the sticks." Fear not uptight parent. One can certainly apply the data here to your rural papooose filler.

A really close look at the data is quite revealing. Essentially, the younger the child is during exposures, the healthier they are as they mature. At least to the age of three to four years. Exposure at three years or older gives the expected result of the child having more allergic reactions, and susceptibility to bacterially induced wheezing and atopy.* At first blush it seems that the study's authors were expecting a different outcome. Even upon further reflection this could indeed be the case. The inverse relationships between early exposures and later lack of symptoms is both a bit counterintuitive and refeshingly positive. Human endogenous immune responses continue to amaze and delight. Okay, maybe not you, but me.

* Atopy is the tendency to be "hyperallergic." Atopy has a strong genetic component. In this study, one can infer that the atopic reactions are wheezing and allergen related asthma.

Take The Science Literacy Test, and Terran Train wrecks!

Of all the places to find a very basic Science Literacy Test "The 'Christian Science' Monitor" seems a most unlikely place. The test is pretty short, and fun if you know a bit of science. Your humble author got one wrong in the test(perhaps that's why I'm feeling so humble today). Nevertheless, I scored in a rarified segment of folks geeky enough to bother finishing the whole test. Tomorrow I'll tell you which question I got wrong, and why.

Go ahead and take the test. I promise it's really easy save for two or three questions. Then we'll compare blunders.

In real news, Moon Rocks Provide More Evidence that our moon's formation was indeed due to an earth and other unknown(yet oddly named)* planetary mass 'sized' bodily collision. Her name was Theia. This really does explain a great deal about why our largest natural satellite is so massive in relation to its 'parent,' and to the paucity of water and volatile compounds. The lack of isotopic differences between the bodies--the moon and earth--while pointing to a well, common ancestry, isn't definitive proof as other planets' moons are thought to have formed alongside their more more massive parents.

The new evidence shows a difference a 12 PPM of in oxygen isotopes between the earth-moon system. The difference most likely points to that interloper Theia colliding with the earth around 4.5 billion years ago. This does beg the question that if such a massive object collided with the earth, and the crust hadn't yet formed, why can the two bodies show differing amounts of oxygen isotopes in crust rocks and minerals? The moon's surface is--with good reason--believed to have been locked in place at the time of it's genesis.

The oldest dated crust on earth is 4.4 billion years old, so the impactor's influence on terran crust would be negated by the 100 million year age difference. Still, there are almost certainly evidences yet to be discovered. One can imagine that the blast ejecta would have orbited the young earth for a great many years. If a truly early meteorite could be found with the lunar isotopic oxygen signature--or better yet--an earthly and unknown other ratio, that would almost certainly seal the case as far as the scientific community is concerned. I suspect that such early meteorites have either been eroded away, or subsumed in tectonic action, but to dismiss the possibility seems more than a bit premature.

Wouldn't it be grand if such a find were made?

I have made no claim to be a scientist--other then in semi-conductor theory and parallel computing--so I am perhaps wildly speculating, but my lifelong love affair with geology hasn't been neglectful of continued study in the field. If some kind reader wishes to send me back to uni. I promise, I will not stop working until I have a post-grad degree in geology. Heck, I promise to work so hard as at my MS, that anything shy of a doctorate will not satisfy me.

*I stopped being amazed as to why humans have to name pretty much everything. The naming of one of the earth impactors seems a bit weird to me. Why doesn't the Chicxulub impactor have a name, when it is almost certainly the event which sounded the final death knell for the dinosaurs and lead to the 5th mass extinction event at the K-T Boundary? We have mountains of evidence for that event, and given our penchant for naming everything, why not that impactor? This is almost certainly THE event that gave rise to the age of mammalian dominance, and hence to us. How can the asteroid not have a name? Okay, I'm overdone.

This is a test

Testing, one two..ad infinitum, ad nasuseum. Yep. I've swapped in a bog standard template. Until I can re-enable commenting and all the other stuffs on the Blog, this Template will serve as a very easily read, very minimalist page. I do like the minimalist approach, but it could use some stupid CSS tricks to make it more "me."

Blog Name Change and some Tech. Babble

First of all, I am changing the blog's name. I know not what at present, but I don't want a "me, too" type of name. I have been working on the new Stylesheet, but Blogger and "don't be evil" Google seem to always find some way to break my CSS. If you look at my page source, you'll see that there is a lot of perfectly usable CSS that is maddeningly difficult to incorporate it into the latest Blogger software. Oh, it's easy enough to dump in there, but it doesn't display the way it would on, say, a less script heavy format. My pages used to display wonderfully. I used to keep my CSS current with Blogger updates, so all it took was a wee bit of tampering to have my pages appear well across browsers of any sort. I may simply open a new Blog to use as a CSS testbed. That really reeks of a disingenuous use of an ostensibly free resource, but what's a custom CSS developer to do? Too much about that.

In technology today, I found some interesting stuff.

Apple unveils new Prog. Lang.

WIRED reports programmers went "nuts" over the presentation. I yawned. Apple should support open standards. Ruby and Python are proven, and developers like working with them. "Objective-C" is new-ish, and doesn't seem to offer anything in the way of newer, better, faster, stronger, codebase development for guys like me, for instance. For almost half a year, I have been working on a email plug-in that might revolutionize the way in which people deal with a certain aspect of email nuisances. I have written it in Extensible Markup Language(XML), as well as in every language that requires special case handling to account for the differences in mail clients and/or operating systems. Sorry about that digression. Getting back on track.. I hope Apple coders like the new language, but Apple should have made the best of all moves, and used an open programming language. OpenCL and OpenGL simply aren't that open. This is really only an issue for game developers and those really tweaking UIs, but still, come on! These things are only truly open if they're supported at the hardware level, not through porting, or worse, emulation. Eek!

In other tech. news, it finally looks like Amazon is FINALLY going to be launching the long rumored "smartphone" on 18, June. I wish Bezos and Amazon well. It looks to be a 3D phone..I really don't know why that's so interesting. It very much reminds me of Douglas Adams's pronouncement: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea..." In all seriousness, smartphones aren't all that. Call me a techno-snob if you wish. Many others have. So the phone is going to have projection capabilities. It seems only natural as Amazon had to do SOMETHING to differentiate itself from the pack. Of course Amazon does have something of a built-in userbase of millions and millions of shoppers. My forecast is that Amazon is will use existing hardware platforms--a new processor design and any attendant major tweaks to the "support staff" would not have escaped this blogger's attention--and will sell for at most 150 USD...at launch.

There was a lot more that I noted yesterday and today, but this is not a technology blog. I get enough of that at the office.

Science later!

My, But That's a Big One

No. Not that. We're talking about exo-planets FKA "Extra-solar Planets"."

Newly Discovered Exoplanet 17 Times More Massive Than Earth

Okay, if you read the article it states--I kid you not--that the newly discovered exoplanet is "17 times heavier than our planet." Heavier? For whom are these people writing? I really feel like banging my forehead into my keyboard. Are we that mathematically and scientifically challenged to have mass wrongly conveyed as weight in order for people to understand just what has been discovered?

Sigh.

The discovery itself is interesting for a whole host of reasons.

I'll choose two for illustrative purposes:

Firstly, theorists weren't certain that a 'rocky' planet could have this much mass and mot be a gas giant..like say, Jupiter. Well, I wonder just how this theory(more like speculation) was arrived at. It's foolish to base prejudices on what we see in our little insignificant eight planet system. One has to believe that more massive rocky planets have yet to be discovered. It seems to me that--mathematics aside--since the new planet "Kepler-10c" has an orbit very close to it's star, that hydogen and helium would have literally gravitated to the more massive star than a close, less massive object. I'm sure that some variant of the inverse square equation would put that right.

Secondly, if the scientific community is correct about the age of Kepler-10c--a mere 3 billion years after the universe's 'creation'--, heavier elements were available for planetary formation and much more interesting forms of chemistry. Very early life, anyone? This doesn't really surprise me as really massive hot burning stars have very short lives indeed. Lots of supernovae equate to lots of heavier elements.

I'm sort of shocked that the astronomical community has such a parochial view of things. This Pale Blue Dot(much thanks to the late Carl Sagan) is truly inconsequential on the galactic scale, much less the universal. Provincialism it seems, is not only the purview of politicians and other assorted charlatans.

Please don't get me wrong. I hold the scientific community in the highest regard possible for human beings. Nature, on the other hand, humbles us all the time, and the surprises that this discovery illuminate serve to show us just how wedded our thinking is to this insignificant speck of the universe. That said, it's the only place we have. We make our stand right here. That, in a great many ways, is a shame.

No Surprise Here: Humans, not climate, account for Disappearance of Pleistocene Megafauna

Humans, not climate, to blame for Ice Age-era disappearance of large mammals, study concludes

This poor author would have been shocked if the research pointed in ANY other direction. Heck, even though I am but a lowly semiconductor engineer, I have long thought that the latest mass extinction event was due to human activity; and just not since the Maori dined on the last Moa. We're apex predators, and the extinction vector(time of extinction and human migratory activities) of large land faunae just fit too well to dismiss the most likely factor in the onset of the Holocene Extinction Event. One could further speculate at this point that the period under the latest finding likely does not extend far enough back into time, as pre-modern hominids were likely also thinning populations of large terrestrial vertebrates to the point of no longer being able to sustain mating practices. With very few exceptions, the notion of the "noble savage" is wholly unwarranted.

I have been arguing the reason behind the megafauna extinction point with people in the field for several decades. Some have been in total agreement, others outright denial. What is really no longer open for debate is that "we" are causing, and being witness to, the sixth mass extinction event known to afflict this planet.

It is my hope that we are smart enough to start to curb species extinctions now. Our history here isn't at all promising.

The one thing we should give our children is a planet worthy of their custodial duty. It is our collective duty to make this a reality. Whilst my fingers are crossed, the rainforests burn, and the oceans become less able to trap atmospheric carbon as both surface temperatures rise, and plankton dies. There's no reason to be optimistic. But still, we must do whatever we can to mitigate the decline of the planet's toxification and subsequent species destruction.

It must be Cancer Tuesday

Below, I brought you the lung cancers breathalyzer.

Now, we have two intriguing studies about Mole Rats. Oddly, the two remotely related species have developed some tantalizingly similar adaptations to dealing with their subterranean existences which via the process of natural selection, make the small rodents almost entirely cancer free. One can imagine inducing tumor growth in laboratory conditions, hence the bit of a hedge.

The Blind Mole Rat appears to have a doubling of the genes that produce interferon beta-1, and a host of other adaptations.

The Naked-Mole-Rat appears to have a host of similar adaptive genes that enable both it and it's distant cousin to survive in very low oxygen environs without suffering all the typical ills of O2 deprivation.

That these adaptative changes both suit their hosts in their subterranean lives and appear to make it difficult to induce tumor development even when given oncogenic cocktails which prove lethal to mice is intriguing indeed. Since nature does little in the way of holding on to genetic material that serves no purpose, but ratchets up on beneficial mutations, it seems plausible that these long-lived rodents--which are neither moles nor rats--are retaining these genetic variations for manifold reasons. Plausibility does not in any way constitute fact, but once the tales of these two remarkable creatures get sorted out, don't be surprised if the low 02 and high CO2 adaptations stand quite alone from the genes that code for, and are expressed as cancer fighting battalions.

The world may yet yield to the 'misnomered' Mole Rats.

Dave Grohl..what's this about? New Diagnostic Lung Cancer Test

Okay, just to show my reader that I am not ALL SCIENCE, ALL THE TIME, I have to give Dave Grohl(Nirvana, Foo Fighters, etc.) a shout out. I love music, too. Although very little of current music causes me to take notice, Foo Fighters are really something special. Sorry, RHCP fans, Foo Fighters are where my rockin' mind goes whenever I think of bands that are still doing it. RHCP is Flea, with back-ups. Foo Fighters are fresh and a throw-back to real good rock. Apparently, Dave has inked a deal with HBO detailing the band's next album as travelogue.

That should be fun.

In other total coolness news, the full 38+ minutes of Nirvana's R&R Hall induction can finally be seen in decent quality on the web

Whilst medical breakthroughs aren't strictly science(applied technology), I can roam there occasionally as this is my party. A breathalyzer for lung cancer detection, that allegedly, not only detects lung cancers, but also--again, allegedly--differentiates between stages is really very cool indeed. The odd part about most lung cancers in the USA is that they are almost entirely avoidable. Kids these days are hopefully taught about the evils of recurring inhalations of tobacco smoke. I am not entirely without guilt here. I was shown a cancerous pair of lungs at a science museum at around ten years of age, yet I still smoked a bit as a teen, and then into my twenties while engaging in ethanol consumption. I have not allowed tobacco smoke to enter the temple of my body for approximately twenty-six years.

I also quit boozing at any level roughly fourteen years ago. Since both activities can give rise to myriad medical issues, it just seems prudent to go completely without either. I do miss the inebriant effect of ethanol, but the potential downsides far outweigh the few hours of social lubrication that ethanol certainly provides.

That's all for now. I may yet find a hard science item worthy of a few words.

I should note here that the blog isn't meant as a geek's tool to scientific nirvana(sorry about the pun). It's rather a place to start researching items that you might find interesting. In all honesty, a blog about cutting-edge advances in semi-conductor gate processes and shrinking lithography isn't likely to garner much readership. Oh, I could write about programming, web development, and all things network related, but there must thousands of blogs that already address these concerns.

At a less technical level, I could wax on about mineralogy, and paleontology, but blogs like the truly excellent Pharyngula blog and others. If there is a clamor for an amateur mineralogy blog, I would be honored to provide much more in-depth treatments about the geology of northern New England, and sites, specimens, etc. I suspect that this would have even less a following than another 'big tent' science blog; which is really what I see this becoming as time passes.

Discovery Channel and History Channel are full of utter rubbish

"Bigfoot Expert" and why Discovery Channel Stinks

This hardly warrants comment. At a time when all of humanity needs to be schooled on REAL science, two of the networks that one would think would stick to the known, do not. Discovery and History are rife with all manner of not only unproven topical programming, but demonstrably false programming.

One of Discovery's worst offenders is referenced in the above link. The History Channel is teeming with everything but history. A look at any other network is likely to uncover other offenses to the senses.

One tiny light in all of this is that it seems that both of these networks have dropped references to "aliens" in the extra-terrestrial sense. In their stead are dozens of reality shows(so-called), that aren't at all real save for programming being based on what a very few people do to earn their ways through life.

Less fill, and more hard hitting sciance and history would do both outlets some real good. I don't see it happening. They'll almost assuredly continue to wallow in least common denominator programming.

That is truly a crime when so much is at stake.

Sandy Hook as False Flag

No, this is not going to be a political post. It is going to be psychological post.

Sandy Hook as False Flag Maneuver

How can people believe that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a "False Flag" event orchestrated by some unknown entity?

The answer is that people can and will believe anything not only in lieu of any supporting evidence, but even despite mountains of contrary evidence.

From Holocaust deniers, to non-belief in modern evolutionary theory, there will always be skeptics of the unwarranted variety.

I am what I hope is a good example of a good skeptic. I believe when independently verifiable evidence warrants such a belief. I'll often withhold belief until it is quantified. As a practical scientist(a semiconductor process engineer), I believe that there is almost shockingly little that cannot be quantified.

The human brain/mind is sometimes stated as the most complex system yet known. Yet, even the human brain can be broken down and the roles of each component can be defined--yes, even quantitatively.

In order to overturn the Sandy Hook shooting, enough of the evidence must be found to be demonstrably untrue(not false, as proving a negative is maddeningly difficult). To date, no evidence other than some instructions to reporters covering the Newtown, CT has surfaced to support anything but the factual evidence of a mass shooting.

The instructions to reporters is simply an artifact of the media's manner to get people positioned properly for the best angles, and having copy ready for the news items that hit the 'airwaves.' This is how all news items are covered that are not absolutely live. That reporter cueing is given as evidence of a cover-up simply shows an obvious lack of the ways in which modern television broadcasting is conducted.

I am not in the media business, but living in the little state of New Hampshire, USA, every four years our first in the nation' presidential primaries I have seen every kind of media machination one can imagine. In the 2000 primary, I sat and ate with a secret service agent and we had a long discussion about how the media gets things correct, and incorrect. I added that most of the major media doesn't give one enough matter on a given topic in order for an inquisitive citizen to go and "conduct follow-up research without first conducting follow-up research." My lunch date got a good chuckle out of my characterization which she thought spot-on.

Summing up, one has to provide contrary evidence in enough magnitude to first challenge the official story, and that only raises the specter of doubt. It hardly overthrows things.

Do governments lie? Absolutely. Is the government lying in this instance? Perhaps, but as yet there is zero real evidence of any misdoing.

It's fun to be a contrarian. But a contrarian sans evidence is simply a nuisance that takes away from real, important issues; and in this instance likely causes additional pain to the mourning survivors.