From the BBC, this caught my eye:
Prime Minister David Cameron has said it “will see the UK lead the world in genetic research within years”.
The first genetic codes of people with cancer or rare diseases, out of a target of 100,000, have been sequenced.
Experts believe it will lead to targeted therapies and could make chemotherapy “a thing of the past”…
The project has now passed the 100 genome mark, with the aim of reaching 1,000 by the end of the year and 10,000 by the end of 2015
I didn’t know this about Ronald Reagan (from the New York Times review):
Reagan had already spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.” In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, “he was pretty much on his own,” Adelman writes, “which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.” But much of what the president said on his own — that he wanted to share missile-defense technology, eliminate offensive nuclear weapons in 10 years and plan a “tremendous party” in 1996, to which he and Gorbachev would tote “the last nuclear missile” from their countries’ arsenals — “scared everyone,” one assistant said. Reagan’s own national security adviser was so dismayed that he restricted distribution of the meeting notes. “After Reykjavik,” a staff member told the journalist James Mann, “Reagan was watched by someone all during the rest of his term in office.”
I see – so it wasn’t nuclear weapons that “scared everyone”, but having a leader with a vision to get rid of them. We have reached a new height of cynicism today, when abolition of nuclear weapons is barely even being talked about. And if we can’t deal with nuclear weapons, which are in only a few hands, how will we deal with potentially even worse weapons, in potentially many more hands, in the future?
According to the United States Drought Monitor, the drought in California is getting pretty alarming.
mounting evidence from reservoir levels, river gauges, ground water observations, and socio-economic impacts warrant a further expansion of exceptional drought (D4) into northern California. For California’s 154 intrastate reservoirs, storage at the end of June stood at 60% of the historical average. Although this is not a record for this time of year—the standard remains 41% of average on June 30, 1977—storage has fallen to 17.3 million acre-feet. As a result, California is short more than one year’s worth of reservoir water, or 11.6 million acre-feet, for this time of year. The historical average warm-season drawdown of California’s 154 reservoirs totals 8.2 million acre-feet, but usage during the first 2 years of the drought, in 2012 and 2013, averaged 11.5 million acre-feet.
Given the 3-year duration of the drought, California’s topsoil moisture (80% very short to short) and subsoil moisture (85%) reserves are nearly depleted. The state’s rangeland and pastures were rated 70% very poor to poor on July 27. USDA reported that “range and non-irrigated pasture conditions continued to deteriorate” and that “supplemental feeding of hay and nutrients continued as range quality declined.” In recent days, new wildfires have collectively charred several thousand acres of vegetation in northern and central California. The destructive Sand fire, north of Plymouth, California—now largely contained—burned more than 4,000 acres and consumed 66 structures, including 19 residences.
Here is a video on Youtube with more information on the agent-based modeling system Netlogo. I am intrigued by the claim, even though it is such a cliche, that even a child can use it.
Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife
NPR reviews an upcoming book called Subirdia, which says that in temperate areas, there are more bird species in the suburbs than in cities or even forests:
So what have suburbs got that forests don’t? Suburbs, he says, offer a wide range of artificially designed garden habitats, providing a smorgasbord of nuts, fruits, seeds, insects and ponds, in dense concentrations. Because they are rich with different kinds of bird food, suburbs are rich with different kinds of birds…
But let’s not get crazy about this: suburbs are not the birdiest zones on earth. Any patch of tropical forest, with its dazzling populations of plant and animal life, will trump a garden-rich suburb. But if you are comparing suburban bird diversity to temperate wild spaces — say the Cascades, the Smokies or the Adirondacks — the suburbs, shockingly, win.
So maybe our goal in denser cities should be to create a landscape with more of this variety of garden habitats. That is doable, and a much more attainable goal than trying to create forest-like habitat in cities. There are some shy species that won’t come to the city, but the city can be pleasant for a wide variety of species, even humans, if we work at it.
Okay, maybe so-called intellectual property rights encourage innovation in some industries sometimes. But the evidence shows that they sometimes do the exact opposite, especially if taken to the extreme. This is the abstract of a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to control for endogeneity of patent invalidation. Patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent increase in citations to the focal patent, on average, but the impact is heterogeneous and depends on characteristics of the bargaining environment. Patent rights block downstream innovation in computers, electronics and medical instruments, but not in drugs, chemicals or mechanical technologies. Moreover, the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers more follow-on innovation by small firms.
Here is some more evidence from the journal Geology that microbial life may exist or once have existed on Mars.
Depletion of phosphorus, vesicular structure, and replacive gypsic horizons of these Martian paleosols are features of habitable microbial earth soils on Earth, and encourage further search for definitive evidence of early life on Mars.
I’m interested in the question of whether life on Earth is truly alone in the universe. If we find just one bacterial cell on another planet, and as long as we don’t think that cell came from Earth or is an ancestor of life on Earth, the question will have been answered. If we can find life just one other place, then it will be likely that there is life all over the place.
If there’s one thing I don’t put a whole lot of stock in, it’s scientific and medical information provided by random websites. Like this one, Corante, which claims that toxoplasma, a virus that incubates in cats, affects rats’ brains so that they are less afraid of cats. Then it goes on to suggest that half of all people are infected with this virus, and that it has unknown, subtle but possibly harmful effects on people. It just makes me think about how little we really know about most of the vast community of microorganisms inhabiting our bodies. The scariest thing would be something that is harmful, but has a long incubation period so it can infect a large fraction of the population before we are even aware of it.
From Conservation Biology, here’s an article on connectivity and movement corridor models for wildlife:
Habitat corridors are important tools for maintaining connectivity in increasingly fragmented landscapes, but generally they have been considered in single-species approaches. Corridors intended to facilitate the movement of multiple species could increase persistence of entire communities, but at the likely cost of being less efficient for any given species than a corridor intended specifically for that species. There have been few tests of the trade-offs between single- and multispecies corridor approaches. We assessed single-species and multispecies habitat corridors for 5 threatened mammal species in tropical forests of Borneo. We generated maps of the cost of movement across the landscape for each species based on the species’ local abundance as estimated through hierarchical modeling of camera-trap data with biophysical and anthropogenic covariates. Elevation influenced local abundance of banded civets (Hemigalus derbyanus) and sun bears (Helarctos malayanus). Increased road density was associated with lower local abundance of Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi) and higher local abundance of sambar deer (Rusa unicolor). Pig-tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina) local abundance was lower in recently logged areas. An all-species-combined connectivity scenario with least-cost paths and 1 km buffers generated total movement costs that were 27% and 23% higher for banded civets and clouded leopards, respectively, than the connectivity scenarios for those species individually. A carnivore multispecies connectivity scenario, however, increased movement cost by 2% for banded civets and clouded leopards. Likewise, an herbivore multispecies scenario provided more effective connectivity than the all-species-combined scenario for sambar and macaques. We suggest that multispecies habitat connectivity plans be tailored to groups of ecologically similar, disturbance-sensitive species to maximize their effectiveness.
The Ebola situation makes for some scary headlines. From the CDC, the number of cases as I write this (July 31) in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone is 1,322 of which 728 (55%) have died.
Ebola is a disease with no known cure which incubates in bats. To put these numbers in perspective, Wikipedia says that 8,231 people in Haiti have died of cholera since 2010, a disease we know the exact cause of and exactly how to prevent (clean drinking water) and treat (staying hydrated with clean drinking water).
