Archive for category Science/Geek
Link Dump: Snappy Answers to Stupid Vaccine Questions
Posted by Grg in Dumb thoughts, Grg's Reference, Science/Geek on Tuesday, January 24, 2012
The Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation (thanks Wikipedia!)
At the risk of not sounding terribly polite, I’ve been researching (i.e., Googling) some of the stupidest questions being asked in our society: those of the antivax movement. Its not that it is stupid to question vaccinations, or for parents to ask sincere questions before having their children repeatedly jab. That’s common sense. No, the stupid comes in where we see antivaccine talking points repeated endlessly, unthinkingly by the antivaccine faithful. (And before you say it, “open minds” should go both ways.) You can’t help but find the same rhetoric being repeated endlessly on discussion boards, partisan websites and in interviews.
Anyway, I’m collecting some of my favorite Snappy Answers to Stupid Vaccine Questions here. While I am no expert, I’ll try to link to answers with good references. I’m also trying to avoid the vanilla PR answers you’ll get from health system websites.
Al Jaffee, by the way, is still alive, possibly in Guantanamo through either a tragic misunderstanding or an accurate Snappy Answer.
From A Photon in the Darkness comes Three Popular Anti-vaccine Myths Deconstructed. Spoilers: The myths are
1) “You claim that vaccines are 100% safe and effective!” Which technically is actually kind of a straw man of a straw man. A meta scarecrow, if you will. But only technically. As Photon explains, nobody of any real knowledge of the matter would claim that vaccines are either 100% safe or effective.
2) ”Vaccine-preventable diseases were in decline before the vaccines were introduced”
3) “The chickenpox vaccine causes shingles!”
From Losing in the Lucky Country comes a discussion on the mysterious phenomena of Vaccine Shedding, which follows in great part with myth #3 above. I’ve seen this sort of thing pop up in a number of discussion boards, where the real phenomena of viral shedding, a part of viral reproduction, has somehow been conflated with vaccines to create the myth of Vaccine Shedding.
The colloquial use of this nonsensical term seeks to convey that an individual who has been vaccinated can readily shed part of the vaccine and cause infection in the unvaccinated. Which by definition demands them to have shed not a vaccine but an infectious agent. Indeed a virus. Which by extension demands the vaccine to be a live virus vaccine. This then opens the door to viral shedding the vast complexities of vaccine induced immunity and viable modes of excretion – aka shedding. That won’t stop your garden variety anti-vaxxer claiming any vaccine can lead to infection of the unvaccinated via this ghastly “vaccine shedding”.
Its complex, and worth a read. To oversimplify, yes, live attenuated vaccines can pose a risk to immunocompromised people (and often infants and pregnant women) and a healthy child or adult cannot get sick from being near a vaccinated person.
I’ll try to keep updating this as whim takes me.
UPDATE 1: How Antivaxxers Debate
Here’s a nice primer on common antivaccine “Tropes and Tactics”, which is summarized and added-upon by Orac here for those who can’t access the article.
UPDATE 2: Brain Studies Demonstrate Autism at 6 Months
Interesting news for the antivaccine proponents who still cling to the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism: you can detect patterns of autism in children as young as six months. Of course, MMR isn’t given to children younger than one year old, which leftbrainrightbrain blog suggests time travel may be the last refuge for the vaccine denialists. They also take a nifty look at the causation/correlation fallacy commonly necessarily employed by people who still insist vaccines cause autism.
We gonna light it up like its Dicynodont
Posted by Grg in Dumb thoughts, Science/Geek on Tuesday, January 10, 2012
We shall name him Toby.
I rescued young Toby from its hellish spinning prison at Giggleberry Farms because it interested me so. Yes, I am the master of the dino-teeth claw game…and apparently the master of spending 50 cents to win 4 cents of prehistorical-themed plastic. I have a general familiarity with dinosaurs, but this guy was new to me. Turns out, that might be because he’s not a dinosaur.
Cartographer extraordinaire and apparent dino afficionado Jim Miller, suggested he is a dicynodont, a type of tusked herbivore that nibbled its way across the Earth back in the mid-Permian era some 280 million years ago. It is, for all purposes, part of proton-mammallian line of reptiles as the more camera-friendly dimetrodon. I look forward to reading more about them. According to the Telegraph, they were very successful and can be found most anywhere on the planet. Good on them.
Also glad to know that whatever factory in Asia churns out plastic dino toys has been looking to represent therapsids. Good on them.
Quick link dump: Med History, GMO Fearmongering at the Atlantic and SciFi (literary and realized)
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Pete Diamandis announced an X-Prize for a tricorder-like device. The X-Prize Foundation is one of those organizations that make me proud of humanity.
Emily Willingham deftly dissects an awful attempt by a writer for The Atlantic at turning a cool scientific discovery into a “Frankenfoods” fear fest. Emily sums up the science in question — findings on how little bits of rice RNA can have an affect on our genes — in these passages :
A study from a Chinese group led by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanking University and published in Cell Research, has uncovered the fascinating result that when people eat rice, they can absorb microRNAs (miRNAs)–tiny sequences of RNA–from the rice into the blood. These rice-originating miRNAs turn up in blood and tissues of people who eat rice and…here’s the kicker…one type of rice miRNA interacts with human proteins that are responsible for removing LDL (“bad” cholesterol) from the blood (!). It’s the first report of plant miRNAs ending up in people by way of diet and the finding that at least one of them alters an important process in the body.
{A bunch of cool stuff you should read cut out.}
Researchers have discovered myriad ways that miRNA influences human development and disease, and these discoveries open the way to using that information to cure disease. But all of the miRNAs investigated thus far in people have come from people themselves, either present for normal functions or overabundant and linked to disease. The flashy take-home from this latest rice study is, We can pick up these tiny regulators from what we eat…and they can interfere with the functions of proteins we make.
She then goes into The Atlantic author’s illogical leap attempt to turn into a cautionary tale of genetically-modified food. I understand (via her Twitter handle) that she’s updating the piece. I look forward to following the tale.
Oh, where were we? History, yes! NEJM is 200 years old and they’re celebrating with a cool site and timeline.
Science Fiction magazines (like all genre literary magazines) are suffering what are probably unsustainable drops in readership, which makes it curious to see that MIT’s consumer-friendly Technology Review has just announced its own Skiffypub: TRSF. I know you can find Analog and Asimov’s in “e” versions, but I’m shocked neither has an Android or IOS app. Its not like they cater to savvy geeks or anything.
Why I don’t go in the water: Yeti Crabs
Posted by Grg in Don't Go In the Water, Dumb thoughts, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Thursday, January 5, 2012
Here’s a great reason why I won’t be sleeping well tonight: Yeti crabs. They look like giant, slightly fuzzy, ticks.
The little octopus is just adorable, though, in an entirely Cthulhuesque way.
Also, why I read EarthSky.org: they’re good about linking to published sources. Handy! Considerate!
Awesome parasite tricks
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Friday, September 9, 2011
While waiting for a photographer to set up this morning, I read a nifty PLoS ONE paper on parasitic wasps from some Czech researchers that might add a few good parasite examples to your cocktail party conversation bank. The chief example, of course, is the larva of the wasps themselves, who force their spider hosts to build the sort of snuggly web-den that they would normally do as they are preparing for winter. The researchers gather that the larva get the same advantage from the winter webs as the spiders do, namely protection from weather and predators. Then, presumably, the larva eat their hosts from within. Eh, don’t feel too bad. Unless you are a big fan of spiders, Neottiura bimaculata and Theridion varians are not the sort I’d hesitate to squish. But maybe that’s just me.
Interestingly, both spiders make different kinds of winterized webs, where N. bimaculata creates a dense wad of webbing while T. varians builds a cupola-like structure. So, despite the fact that the hosts are two distinct species who build two distinctly different types of webs, the wasp larva effects them in more or less the same way, presumably by tinkering with the same winterizing mechanism (yay evolution!).
The paper’s intro also provides a few good examples, which I’ll just paste here for reference:
Many parasites and parasitoids have evolved remarkable strategies to manipulate the behavior of their hosts in order to promote their own survival and reproduction [1], [2]. The behavioral manipulations described include altered phototaxis, changes in locomotion, and the alteration of foraging and defensive behaviors [2]–[19]. The most fascinating manipulations are those that lead to unnatural host behaviors. The parasitic trematode, Dicrocoelium dendriticum Rudolphi, forces its intermediate ant-host to move up onto blades of grass during the night and early morning. This action increases the ingestion of infected ants by grazing sheep, the final host [3]. Mermithid nematodes induce their terrestrial arthropod hosts to commit suicide by jumping into water, after which the hairworms desert the host to spend their adult stage in their natural habitat [8].
Behavioral manipulations often result in the induction of innate behaviors. Acanthocephalan, Polymorphus paradoxus (Connell & Corner), evokes evasive behavior in the amphipod intermediate host, Gammarus lacustris Sars, which is then eaten by ducks [4]. The braconid parasitoid, Glyptapanteles spp., makes their caterpillar host behave as a bodyguard of the parasitoid pupae [15]. The caterpillar stands bent over the parasitoid pupae and violently lashes out at approaching predators, resulting in reduced predation of parasitoid pupae.
Evidence for benefits of the host manipulations for the parasitoid has been gained from several host-parasitoid systems [9]–[12]. But there might be also costs involved. This has been rarely studied. Maure et al. [13] investigated bodyguarding of the braconid pupae, Dinocampus coccinellae (Schrank), by ladybird Coleomegilla maculate Timberlake. Laboratory experiments revealed that duration of bodyguarding suppressed predation by lacewings but also decreased the parasitoid fecundity.
You can find the entire article here, for free, because PLoS ONE is awesome like that.
The Second (Third? Fourth?) Coming of the Golden Fleece Awards
Posted by Grg in Dumb thoughts, Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Thursday, June 2, 2011
Why? Because research often sounds funny. Really. Why else would Palin attack fruit fly research? For the ignorant, it sounds pretty damn frivolous. For the rest of us, its pretty embarrassing to watch.
Now I’m not saying that there’s not waste in government, or even waste in research funding. There probably is. In fact, I’m willing to go as far as say–without any evidence at hand one way or the other–that there probably is waste in federal research funding. Someone, somewhere at the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, is funding a research program that they know, in their heart of hearts, will not advance the human body of knowledge one iota. Shocking, I know.
If only Coburn was actually pursuing something like that. No, he’s doing what Proxmire and others did before him, searching through the reams of research grant summaries produced by places like NSF to pick ones that sound silly or frivolous. Its easy enough to do, but will just as likely backfire on you. Again, ask Palin.
You can also ask Mark Sanford. Before Mark was a governor and a famed Appalachian explorer, he was a Republican Congresscritter of the Revolution of ’94 sort. In 1998, he played the same Golden Fleece game, searching the abstract databases of the National Science Foundation (which had become freely online) for funny-sounding award summaries.
To be honest, I did the same thing. I interned in the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA, which I always liked to say as Opa! They learned quickly to keep me away from the dishes.) As a pioneer in open-access government-type stuff, NSF put all their approved grant information online, which was pretty keen in the 90s. As an intern, I was not encumbered by a particular PR “beat” and was given free reign to cover whatever I found interesting, as long as the professional public information officers didn’t mind. I scanned through the award listings and came up with cool stuff like “supermassive” black holes and “doppler on wheels.”
Sanford did the same thing and came up with a remarkable rant on federal funding for ATM research. He wanted to slice almost $200 million from the budget, citing waste on ATM research and other silly things. Only he (or his staffer) didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, if they did, they would have realized that the award abstract referred to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the switching technique that made your lightning fast dorm room ISDN connection so much faster than your parent’s Compuserve account. Cue the sad trombone. (Side note: Sadtrombone.com is apparently defunct so I’ll do it myself: Wah wah wah waaaaah.)
In fairness to Republicans, it was Sanford’s Michigan colleague Vern Ehlers who pointed out Sanford’s error, quashing the budget hack. (Check out this little note in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)
Even more recently, Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, tried to play the Golden Fleece game. Last year, Rep. Smith called for folks to search through NSF’s award database to find other funny-sounding stuff like:
$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.
Of course, both projects were taken drastically out of context. the soccer study was really a look at smart-swarming, that is how teams can come together to collaborate on complex problems. The “sound of objects breaking” was created for the study of how to recreate realistic noises in a virtual environment, say for search-and-rescue or the military, perhaps? Again, its a bit of irony. The NSF attempts to be responsible with our money, showing us precisely where the dollars are going, only for some political hack to come along, take the work out of context, and use it to further his own political agenda.
Oh, bother.
NSF, which only spends about 5 percent of its budget on administrative costs*, is getting nailed by political hacks for a) openly posting its award information (which is probably mandated by now) and b) funding scientists who often use imprecise or “clever” language in their award application titles and abstracts.
So, Coburn, you want to cut waste? Fine, but realize that federal funding for research is the backbone of our economy. Every new technical advance, therapeutic drug, surgical technique, material and technology we’ve seen in the last 50 years owes its very existence to agencies like the NSF and NIH. Every step forward we’ve made in medicine, technology and industry began in some academic laboratory with government dollars. Research funding is every bit a part of our infrastructure as our roads and bridges (which could also use a little bit of money now that I think of it).
Maybe you could take a little fiscal pride in that Tom, my friend, and a little less happy-dancing over the amount of farm subsidies your rake in for Oklahoma each year.
The fact is, NSF and NIH subject grant applications to peer review. That is, the agencies gather teams of scientists to review the grant applications made by other scientists. The NSF was started that way nearly 60 years ago as a way of making a science of science funding, whereas scientific projects would otherwise be funded through political largesse and budgetary earmarks. In other words, its the opposite of pork.
Money is scarce–only about 1 in 10 grants are ever given funding–so the pressure is on to fund high-impact, low-risk work. (If anything, there is a good argument to be made for funding high-risk work, but that’s not what I’m ranting about today.) Grants that get funding rarely get funded on the first go-around, and a lot of work goes into making sure the money is spent wisely. Note: I can’t think of anywhere else in the Federal government where people work so hard to make sure that taxpayer money is spent well. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Further reading:
(An interesting essay regarding a recent American Association of Anthropology kerfluffle that’s tangentially-related.)
* Best proof I can find is here, a report from 4 years ago. I admit, its a little outdated, but I’ve got work to do…
Why I don’t go into the water: Stealth Orcas
Posted by Grg in Don't Go In the Water, Science/Geek on Thursday, March 3, 2011
Killer whales Orcas are one of my daughter’s many, many favorite animals. In fact, I don’t use “killer whales” anymore thanks to her goading.
Still, let’s not fool ourselves, they are apex predators and you, all fat and stuffed into a wet suit, are pretty much just an oddly rubber-tasting seal moments away from a bloodly, wet devourment*.
The researchers thought the predators might switch to very high frequency whistles to co-ordinate the hunt.
But the orcas actually go completely silent and are somehow still able to form organised hunting groups.They used hydrophones – underwater microphones – to listen to and record orcas communicating with each other. The team could even hear crunching sounds when the animals were eating their prey.
Go ahead and listen at the article. Pretty awesome, actually.
File this under Things I Didn’t Know (and germane to the article’s point), but scientists believe that there may be two sub-species of orca. One “resident” species that primarily eat fish and a “transient” species that favor seal meat…mmmm…
Resident orcas hunt for salmon using echolocation. The orcas click, producing waves of sound that travel through the water and bounce off the fish, allowing the predator to sense its location.
“But all marine mammals have excellent underwater hearing,” explained Dr Deecke.
“If if a killer whale swam along clicking like mad, all the seals and porpoises would think – here comes a predators, let’s get away.”
But the transient orcas’ solution surprised the researchers.
“They go into stealth mode – completely silent,” said Dr Deecke. “This raises the question: how are they communicating?”
It seems that orcas can carry out complex, co-ordinated mammal-hunting trips without “talking to each other” at all.
That’s pretty sweet…but I’m still not going in the water with them
(Lastly, kudos for the BBC for linking to the source publication.)
*Turns out Devourment is a death metal band from Texas. No word on whether they sing about orcas.
Why I don’t go into the water: Jellyfish with both “medusa” and “gigantica” in their Latin names should be avoided on principle
Posted by Grg in Don't Go In the Water, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Friday, December 10, 2010
But looking up info on oarfish, I came across Mark Benfield‘s work at Louisiana State University. He’s working with oil and gas industry ROVs — submersible robots — to study wildlife. Hey, its the least the industry could do. No, seriously, the very least.
Last spring, Benfield published the first account of Stygiomedusa gigantea, a giant jellyfish, in the Gulf of Mexico. They aren’t trawler-eating big, but they are still fairly huge. They are apparently fond of grabbing onto underwater structures — such as pipelines or oil rigs — to use as a base for feeding. See, the oil industry is providing a valuable service!
Discover Magazine interviewed Benfield last month. Cool, shudder-inducing vid:
Why I don’t go in the water: the Oarfish of the ocean depths
Posted by Grg in Don't Go In the Water, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Friday, December 10, 2010
The awesomely named Serpent Project — a painfully labored acronym “Scientific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology” lets scientists use ROVs run by oil and gas companies in the gulf. The fossil fuel industry in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t quite have the best spring and summer, evah!, so it is understandable that this didn’t get much press. Also, its about a long, disgusting fish monster.
Still, someone took Dr. Mark’s video and set it to Holst’s Neptune the Mystic, which is as appropriate as it is satisfying.
These guys can grow up to 56 feet long, which is frighteningly impressive.
Also, Dr. Mark also captured footage of a ginormous pulsating jellyfish that ought to put the fear of Cthulhu into you, if nothing else does. Next post.
Archer takes down plesiosaur
Posted by Grg in Science/Geek on Friday, December 3, 2010
Pretty cool picture, though.