Monthly Archives: October 2016

One of the options often used to wisely consume water is recycling: collecting water that has been used once, often by residents for excretion, clean it, and send it back for more use. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Not always, as Anthony King reports in NewScientist (17 September 2016, paywall):

Excreted and flushed through our sewage works and waterways, drug molecules are all around us. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water.

The amounts that end up in your glass are minuscule, and won’t lay you low tomorrow. However, someone prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health?

“We don’t know what it means if you have a lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations,” says Klaus Kümmerer at the University of Lüneburg, Germany.

Even what we might consider fresh water isn’t so fresh:

Paul Bradley of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren’t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdb).

Back in 2013, Scientific American reprinted a report from Environmental Health News on the efficacy of water treatment facilities:

Only about half of the prescription drugs and other newly emerging contaminants in sewage are removed by treatment plants.

That’s the finding of a new report by the International Joint Commission, a consortium of officials from the United States and Canada who study the Great Lakes.

The impact of most of these “chemicals of emerging concern” on the health of people and aquatic life remains unclear. Nevertheless, the commission report concludes that better water treatment is needed.

“The compounds show up in low levels – parts per billion or parts per trillion – but aquatic life and humans aren’t exposed to just one at a time, but a whole mix,” said Antonette Arvai, physical scientist at the International Joint Commission and the lead author of the study. “We need to find which of these chemicals might hurt us.”

The NewScientist report explored the possibility of less stable drugs (i.e., shelf-life), which might make pharmaceuticals more resource intensive (in my view), so I wonder if an alternative would be to require the pharmaceutical companies to also do the research to discover how to remove the remnants of their drugs from the water supply – or to guarantee the human body completely absorbs it. Extra points if they can report that common treatment options already remove the drug remains.

From the 60 Seconds column of NewScientist (14 September 2016):

A newly identified parasitic worm has been named in honour of US president Barack Obama. The thread-like blood fluke, called Baracktrema obamai, infects freshwater turtles. Its discoverers say they admire Obama, and that, to the people that study them, parasites are beautiful (Journal of Parasitology, doi.org/bqfk).

Oy.

I hate it when I become vertiginous in my chair.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=f1BgzIZRfT8%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded

In connection with this post, I present boine:

Of or pertaining to the boas.

YourDictionary

Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog covers a 3-in-1 fossil:

An image from the study showing the juvenile snake that ate a lizard that ate an insect. The arrow points to tip of the lizard’s snout. (Credit: Krister T. Smith)

It’s not often that paleontologists uncover a fossil that reveals what its dinner ate for dinner.

Working in Germany’s Messel Pit, a prehistoric volcanic lake, researchers found an insect inside of a lizard inside of a snake (a snalizect?), all preserved for posterity in ancient sediment. It’s essentially a prehistoric turducken, although not one you’re likely to serve up at Thanksgiving dinner.

This particular example of fossil-ception let researchers peer into a 48-million year old food chain, and bolsters theories about the dining habits of this particular species of snake, likely belonging to the genus Paleopython.

For those who love dense, academic prose, this is from the original article by Krister T. Smith and Agustin Scanferia on Springer Link, aka Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments.

The distorted skull is seen in left dorsolateral view (Fig. 2c), but CT reconstructions allow the observation of most of the ventral side of preserved bones (Fig. 2b). The edentulous premaxilla exhibits long transverse processes as in most boines. The frontals bear a conspicuous thin supraorbital shelf, which confers a quadrangular shape in dorsal view. This configuration can be observed in Palaeopython fischeri, as well as in juvenile and adult boines.

I’ve not heard of this phenomenon, but Spaceweather.com supplies information, both current and what they plan to research:

Researchers have long known that one of the van Allen Radiation Belts dips down toward Earth over South America, creating a zone of high radiation called “The South Atlantic Anomaly” (SAA). Since its discovery in 1958, the SAA has been shape-shifting, growing larger and intensifying.  A map published just last week in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Space Weather Quarterly outlines the anomaly with new precision:

When a spacecraft in low-Earth orbit passes through the anomaly, “the radiation causes faults in spacecraft electronics and can induce false instrument readings,” explains Bob Schaefer of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, lead author of the paper reporting the results. “We actually used these spurious signals to map out the radiation environment at an altitude of 850 km.” …

According to orthodox thinking, the SAA reaches down from space to within about 200 km of Earth’s surface. Below that altitude, its effects should be mitigated by the shielding of Earth’s atmosphere and geomagnetic field. To test this idea, Spaceweather.com and Earth to Sky Calculus have undertaken a program to map the SAA from below using weather balloons equipped with radiation sensors.  Next week we will share the results of our first flight from a launch site in Chile.  Stay tuned!

For those wondering about a correlation with Earth’s gravitational anomalies, here’s a recent map from the European Space Agency:

ESA Gravitational Map (from UniverseToday)

Doesn’t look strong from this visual inspection.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, American title Godzilla vs. the Thing, and included extra footage – this may be the version I saw) contains the elements of a good film, mixed together with a potato masher, and laid out for all to see. A giant egg has floated into the fishing village’s harbor as part of a destructive typhoon. The village mayor claims it and then sells it to a notorious entrepreneur and his shadowy backer, forcing the scientist and journalists who come to examine it to leave. The egg is placed in a huge hot house where it’ll be exhibited for crass commercial purposes.

Two tiny people appear to claim the egg, but their supplications for its return fall on the deaf, greedy ears of the owners, and they reluctantly leave; as they go, the journalists get a glimpse of the Thing, a gigantic butterfly whose egg it is.

As the ground is cleared for a project of some sort (I forgot what), from the muck and mud appears GODZILLA, who proceeds to do what GODZILLA does – stomp the village flat. The Japanese defense forces rally to cast Godzilla forth, but fail. The US Navy is called in, but, in an incoherent sequence, they fail as well (although, unlike the home-town Japanese, they suffer no casualties – a lost opportunity for the film makers, who could have had Godzilla clutching plastic model ships to his breast – throw in another typhoon at the same time and the visuals would have been stunning).

Goya’s Colossus

It’s worth taking a break from the summation to note that some fairly awful special effects produced a sharply focused city-scape in the foreground, with a mobile, fuzzy, faded-out Godzilla in the background, resulting in a surprisingly effective & creepy sequence of Godzilla moving through a city proper. In some bizarre manner, it reminds me of the great Spanish artist Goya’s painting Colossus¹, a mundane village in the foreground, a monstrous, sketchily seen creature passing in the night … although Godzilla wasn’t exactly passing peacefully.

In any case, as towns and villages fall to the monster, a deputation is sent to the island of the two tiny people who claimed the egg, asking for assistance in killing Godzilla. After a brief squabble or two, the Thing agrees to help, as its final act. At this juncture we see a gesture to the nature of Evil, as the entrepreneur, suddenly destitute, beats his shadowy backer up and then steals the money from the backer’s floor safe. With money-lust in his eyes and Godzilla literally looming in the distance, as seen (quite effectively) through a window, he turns his back on the backer, who pulls a gun and shoots him dead. Then the backer grabs the money, but Godzilla, who apparently really zips along, smashes the building, ending the life of the backer. Thus does evil always destroy itself in its unbridled lusts. Godzilla is often a morality play.

Godzilla menaces the egg, but the Thing arrives just in time to distract Godzilla (I hesitate to guess Godzilla’s gender, if I may be so irrelevant), engendering an epic battle (the Thing generates tremendous blasts of wind, confusing Godzilla …) which sees Godzilla distracted, and the Thing dead. Somehow, Godzilla knows that an island just off the coast has a collection of teachers and children Who Must Be Destroyed, and so he abandons his mission to destroy the egg to swim to the island in search of his prey. This gives the little people time to sing to the egg, causing it to burst and give forth …

Mothra larvae (from MothraKingdom)

TWO MOTHRAS! (Larvae?)

Yep, that’s your plot twist of the day. They plunge into the sea in pursuit of Godzilla, catch up to him on the beach, ensnare him in what appears to be spiderweb; Godzilla rolls off a cliff (wait, they’re on the beach, right?) and falls into the sea.

But is he dead? Have they failed in their mission?

The movie suffers from continuity problems, dialog problems, stereotype problems, special-effect problems (it was particularly deflating to see Godzilla’s breath literally melting the scenery as well as the military’s tanks), problems, problems, problems. But there’s a tangible plot, with some real cause and effect results, and if Godzilla’s appearance is less traceable to events and more to metaphorical requirements, well, take your complaints to the Customer Service desk.

You know who will be manning it.

¹Colossus may have been painted by an apprentice of Goya.

The only thing that has changed for Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare with respect to the upcoming election is his anxiety level:

What’s more, many of Trump’s voters are going to vote for him because of national security, not despite it. They are going to vote for him believing that Trump is the “tough” candidate. They are going to vote for him believing in his conflation of terrorists and the victims of terrorism. They are going vote for him believing that “a wall” to keep out migrants has something meaningful to do with national security. They are going to vote for him having accepted at some level his apocalyptic account of confrontation with the Islamic world and his insistence that all we need is greater willpower and more firepower for victory to be ours.

The radical disparity between elite policy views of Trump in the national security arena and the apparent resilience of his support certainly has parallels in other areas. But the national security side is different both in the degree of alarm and in the degree of unanimity. This is the area, after all, where the president has the most latitude, and it’s an area where non-partisan expertise is still valued and attitudes tend to be least partisan.

What has happened here? How have we come to a place where at least partly in the name of national security, a huge swath of the electorate is about to vote for a man when a wide community of practitioners and scholars considers it obvious that his views, actions, words, and very psyche threaten national security?

Maybe it’s time to sue Roger Ailes, former CEO of Fox News, for the deliberate deprivation of the American electorate. Doubt that? Here’s Bruce Bartlett, prominent conservative, taking Fox News apart. Not subjectively, but objectively. This should worry every person who thinks they’re a conservative and suckles at the Fox News teat.