Recently in Science, Technology & Health Category

Um... abortion is safer than birth?

Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.

Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.

It's not safer for the baby though.

(HT: James Taranto.)

Surgeon in Antarctic removes his own appendix.

One of the expedition's members was the 27 year old Leningrad surgeon Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov. He had interrupted a promising scholarly career and left on the expedition shortly before he was due to defend his dissertation on new methods of operating on cancer of the oesophagus. In the Antarctic he was first and foremost the team's doctor, although he also served as the meteorologist and the driver of their terrain vehicle.

After several weeks Rogozov fell ill. He noticed symptoms of weakness, malaise, nausea, and, later, pain in the upper part of his abdomen, which shifted to the right lower quadrant. His body temperature rose to 37.5°C.1 2 Rogozov wrote in his diary:

"It seems that I have appendicitis. I am keeping quiet about it, even smiling. Why frighten my friends? Who could be of help? A polar explorer's only encounter with medicine is likely to have been in a dentist's chair."

(HT: GeekPress.)

Erik Klemetti points out something obvious but frequently ignored by movies: you won't sink if you fall into lava.

Molten lava is nothing like water. Sure, everyone thinks that liquid rock (magma) is going to behave like any other liquid (e.g., water), but there are some key physical properties that tell us it just isn't the case. Let's compare!

• Water has a density of 1000 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 0.00089 Pa*s.
• Lava has a density of 3100 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 100-1000 Pa*s.

Pa*s is the SI unit for viscosity -- some people might be familiar with other viscosity measures like poise. Viscosity is, more or less, the resistance to flow, so if you throw something in a liquid, a low viscosity liquid (like water) will "get out the way" and you'll sink faster relative to a high viscosity liquid (like cold corn syrup). The density of the liquid will also play a role in how quickly you might sink based on your own density. So, when we're looking at water versus lava, lava is ~3.1 times the density and between ~100,000 to 1,100,000 times the viscosity. They are very different!

You could probably walk on lava, except for the horrible burning. Even still, you could amble on your ever-shrinking legs.

New research reveals that millions of printers are vulnerable to rogue firmware updates.

One particularly vexing part of the fix: Printers that are already compromised by rogue software likely cannot be fixed. An attacker could easily shut down the pathway for future updates that would "cure" an infected printer.

"If and when HP rolls out a fix, if a printer is already compromised, the fix would be completely ineffective. Once you own the firmware, you own it forever. That's why this problem is so serious, and so different," Cui said. "This is nothing like fixing a virus on your PC."

Such inability to help consumers manually secure their printers could ultimately have disastrous consequences, Stolfo said.

"It may ultimately lead to telling everyone they just have to throw their printers out and start over," he said. "Fixing this is going to require a very coordinated effort by the industry," Stolfo said.

Bonus conspiracy theory: follow the money. What's the best way to sell millions of new printers in a bad economy?

(HT: RB.)

Sometimes an institution does something so stupid that it reveals that the institution itself has become fundamentally useless or even malevolent. In the most egregious cases, I believe we need something like capital punishment for entire organizations. Consider the recent ruling in the EU that bottled water manufacturers cannot claim that water reduces the risk of dehydration.

Brussels bureaucrats have been lambasted for conducting a three year study that has resulted in an E.U. ban on bottled water claims that drinking water prevents dehydration.

A three year study by European bureaucrats in Brussels has resulted in a ban on producers of bottled water from claiming that water prevents dehydration. The ban met with widespread criticism in Britain where the advice of the National Health Service is that drinking water helps to prevent dehydration. However if bottled water carries such claims from next month, the producers could face a two year prison sentence, according to Town Hall.

The European Food Standards Authority is behind this idiotic decisions and should be immediately disbanded and all the employees should be fired. Any institution that can produce such nonsense has no hope for reform. Kill it and start over.

When the singularity comes, will we even notice the transhumans?

Premise #2: Transhumans will be hard to see.

The individuals who elect to be more than human will evolve very, very rapidly. They'll be able to improve themselves continuously, after all. They'll be adding new powers, new abilities, new facets of themselves, all the time. Which means, I suspect, that they'll soon evolve right out of sight.

What do I mean by that? Well, as a character in one of my short stories says, consider the ant. It is a very successful being. It lived long before us. It will exist long after we're gone. But does it see us? Does it think about us as we think about it? As a living being? As an entity with its own goals and aims?

I submit that it doesn't. First, I'm not sure it has concepts like "entity" and "living," but, second, even if it did, I'm pretty sure it would see us as just big, warm, moving, something-or-others. And our constructions? Our cities and farms? No different from any mountain or field.

My point, then, is that once transhumans were as far removed from us as we are from insects, they might be pretty much invisible to us. Or, more precisely, we'd see them, but not know what we were looking at.

The whole thing is worth reading.

As technology continues to improve, more and more people will be permanently displaced from the workforce and will be unable to contribute meaningfully to the economy. In January I first wrote about the relationship between unemployment and technology.

As technology continues to improve, more and more workers will be displaced by automated systems. Manufacturing won't be the only sector affected: how many tax preparation jobs have been eliminated by TurboTax? Sales jobs by Amazon?

Using intelligence as a proxy for a person's general capability to contribute to the economy, we would expect that as technology improves the people who will be affected first will be those who are working jobs that require the least capability. Let's call the red line the displacement line: it represents the minimum amount of capability a person must have in order to be able to do a job that cannot be done by an automated system.

Economic indicators validate my prediction.

Since the end of the recession in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.

Corporations are doing fine. The companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are expected to report record profits this year, a total $927 billion, estimates FactSet Research. And the authors point out that corporate profit as a share of the economy is at a 50-year high.

Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count, the first time that has happened over a decade since the Depression.

This employment shift will not be smooth and continuous -- employment numbers may rebound for a while -- but the shift is inexorable. Those with capital (the shareholders of the corporations who own the technology) will continue earning, but those who depend on the value of their labor to survive will be slowly squeezed.

If the trend continues it will necessarily lead to either a giant social-welfare apparatus supported by the machines and the few who control them, or civilization will collapse. Or maybe both!

Wow: if this doesn't touch your heart then you have no soul. Mother forgoes cancer treatment to save unborn child.

She sent 159 text messages about her pregnancy to her brother in the months that followed. Many were joyful but then the bone-chilling messages came in during the predawn hours. She said severe headaches and double vision tortured her while tremors wracked her entire body.

"I'm worried about this baby," she texted.

"I hope I live long enough to have this baby," said another message. "Bubba, if anything happens to me, you take this child." ...

At her family's encouragement, she visited a number of doctors. In July, a CT scan revealed that she had head and neck cancer.

Now she had to choose between her life and her baby's life. Phillips said she agonized only for a while before deciding against taking potentially lifesaving chemotherapy in hopes that she would soon hold a healthy baby in her arms.

Read the rest.

(HT: Townhall.)

Rant from a Googler about how Google fails at platforms.

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me. ...

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

It's nice to hear that Google has some weaknesses as a company! I've always been shocked that I can't write apps that interface with Google products as I've so easily done for Facebook.

Victor Davis Hanson nails modern environmentalism.

Solyndra and Van Jones are the metaphors of these times, reminding us of the corruption of the very notion of "green." In the age of Al Gore, it has eroded from a once noble ideal of conservation to a tawdry profit- and job-scam for assorted hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. Without the lofty hype and shake-down, most otherwise would have had to find productive jobs. Tragically, "green" is the new refuge of scoundrels.

It's sad that environmentalists have done so much to ruin and discredit the cause by turning it into a scheme to enrich themselves and empower socialism and fascism.

"We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

And more discussion of FTL at Chaos Manor.

Measles fights cancer.

A marker for tumor cells is also a receptor for the measles virus. This finding might mean measles could be deployed against different types of cancers. ...

This is not the first time the cancer-fighting prowess of measles has been shown--Mayo Clinic researchers had already reported it. However, it is the first time the virus has been shown to target a common receptor to many different types of cancers. Next will come experiments with mice to see how well it works.

So is it possible that while the measles vaccine has reduced the prevalence of the virus it has also increased the incidence of various forms of cancer?

I'm not trying to start a conspiracy here... I'm a firm believer in the efficacy and utility of vaccines.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Mitochondrial degradation plays a role in many age-related diseases, but researchers have found a treatment that might rejuvinate mitochondria!

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have found a protein normally involved in blood pressure regulation in a surprising place: tucked within the little "power plants" of cells, the mitochondria. The quantity of this protein appears to decrease with age, but treating older mice with the blood pressure medication losartan can increase protein numbers to youthful levels, decreasing both blood pressure and cellular energy usage. The researchers say these findings, published online during the week of August 15, 2011, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may lead to new treatments for mitochondrial-specific, age-related diseases, such as diabetes, hearing loss, frailty and Parkinson's disease. ...

Declining mitochondria are known to influence chronic diseases in older adults, explains Walston, whose next step is to translate studies from cell culture and animal based studies to human studies in hopes of developing new therapies. "Our findings will help us determine if the drugs that interact with this receptor will also lead to improvement of mitochondrial function and energy production. This, in turn, could facilitate the treatment of a number of chronic diseases of older adults."

Fantastic news!

(HT: GeekPress and @bradleyvoytek.)

MIT researchers claim to have found a way to identify cells infected with any kind of virus.

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them -- including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.

The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. "In theory, it should work against all viruses," says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory's Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology.

Amazing accomplishment. I hope it pans out.

(HT: Marginal Revolution.)

New data from NASA reveals that the earth radiates a lot more heat into space than was previously thought. This is good news for humans because it further reduces worries about global warming / climate change.

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

If logic and data are capable of influencing the debate, that is.

(HT: NC.)

What's more awesome than neutron stars and red giants? Neutron stars inside red giants!

A Thorne-Zytkow Object is the end result of a merger between a Neutron Star and an O-Star (Red Giant). The two stars begin as a binary star system, and then the Neutron star (>1.4 solar masses) falls into the Red Giant (10-15 solar masses). This may seem strange that a star could fall into another star, but when we exam the densities, it doesn't seem so strange at all. The Neutron star is extremely dense because it is made exclusively of Neutrons. It has a similar demsity of an atomic nucleus. A single tablespoon of it is comparable to a fraight train filled with bricks. The Red Giant on the otherhand is very large, and so its mass is distributed over a greater volume, making for a much less dense object. A Red Giant has a density comparable to that of water. If it is easier, imagine the merger between a Neutron star and a Red Giant as being a rock sinking in water. In this process however it takes 1,000 years to get to the core and one month to get inside the core. The motion of the neutron star within the envelope of the red giant is on the order of Mach 3-1.4. TZOs are usually understood as a neutron star within the core of a red supergiant with the radii of several AU, a low temerpature, and a luminosity of order 10^5 solar luminosity units.

It is believed that the TZOs are formed at at a rate of 1/500 years to 1/1000 years per 10^11 solar mass Milky-way-like galaxy. This means that more than 30 TZOs could be formed per year within a 30 Mpc radius.

There are generally two possible outcomes of a neutron star sinking into the depths of a red giant. It will either become a supernova or a TZO.

That's a heavy meal.

BetterExplained.com has a great explanation of e, exponential functions, and natural logarithms. Very intuitive and not too mathy!

Pollution is terrible! No wait, pollution prevents global warming! Yay pollution!

Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

But... why would emerging economies "eventually crack down on pollution" when that pollution is the only thing standing between humanity and GLOBAL WARMING? Shouldn't the anti-warmists now be promoting the use of fossil fuels to protect our fragile environment?

The study said that the halt in warming had fueled doubts about anthropogenic climate change, where scientists say manmade greenhouse gas emissions are heating the Earth.

There was doubt because... y'know... there wasn't any warming.

"It has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008," said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

But now it's completely clear!

Sulphur aerosols may remain in the atmosphere for several years, meaning their cooling effect will gradually abate once smokestack industries clean up.

Which they'll do why? Coal is cheap, plentiful, and it protects us from global warming! All hail coal!

Other climate scientists broadly supported Monday's study, stressing that over longer time periods rising greenhouse gas emissions would over-ride cooling factors.

"Long term warming will continue unless emissions are reduced," said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at Britain's Met Office.

Long term? Wasn't global warming supposed to heat up the earth by like one degree over the next century? If we're talking about longer term than that, it's hard to be worried. Burn more coal.

(HT: NC, RC.)

James Richard Verone is a very sympathetic case, but certainly we as a society can't allow a person to rob a bank to get free prison healthcare.

A couple of months ago Verone started weighing his options.

He considered turning to a homeless shelter and seeking medical help through charitable organizations.

Then he had another idea: commit a crime and get set up with a place to stay, food and doctors.

He started planning.

As his bank account depleted and the day of execution got closer, Verone sold and donated his furniture. He paid his last month’s rent and gave his notice.

He moved into the Hampton Inn for the last couple of days. Then on June 9 he followed his typical morning routine of getting ready for the day.

He took a cab down New Hope Road and picked a bank at random — RBC Bank.

Verone didn’t want to scare anyone. He executed the robbery the most passive way he knew how.

He handed the teller a note demanding one dollar, and medical attention.

“I didn’t have any fears,” said Verone. “I told the teller that I would sit over here and wait for police.”

Let's assume that the story as presented is true. (I'm moderately skeptical of its veracity.) Obviously this is an unsustainable and undesirable strategy, and society has a strong interest in preventing others from following this same course. Several ideas present themselves:

1. Taxpayer-subsidized healthcare for everyone, not just prisoners.

2. No taxpayer-subsidized healthcare for anyone, including prisoners. This issue highlights one of the major problems with using imprisonment as our primary form of punishment: a prisoner is a total drain on the economy. I'm already on record opposing imprisonment for non-violent criminals.

3. Charge Verone with some sort of fraud-like crime that reflects his true intent.

(HT: Marginal Revolution.)