Science, Technology & Health: February 2006 Archives
This is vague, but I heard on the radio yesterday that a researcher from some university is preparing to market an over-the-counter genetic test for the A1 "addictive personality" allele which is strongly linked to alcoholism. There is little doubt left that alcoholism and other addictive traits have a genetic component, and once there's a cheap and easy test to determine which people have the genes, how will that affect society?
Employers and insurers will obviously have strong incentives to avoid people with a high likelyhood of becoming alcoholics, but what if these addictive personality types can also become "workaholics"? Maybe not so bad for employers.
Even the dating game could be changed. Requests for STD tests are pretty common, but what if a potential mate asked you to have a DNA test before committing? Would your desire for a relationship with a person be affected if you found out that he had the addictive personality gene? If I found out that my child was dating someone with an addictive personality I would certainly warn her away from that person.
But then, genes aren't destiny. I believe in free will, and I'm sure there are more people with the gene who aren't alcoholics than who are. It's probably irrational for individuals to make any decisions about their friends or family based on genetics, and I doubt I'd hold anyone's genes against them in the face of contrary personal experience with the person. But when dealing with huge, statistically valid samples (like the government and corporations do) it could be completely rational to discriminate.
Finally, how might society change if people with "addictive personalities" couldn't find mates? The gene must be useful to the system or it would have died off a long time ago. Alcoholism and the like are terrible, but I don't know if a society without the A1 allele would be nearly as dynamic and interesting.
I can't wrap my head about the news that women are having plastic surgery to restore their hymens so they can "lose their virginity" again.
When Jeanette Yarborough decided to give her husband a gift for their seventeenth wedding anniversary she wanted it to be special. Really special. She decided that conventional treats such as Mediterranean cruises, gold watches, cars, a murder-mystery weekend, or even a boob job just weren’t going to cut it. She gave him something much more personal — and painful. Her virginity.Well, sort of. Mrs Yarborough paid $5,000 (£2,860) to a cosmetic surgeon to stitch her hymen back together so she could “lose her virginity” all over again and her husband would have that thrilling conquest at the grand age of 40.
He did, and after that very expensive moment the ecstatic couple spent a passionate Valentine’s weekend last year having the kind of sex that they had almost forgotten about. Now they are busy telling family, friends and strangers that it is the best money they ever spent and everyone should do it.
Far more than breast augmentations or face lifts, a decision to have this kind of surgery involves some serious psychological components that are hard to even categorize. Lost innocence? Recaptured youth, of the most intimate kind? Regret over past actions? "Closure" for past abuse? It's hard for me to figure it out. Are there female readers out there who can comment on whether or not they'd ever do this, or why it might be desirable to someone?
My brother passes this along:
Bill Nye The Science Guy told me (the only thing he ever said to me): "If you want to get really rich, invent a better battery." At the time, we were looking under the hood of a display model of a hybrid car in the Los Angeles Federal Building downtown.
Presumably the world will beat a path to MIT sometime soon...
Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of lithium battery that could become a cheaper alternative to the batteries that now power hybrid electric cars.Until now, lithium batteries have not had the rapid charging capability or safety level needed for use in cars. Hybrid cars now run on nickel metal hydride batteries, which power an electric motor and can rapidly recharge while the car is decelerating or standing still.
But lithium nickel manganese oxide, described in a paper to be published in Science on Feb. 17, could revolutionize the hybrid car industry -- a sector that has "enormous growth potential," says Gerbrand Ceder, MIT professor of materials science and engineering, who led the project.
It's safer, cheaper, and recharges faster than the lithium cobalt oxide batteries that power cell phones and the like. Still, I hate batteries on principle... let's just skip them and go straight to Mr. Fusion.
This page claims that water doesn't drain backwards in the Southern Hemisphere, but there was a whole Simpsons episode to the contrary. I don't know who to believe! Do I have any readers from Brazil who can settle the matter?
In physics, "escape velocity" is the speed (and direction) at which a body can escape a gravity well without further acceleration. That is, if you're moving fast enough you can escape from a gravity well without propulsion. For example, to escape from the Earth/Moon gravity well you need to be moving at 11.2 km/s. Of course, you can escape at any speed if you've got an engine, but if you want to, say, fire a bullet away from earth it would need to be moving 11.2 km/s to really get away (excluding air resistance); otherwise it will eventually fall back.
If that's clear, then consider the idea of "life extension escape velocity": the rate of life extension after which people will stop dying from old age. For example, since 1850 life expectancy in the United States has risen from 38.3 years to 74.8 years: an increase in life expenctancy of approximately 3 months per year. However, imagine a world in which life expectancy increases at a rate greater than 1 year per year... some people would still die, statistically, but the average age of death would increase faster than people actually get older. Death from old age would become very rare.
One year per year is the "life extension escape velocity". If and when medical advances ever reach that point, death from old age will be effectively eliminated. A lot of biologists (and others) have considered the issue and debated how society would change if people stopped dying, and Stanford professor Shripad Tuljapurkar has gotten some attention for making at least one obvious point: we'll have to raise the retirement age, something existing oldsters will fight against tooth and nail.
It seems obvious that drinking tap water is better for the environment, but considering how many self-proclaimed environmenetalists I know who drink bottled water maybe this is a good reminder.
Bottled water consumption, which has more than doubled globally in the last six years, is a natural resource that is heavily taxing the world's ecosystem, according to a new US study."Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing, producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy," according to Emily Arnold, author of the study published by the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based environmental group.
Arnold said although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can end up costing 10,000 times more. ...
"Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 US cars for a year," according to the study. "Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year." ...
It said that while consumers tend to link bottled water with healthy living, tap water can be just as healthy and is subject to more stringent regulations than bottled water in many regions, including Europe and the United States.
"In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water," the study says. "Often the only difference is added minerals that have no marked health benefits.
People in "green homes" shouldn't drink bottles.
Internet service providers in Japan are apparently monitoring users and alerting police when suicidal messages are transmitted over their networks.
A total of 91 people committed suicide in 34 Internet-related incidents across Japan last year, but police managed to prevent several potential victims from killing themselves by cooperating with Internet service providers, it has been learned.Police began cooperating with Internet service providers in October last year, based on guidelines created by an organization on Oct. 5.
Under the cooperation system, Internet providers hand the names and addresses of people who post suicide-related messages on the Internet in emergencies.
Is this good, bad, or indifferent? By my understanding there's nothing that prevents American IPSs from doing the same thing. For that matters, ISPs could pro-actively alert police to all sorts of potential crimes, were they so inclined.
Reader JV points me to this nifty network generator that lets us all play CIA by connecting the dots between terrorists. Of course the connections may be tenuous at best, but it's still fun. I know similar technology has been used to visualize the blog universe, but I can't find the link at the moment. Anyone?
While reading about intrusive gaming I came across Planetarium, which looks quite intriguing.
A girl with complete foresight but no recollection of the past receives a love-letter from beyond the end of her future. Guided by her friend the mathemagician, she begins a journey through the events which his calculations have predicted and her intuition has foreseen, towards the source of the curious letter.Each instalment contains three puzzles -- usually one riddle, one number problem and one tricky puzzle -- whose answers themselves form an overall puzzle, which can only be solved when the whole of Planetarium has been completed.
I plan to check it out. This is the exact sort of game/story I'd love to write.
Everyone knows I'm a huge fan of Google Earth, but now Windows Live Local has a cool feature that lets you get a "bird's-eye view" from an isometric angle that can be much more interesting than looking straight down. The images are pretty high resolution, and you can practically look into peoples' windows.
(HT: Future Feeder and reader JV.)
