Science, Technology & Health: April 2008 Archives

This is pretty amazing if it's true... "extra-cellular matrix" powder that can regrow a fingertip. With pictures, some gruesome.

Scientists are claiming an amazing breakthrough - regrowing a man's severed finger with the aid of an experimental powder.

Four weeks after Lee Spievack sliced almost half an inch off the top of one of his fingers, he said it had grown back to its original length.

Four months later it looked like any other finger, complete with "great feeling", a fingernail and fingerprint.

I'm skeptical, but hey, if it's real then it's an amazing breakthrough. I'm sure we'll hear more about this "pixie dust".

Update:

Looks like my skepticism was justified.

But Professor Stephen Kaye, a consultant plastic and hand surgeon at Leeds University, poured cold water on Dr Badylak's claims.

Asked if he was surprised that Mr Spievack's finger "grew back" he said: "Not in the slightest."

Prof Kaye added: "The pictures I've seen on the web show a wound I would have expected to heal and regenerate in any case.

"The end of the finger is extremely good at regeneration. The pictures we've seen on the web show no evidence of loss of bone, nerve or tendon material, but regeneration and repair of skin - which is exactly what the fingertip does."

He added that the photographs appeared to portray a "very commonplace transverse amputation of the very end of the fingertip" and not someone who had lost the last phalanx of his finger, as Dr Badylak claimed.

Well yeah, if there was no loss of bone, nerve, or tendon, then the regrowth is much less interesting.

In the wake of last year's catastrophic failure in AIDS vaccine research (in which vaccine recipients actually had a slightly increased incidence of contracting the disease) it's eminently reasonable to consider other approaches to the problem. Considering the gazillions of dollars we've invested into AIDS vaccine research with no benefit, why not try redirecting our money away from the failing scientists and simply pay people not to get AIDS?

Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

The programme, jointly funded by the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Population Reference Bureau and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund, marks an important step in the fight to tackle Aids, which claims 2m lives a year.

In spite of billions of dollars spent annually on treatment and prevention worldwide, there were about 2.5m new HIV infections in 2007, predominantly in Africa.

Carol Medlin from the University of California, San Francisco, one of the researchers, said: “We hope this ‘reverse prostitution’ will make people think hard about the long-term consequences of their short-term behaviour.”

Sounds worth a shot. It would be surprising to me if a few dollars would provide much additional incentive to avoid a fatal disease, but then it's surprising to me that anyone contracts AIDS from sex or drug use anymore. If these payments reduce the infection rate by even 1% then they'll be more effective than all the research into AIDS vaccines thus far.

I predict that over the next 5-10 years our society will need to address what will grow into a major controversy: should we dig up Albert Einstein (and other famous scientists, historical figures, etc.) and clone them? It's likely that we'll be able to extract sufficient DNA from Einstein's corpse to create a clone of him who could grow from infancy into a normal adult. Presumably Einstein's heirs could veto such an effort (if they wanted to), but what about cloning George Washington. Who has a legitimate claim on his DNA now, hundreds of years after his death?

It may sound silly to us in 2008, but we'll be addressing this issue within our lifetimes.

Yesterday I wrote that software engineering is one of the most mentally challenging tasks that humans perform, and this article about optimistic programming might help non-programmers understand why.

I remain astonished that so many developers continue to write code that assumes relations like1+1=2 are true. In fact, 1+1=0fe23b9, sometimes. Or -65535. Or any of innumerable other values.

1+1=2 only when everything works perfectly. Do your programs work perfectly all of the time? The evidence suggests that most of us create imperfect code. Lots and lots of bugs.

Yet when writing the code, we labor under the assumption that there will be no bugs. Bugs are largely treated reactively: Chase 'em down when they appear rather than anticipate how they may arise and appropriately taking defensive action.

1+1!=2 if any of the parameters are globals and a reentrancy problem stomps on part of a value. Badly encapsulated data has the same problem. A null pointer passed to a summing function can return utterly unpredictable results.

Apparently, gauged by the code I see, none of us has ever dereferenced a null pointer.

Computer programs are literally chaotic systems: they are deterministic (i.e., they do exactly what you tell them to, every time) and tiny changes can have wide-ranging effects (change of a single bit will completely alter the behavior of the program). Not only are there an infinite number of errors that could occur, there are an infinite number of right ways to reach a goal as well. Navigating between these two infinities is hard. A program may have bugs that only appear once every thousand years, or bugs that result in very subtle output errors that are difficult to notice. Oftentimes a programmer will see an erroneous result but be unable to find the place in the code that's causing it.

One of the simpler problems to explain to a non-engineer is the halting problem. Everyone has experienced it: you're using a program and it suddenly becomes non-responsive: it crashes, goes into an infinite loop, or otherwise just stops responding to you. These are all examples of a halt, and the halting problem is the question of whether or not it's possible to determine if a particular program will ever halt. More formally:

Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.

Alan Turing proved mathematically that the halting problem is undecidable. That means that even if you have the source code for a program and know exactly what input will be put into it, there are some programs for which it is still impossible to determine whether or not they will halt. Typically, it's easier to determine if a program will halt than if it won't. If you run it, and it halts, then there you go! However, if you run it and it doesn't halt, you can't know that it won't halt if you just wait a little longer. How long do you have to wait? There's no way to know. The second after you stop waiting and decide that the program won't halt, it might halt. (Because actual computers have finite memory it is theoretically possible to determine whether a program will halt or not simply by enumerating every possible memory state, but practically this cannot be accomplished because there are far more memory states than there are atoms in the universe.)

So there's a very high-level description of one kind of bug that is known to be unsolvable. By being very careful, very smart, and very thorough it's possible to limit the number of bugs in a program to a level that doesn't render the program unusable, but improvements are asymptotic. The first 90% of the bugs take 10% of the time, the next 9% of the bugs take 10% of the time, the next 0.9% of the bugs take the next 10% of the time, and so on, until you've spent far more than 100% of the time alloted!

And remember: because the system is chaotic a single bug can result in catastrophic failure. Jaron Lanier has written extensively about Gordian software and why we need to move towards a non-chaotic software paradigm that is inherently fault-tolerant, but there's essentially zero progress on that front at the moment. Software bugs are here to stay.

101 computer programming quotes and 101 more. Those are "one-hundred and one", not "five".

It's funny that non-programmers tend to perceive programmers as cocky and arrogant, when in my experience a programmer's humility always increases with their skill. The best programmers I know are quick to admit their mistakes and trumpet their horrific learning experiences; they also tend to be some of the most cynical people I know, readily admitting to the inevitability of future catastrophic failures of their work product. Maybe it's my own vanity, but I think computer programming is probably among the hardest professions, along with being a general or a fascist dictator.

(HT: GeekPress and MetaFilter.)

I've seen first-hand the effects of chemotherapy on patients' bodies, so this new approach for applying nanotechnology to chemotherapy is extremely exciting:

The researchers focused a powerful drug directly on tumors in rabbits using drug-coated nanoparticles. They found that a drug dose 1,000 times lower than used previously for this purpose markedly slowed tumor growth.

"Many chemotherapeutic drugs have unwanted side effects, and we've shown that our nanoparticle technology has the potential to increase drug effectiveness and decrease drug dose to alleviate harmful side effects," said lead author Patrick M. Winter, Ph.D., research assistant professor of medicine and of biomedical engineering.

The nanoparticles are extremely tiny beads of an inert, oily compound that can be coated with a wide variety of active substances. In an article published online in The FASEB Journal, the researchers describe a significant reduction of tumor growth in rabbits treated with nanoparticles coated with a fungal toxin called fumagillin. Human clinical trials have shown that fumagillin can be an effective cancer treatment in combination with other anticancer drugs.

In addition to fumagillin, the nanoparticles' surfaces held molecules designed to stick to proteins found primarily on the cells of growing blood vessels. So the nanoparticles latched onto sites of blood vessel proliferation and released their fumagillin load into blood vessel cells. Fumagillin blocks multiplication of blood vessel cells, so it inhibited tumors from expanding their blood supply and slowed their growth.

Human trials also have shown that fumagillin can have neurotoxic side effects at the high doses required when given by standard methods. But the fumagillin nanoparticles were effective in very low doses because they concentrate where tumors create new blood vessels. The rabbits that received fumagillin nanoparticles showed no adverse side effects.

This kind of research can't happen too fast.

Analysis of dozens of studies indicates that antioxidants may do more harm than good:

The review involved trials on beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium.

It says in-depth analysis of the different trials does not support the idea that vitamins extend lifespan.

'Even more, beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E seem to increase mortality,' says the review.

Vitamin A was linked to a 16 per cent increase in mortality, beta-carotene - the pigment found in carrots, tomatoes and broccoli which the body converts into vitamin A - to a 7 per cent increase and vitamin E to a 4 per cent increase. However, there was no significant detrimental effect caused by vitamin C.

'There was no evidence to support either healthy people using antioxidants to prevent disease or for sick people to take them to get better,' said the review.

What's more, excessive use of multivitamins may cause prostate cancer.

Doctors are investigating a possible link between heavy multivitamin use and the most serious types of prostate cancer, according to an article in today's Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers followed 295,344 men. Men who reported taking multivitamins more than seven times a week had a slightly greater risk of advanced or fatal prostate tumors. If doctors followed 10,000 men for 10 years, there would be about 30 extra cases of advanced prostate cancer and seven or eight extra cases of fatal prostate cancer associated with heavy supplement use, says lead author Michael Leitzmann of the NCI.

I cut my multivitamin intake to once every-other day. Vitamins aren't a cure-all, and supplements should be used judiciously.

13-year-old German boy Nico Marquardt has determined that the Apophis asteroid is 100 times as dangerous as NASA calculated.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth -- and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.

If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

If we don't have the technology to divert an asteroid within 20 years, we deserve what we get. I can't wait to get my hands on all that iridium!

(HT: Nick.)

Update:

NASA Denies:

The AFP story claimed NASA had told the European Space Agency that the boy's calculations were correct. But Yeomans's statement on the NASA website says this is not true.

"Contrary to recent press reports, NASA offices involved in near-Earth object research were not contacted and have had no correspondence with a young German student, who claims the Apophis impact probability is far higher than the current estimate," it says.

Chesley points out that NASA's calculations have been independently confirmed by a group of scientists at the University of Pisa, who report their results on a website called NeoDys. The NeoDys entry on Apophis puts its impact risk at 0.00207%, or about 1 in 48,000.

(HT: GeekPress.)

As an artificial intelligence researcher I've always been fascinated by animal intelligence. It's simpler to understand than human intelligence, but often quite sophisticated in species-specific ways. Here's a National Geographic article about animal minds and various flavors of animal intelligence, and while it's quite fascinating I find it to be rather limited by its insistence on evolution as the mechanism behind the observed commonality.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin's evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

It's almost as if there were some common intelligent creator behind it all!

"Dogs' understanding of human forms of communication is something new that has evolved," Kaminski said, "something that's developed in them because of their long association with humans." Although Kaminski has not yet tested wolves, she doubts they have this language skill. "Maybe these collies are especially good at it because they're working dogs and highly motivated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they must listen very closely to their owners."

Scientists think that dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in which to evolve language skills.

Maybe dogs were designed for a purpose?

"People were surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools," said Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, referring to the straws and sticks chimpanzees shape to pull termites from their nests. "But people also thought, 'Well, they share our ancestry—of course they're smart.' Now we're finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds. But we don't have a recently shared ancestry with birds. Their evolutionary history is very different; our last common ancestor with all birds was a reptile that lived over 300 million years ago.

"This is not trivial," Kacelnik continued. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once—that it's not something reserved only for primates or mammals."

Some will object that my belief in a creator is somehow not scientific, but anthropomorphizing the process of evolution such that it can "invent" characteristics isn't far different.

Kacelnik and his colleagues are studying one of these smart species, the New Caledonian crow, which lives in the forests of that Pacific island. New Caledonian crows are among the most skilled of tool-making and tool-using birds, forming probes and hooks from sticks and leaf stems to poke into the crowns of the palm trees, where fat grubs hide. Since these birds, like chimpanzees, make and use tools, researchers can look for similarities in the evolutionary processes that shaped their brains. Something about the environments of both species favored the evolution of tool-making neural powers.

Or, again, perhaps these species were designed for their niche -- a possibility that is as interesting and testable as evolution.

"Elele just loved to be right," Herman said. "And she loved inventing things. We made up a sign for 'create,' which asked a dolphin to create its own behavior."

Dolphins often synchronize their movements in the wild, such as leaping and diving side by side, but scientists don't know what signal they use to stay so tightly coordinated. Herman thought he might be able to tease out the technique with his pupils. In the film, Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from the side of the pool, circle together underwater for about ten seconds, then leap out of the water, spinning clockwise on their long axis and squirting water from their mouths, every maneuver done at the same instant. "None of this was trained," Herman says, "and it looks to us absolutely mysterious. We don't know how they do it—or did it."

If that is accurate, the feat described is quite amazing.

Through these dolphins, he made some of the most extraordinary breakthroughs ever in understanding another species' mind—a species that even Herman describes as "alien," given its aquatic life and the fact that dolphins and primates diverged millions of years ago. "That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for intellect," Herman said. "We don't share their biology or ecology. That leaves social similarities—the need to establish relationships and alliances superimposed on a lengthy period of maternal care and longevity—as the likely common driving force."

Maybe! You can put your faith in that untestable hypothesis if you want to. I guess I just have a grander view of the universe, of humanity, of our fellow creatures, and of our Creator.

This Slate article about American Asians and gender selection is interesting as a counterpoint to the "technology will solve everything" meme that permeates our culture.

Now comes further evidence of this effect. Two days ago, economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in "U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents." Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.*

There's no plausible innocent explanation for this enormous and directionally abnormal shift in probability. The authors conclude that the numbers are "evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage."

So some Asians in America -- or Americans of Asian descent -- are almost certainly using abortion to ensure that they get a boy. This process is enabled by technology: not only does technology make it possible, but advancing technology makes gender determination and selective abortions more private, which bypasses any opprobrium such an abortion might otherwise provoke.

I've written before that gender selection poses a philosophical problem for libertarians and an existential problem for the primarily Asian cultures that practice it. It's hard for me to see how technology will "solve" this quandary absent a culturally dominant moral worldview.

Peripherally, the sentence I starred above doesn't sound right to me. According to this article about an article about the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, the gender of later children is only very slightly affected by the genders of earlier children, if at all. Did the author of this Slate article, William Saletan, pull the starred statistic out of thin air, or is there other research on this topic I haven't been able to find with Google? Sounds like an old wives' tale to me.

Artificial intelligence researchers have been working on the traffic problem for decades, and there are some (expensive) traffic management packages that can help cities operate their traffic lights efficiently, etc. Helping individual consumers avoid traffic hasn't really been possible until very recently however, mostly because there weren't enough sensors collecting real-time data. That gap has been filled, and now Microsoft is unveiling route-planning software called Clearflow that ties into a GPS and helps drivers avoid congestion.

Microsoft on Thursday plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams.

The new service’s software technology, called Clearflow, was developed over the last five years by a group of artificial-intelligence researchers at the company’s Microsoft Research laboratories. It is an ambitious attempt to apply machine-learning techniques to the problem of traffic congestion. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets.

The Clearflow system will be freely available as part of the company’s Live.com site (maps.live.com) for 72 cities in the United States. Microsoft says it will give drivers alternative route information that is more accurate and attuned to current traffic patterns on both freeways and side streets.

A system for driving directions that Microsoft introduced last fall was limited, because without Clearflow there was no information available about traffic conditions on city streets adjacent to the highways. Because the system assumed that those routes would be clear, drivers were on occasion sent into areas that were more congested than the freeways.

The new service will on occasion plan routes that might not be intuitive to a driver. For example, in some cases Clearflow will compute that a trip will be faster if a driver stays on a crowded highway, rather than taking a detour, because side streets are even more backed up by cars that have fled the original traffic jam.

No word in the article about what will happen if Clearflow directs all of its users onto the same previously-uncongested road....

This is a step in the right direction. Ultimately traffic will be "solved" by computer-driven vehicles that can operate faster and with smaller safety margins than human operators.

I only recently heard about Project Pluto, and it's so crazy that it's hard to imagine anything so awesome could every be built.

The proposed use for nuclear-powered ramjets would be to power a cruise missile, called SLAM, for Supersonic Low Altitude Missile. In order to reach ramjet speed, it would be launched from the ground by a cluster of conventional rocket boosters. Once it reached cruising altitude and was far away from populated areas the nuclear reactor would be turned on. Since nuclear power gave it almost unlimited range, the missile could cruise in circles over the ocean until ordered 'down to the deck' for its supersonic dash to targets in the Soviet Union. Once powered up, the unshielded half-gigawatt nuclear reactor would emit highly lethal radiation in a large radius; such a vehicle could not possibly be human-piloted or reused. Indeed, some questioned whether a cruise missile derived from Project Pluto would need a warhead at all; the radiation from its engine, coupled with the shock wave that would be produced by flying at Mach 3 at treetop level, would have left a wide path of destruction wherever it went. The SLAM as proposed would carry a payload of many nuclear weapons to be dropped on multiple targets, making the cruise missile into an unmanned bomber. Contrary to some reports, the exhaust of the engine would not itself be highly radioactive.

On May 14, 1961, the world's first nuclear ramjet engine, "Tory-IIA," mounted on a railroad car, roared to life for just a few seconds. Three years later, "Tory-IIC" was run for five minutes at full power, producing 513 megawatts and the equivalent of over 35,000 pounds force (156 kN) thrust. But despite these and other successful tests the Pentagon, sponsor of the "Pluto project," had second thoughts; Intercontinental ballistic missile technology had proved to be more easily developed than previously thought, reducing the need for such highly capable cruise missiles. On July 1, 1964, seven years and six months after it was born, "Project Pluto" was canceled.

If you like that, you might also like the nuclear-powered long-range bomber.

I know you've all been on pins and needles waiting for my decision... and the winner is... the BlackBerry Curve 8310! It doesn't have WiFi, but I barely use the WiFi I've got, so I decided to save my money. It comes with built-in GPS, which sounds cool. Anyway, I'll let you know how I like it when it arrives.

The Bakken Formation in North Dakota has been making news as oil prices have lingered at record-highs.

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

That's a lot of oil, but we may not have the technology to recover the majority of it... yet.

New curiosity developed in 2007 when EOG Resources out of Houston, Texas reported that a single well it had drilled into an oil-rich layer of shale below Parshall, North Dakota is anticipated to produce 700,000 barrels (111,000 m³) of oil. Estimates for ultimate oil contained in the entire Bakken play range from 271 billion to 503 billion barrels (40–80 km³), with a mean of 413 billion barrels (65 km³) of technically recoverable and irrecoverable oil.[6]

This massive estimate appears to dwarf the estimated 50–70 billion barrels (8–11 km³) of technically recoverable and irrecoverable oil in Alaska's North Slope. A conservative estimate of Bakken's technically recoverable oil would be 1% to 3%, or between 4.1 and 12.4 billion barrels (0.6–2 km³) of oil, due to the fact that Bakken's shale is so tight. However, other estimates range from 10% to as high as 50% technically recoverable reserves.[7] By comparison, recoverable oil estimates in the Alaska formation are 30% to 50%, or a mean of 26 billion barrels (4 km³).

The key phrase is "technically recoverable". As technology improves (and oil prices rise) the amount of "technically recoverable" also increases. (Another illustration of why oil depletion is a myth.)

A majority of American doctors now support nationalizing healthcare... but so what? 99% of teachers support public education and we can see what a miserable failure that institution is. The decision on whether or not to nationalize the healthcare industry is primarily a question of economics, not medicine, and doctors have plenty of selfish reasons to support a federal takeover.

There have been many news stories over the past few years about doctors quitting their profession for various reasons, mostly to do with malpractice insurance/litigation and over-regulation, so it's no surprise that doctors are itching for some sort of change. Unfortunately, no one is seriously considering change that would actually improve healthcare and not just health insurance, so disgruntled doctors and patients are left with little outlet for their frustrations other than the proposed nationalization.

Regardless of what a majority of doctors think, nationalized healthcare would be a disaster economically, and consequently a disaster medically. The law of unintended consequences demands no less.