Author Archives: curiouscat

Today, Most Deaths Caused by Lifetime of Action or Inaction

Chart of the Leading Causes of Death in 1900 and 2010

Our instincts lead us to fear the unknown and immediate threats (probably so we can be ready to run – or maybe fight). But today the biggest risks to an untimely dealt are not lions, other people out to get us, or even just random infection. We have to adapt to the new risks by taking action to eat healthfully and exercise, in the same way we we have evolved to avoid becoming a meal for a hungry beast.

Today the largest causes of death are heart disease and cancer (which account for more than 60% of the deaths causes by the top 10 leading causes of death). The next leading causes are non-infectious airways diseases, cerebrovascular diseases and accidents. Alzheimer’s, diabetes, nephropathies, pneumonia or influenza and suicide make of the rest of the top 10 leading causes.

In 1900 Pneumonia or influenza and tuberculosis took as many lives (per 100,000 people) and cancer and heart disease take today. We have done well decreasing the incidents of death (fewer deaths per 100,000) by greatly reducing and nearly eliminating some causes of death (the 2 leading causes from 1900 are good examples).

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Using Robots to Collect Data on our Oceans

Interesting idea to use self propelled robots to provide data on the oceans. They use no fuel to move, they use wave energy. They also have solar panels on the top. The wave gliders can travel to a distant area, collect data, and return to base. One of the big problems with convention methods of collecting data on the oceans is the large costs of placing the buoys (and the cost of servicing them).

Sex and Development of Life in the Ocean

TED education is providing access to really interesting education material. In this webcast learn about fertilization, development and growth in the ocean depths.

Mountain Lions Returning to the Midwest USA for the First Time in a Century

Cougars Are Returning to the U.S. Midwest after More Than 100 Years by John Platt

Cougars once lived throughout most of the U.S. and Canada but state-sponsored bounties put in place to protect livestock and humans from what were often deemed “undesirable predators” led to the cats’ extermination in the east and Midwest.
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Things started to turn around for the cougar in the 1960s and 70s when, one by one, the bounties were rescinded and states made the animals a managed-game species. Today they are classified as game species in most states and a “specially protected mammal” in California. This allowed their populations first to grow and then to expand their territories.
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Cougars are generalist predators, so LaRue says they can select any habitat with enough prey. They have also been shown to walk hundreds of kilometers in search of new habitat. “They have no problem traveling through cornfields or prairies for long distances if they have to,” she says. But cornfields and prairies aren’t suitable habitat for the cougars to settle in. She says they require forest cover, rugged terrain and dispersal corridors (typically rivers) that allow easy migration for both the cats and their prey.

Mountain Lions are very cool animals. So like our pets but with a size that means they can kill us, if they want. They are not much risk to us though. Occasionally there are attacks (now that the numbers of cougars are growing) but an extremely small number.

Data from the city of Boulder, Colorado:

There has been an average of 0.2 annual human deaths in all of North America from mountain lions between 1900 and 2007. This number is very low compared to annual deaths from black widow spiders (1.4 between 1950-1989), domestic dogs (16 between 1979-1998) and car crashes (45,000 between 1980-2005).

One Scientists 20 Year Effort to Defeat Dengue Fever

As I have said many times scientific breakthroughs often follow many years of effort. Here is a great example of a scientist putting in great work for years and it looks like it is about to payoff for hundreds of millions of people.

A Scientist’s 20-Year Quest To Defeat Dengue Fever

Now as I said, Scott’s been pushing this idea of using Wolbachia to control dengue for decades, for a most of that time without any success. I asked Scott what it takes to stick with something for that long.

“I think being obsessive,” he replied. “Being maybe a little ill in that regard. And it’s just that I seem to have focused my obsession onto Wolbachia instead of on to postage stamps or model trains.”

And even though his obsession has brought him to the point where he’s shown he can get his Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to spread in the wild, that’s not the success he’s ultimately after. “Success for me is having a significant impact on dengue disease in communities,” he says.

To do that, he’ll have to release his mosquitoes in a place where there’s a lot of dengue, and then see if that brings down the number of cases of the disease in humans. Those studies are being planned now.

The stakes are high. By some estimates, more than a billion people around the world are at risk for getting dengue. Even if it doesn’t kill you, I’m told a case of dengue can make you feel so bad, wish you were dead.
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But Scott says it’s not yet time to celebrate.

“We’ve got some good preliminary data, and we’re on the path. And it’s looking good. But you know I am a realist. It could fall over at any day,” says Scott.

Friday Fun: Kitten and Bunny

Just some fun for your Friday. Enjoy.

Webcast on Machine That Bores Subway Tunnels

This huge tunnel boring machine (12 meters in diameter and 95 meters long) digs subway tunnels without disturbing the buildings above. Up to 350 meters of tunnel can constructed in a week.

Prostate Cancer Drug so Effective Trial Stopped to Give Drug to All Participants

Prostate cancer drug so effective trial stopped by Victoria Colliver

The hormone treatment, Johnson & Johnson’s Zytiga, when added to a standard steroid therapy doubled the time it takes for the disease to progress in patients treated with the standard therapy alone, said the lead researcher, Dr. Charles Ryan, associate professor of clinical medicine at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year approved Zytiga, also known as abiraterone, for use in men whose prostate cancer had spread to other parts of their body and had already been treated with chemotherapy.
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This trial focused on patients whose cancer had metastasized, may have been treated with other hormone therapies but had not yet gone through chemotherapy.
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Prostate cancer, the second most common form of cancer in males after only lung cancer, is diagnosed in about 200,000 men in the United States each year. And while it is generally treatable, the disease kills nearly 30,000 men a year.

Because their disease is often slow-growing, about a third of patients diagnosed with prostate cancer won’t be treated. Another third will undergo successful treatment, which could include surgery, various hormone therapies or chemotherapy.

Still, a third of patients will have recurrent or aggressive disease that may have been caught too late. Ryan said men tend to die when the cancer spreads outside the prostate, mostly to bone, and the patient becomes resistant to hormonal therapy. The cancer cells rely on testosterone to exist, so typically doctors treat patients with testosterone-blocking hormone therapy.

But patients become resistant when the cancer cells develop the ability to make their own hormone and learn to survive even in the face of the testosterone-blocking drugs, giving the disease the ability to progress, Ryan said.

Zytiga is the first FDA-approved drug that can go inside the cancer cell and block it from making its own testosterone.

The trial involved 1,088 men who were being treated by 151 cancer centers in 12 countries. Each was given a low dose of the steroid prednisone, which works to combat the cancer

This is very good news. There is lots of positive news over the years. Often it seems to come to nothing years later. Promising drugs in the lab turn out to be far less promising in clinical trail. But very successful clinical trials are very good news. Even this kind of news though really should be confirmed by larger scale success, but this is a very good start.

Good Chemistry: A Love Song for Ionic Bonds

Song and video by 10th grade student, Eli Cirino, for extra credit in his chemistry class.

An ionic bond is a type of chemical bond formed through an electrostatic attraction between two oppositely charged ions. Ionic bonds are formed between a cation, which is usually a metal, and an anion, which is usually a nonmetal.

An ionic bond is considered a bond where the ionic character is greater than the covalent character (ionic bonds cannot exist on their own, they must have a covalent bond present also).

Scientific Inquiry Process Finds More Evidence Supporting Einstein’s Theory

As scientists have been able to see farther and deeper into the universe, the laws that govern its expansion have been revealed to be under the influence of an unexplained force.

In a paper on the arXiv, Astrophysical Tests of Modified Gravity: Constraints from Distance Indicators in the Nearby Universe, are a vindication of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Having survived several decades of tests in the solar system, it has passed this new test in galaxies beyond our own as well.

In 1998, astrophysicists made an observation that turned gravity on its ear: the universe’s rate of expansion is speeding up. If gravity acts the same everywhere, stars and galaxies propelled outward by the Big Bang should continuously slow down, like objects thrown from an explosion do here on Earth.

This observation used distant supernovae to show that the expansion of the universe was speeding up rather than slowing down. This indicated that something was missing from physicists’ understanding of how the universe responds to gravity, which is described by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Two branches of theories have sprung up, each trying to fill its gaps in a different way.

One branch — dark energy — suggests that the vacuum of space has an energy associated with it and that energy causes the observed acceleration. The other falls under the umbrella of “scalar-tensor” gravity theories, which effectively posits a fifth force (beyond gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) that alters gravity on cosmologically large scales.

“These two possibilities are both radical in their own way,” University of Pennsylvania astrophysicist Bhuvnesh Jain said. “One is saying that general relativity is correct, but we have this strange new form of energy. The other is saying we don’t have a new form of energy, but gravity is not described by general relativity everywhere.”

Jain’s research is focused on the latter possibility; he is attempting to characterize the properties of this fifth force that disrupts the predictions general relativity makes outside our own galaxy, on cosmic length scales. Jain’s recent breakthrough came about when he and his colleagues realized they could use the troves of data on a special property of a common type of star as an exquisite test of gravity.

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