How Humans Evolved Allergies

Ancient antibody molecule offers clues to how humans evolved allergies

The chicken molecule, an antibody called IgY, looks remarkably similar to the human antibody IgE. IgE is known to be involved in allergic reactions and humans also have a counterpart antibody called IgG that helps to destroy invading viruses and bacteria. Scientists know that both IgE and IgG were present in mammals around 160 million years ago because the corresponding genes are found in the recently published platypus genome. However, in chickens there is no equivalent to IgG and so IgY performs both functions.

Lead researcher, Dr. Rosy Calvert said: “Although these antibodies all started from a common ancestor, for some reason humans have ended up with two rather specialised antibodies, whereas chickens only have one that has a much more general function.
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Professor Brian Sutton, head of the laboratory where the work was done said: “It might be that there was a nasty bug or parasite around at the time that meant that humans needed a really dramatic immune response and so there was pressure to evolve a tight binding antibody like IgE. The problem is that now we’ve ended up with an antibody that can tend to be a little over enthusiastic and causes us problems with apparently innocuous substances like pollen and peanuts, which can cause life-threatening allergic conditions.”

$1 Billion for Life Sciences in Massachusetts

Petri dish for economic growth

So far, the signs are good. The bill commits $500 million for research facilities, infrastructure improvements, and other capital projects; $250 million for tax credits; and $250 million for research grants. The plan is flexible enough to support research at private institutions while making major investments at public universities. Patrick and legislators fended off the most flagrant attempts to divert money into political pet projects with little direct relevance to the biotech industry, such as $49.5 million for a science building at a state college with no graduate science programs.

As I have mentioned many times the centers of scientific excellence are important for economic success. Massachusetts has some great advantages with MIT, Harvard, many biotech companies… but still must continue to focus on staying a center of excellence.

Mathematicians Critique Journal Rankings

Three international math groups joined forces to issue a report last week decrying the use of citation statistics to evaluate scientific journals, research institutions and individual scientists. These statistics, sometimes called “bibliometrics,” measure how frequently a given journal’s articles are cited by other journals.

Read the report on Citation Statistics. This concern is justified. I do have some interest in some of these (and related) statistics but one must always remember their limitations.

No AP Stories

Michael Arrington, at Techcrunch, has announced a new policy Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned. Good for him. I have long not linked to Associated Press stories due to their pointy haired boss understanding of the internet. The New York Times took awhile to understand how to respond to the new world but seems to be doing well now (so now I link to them). Other good sources: BBC (though they need to do better with webcasting), NPR, National Geographic, Science Blogs, PLoS.

Getting links is a good thing. When you have lawyers threatening people that are helping you, that is just plain dumb (and not the behavior I want to support by directing traffic to your site). Yes some bloggers do go to far and appropriate content they should not. So fine, do something about that. But you need to act sensibly, not like they have been (and that is not just limited to the problems that have landed them in trouble recently but their lack of making effective use of the internet for years).

The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model – paid content.

So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

TX Active Cement

TX active cement graphic

Industry scrambles to find a ‘greener’ concrete

While Italcemente’s smog-eating cement has been used in Europe for several years, it was released in the United States only in 2007 under the name TX Active. It contains titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone. TX Active also keeps a building shiny white – a quality admired by architects – by preventing the buildup of pollutants on the surface.

Research suggests that if 15 percent of the surface area of Milan, Italy, were covered in TX Active, air pollutants there could be reduced by 50 percent.

When weighing the environmental effects of concrete, some other benefits need to be included, says Rick Bohan of the Portland Cement Association (PCA), a nonprofit trade group based in Skokie, Ill. For example, the insulation provided by concrete walls combats greenhouse-gas emissions by reducing the energy needed for heating and cooling a building by up to 40 percent compared with wood- and steel-frame structures, according to PCA research.

TXActive Cement graphic from HeidelbergCement

Geek Pad Paper

Geek Pad provides programming, engineering and science students paper with a subtle grid to help organize notes and draw graphs. I don’t exactly see this as revolutionary as the web site claims, but you might find it useful. Plus I like that it was created by a college junior pursuing a B.S. in electronics engineering.

RoboCup German Open 2008

Video of humanoid robot football (soccer) competition in German, April 2008. They are a bit slow but it sure looks like this is a fun area to watch the improvement of robot engineering.

Alligator Blood Provides Strong Resistance to Bacteria and Viruses

Gator Blood May Be New Source of Antibiotics

The study authors, from McNeese State University and Louisiana State University, said their research is the first to take an in-depth look at alligator blood’s prospects as an antibiotic source. According to the researchers, alligators can automatically fight germs such as bacteria and viruses without having been exposed to them before launching a defense.

For the study, the researchers extracted proteins known as peptides from white cells in alligator blood. As in humans, white cells are part of the alligator’s immune system. The researchers then exposed various types of bacteria to the protein extracts and watched to see what happened.

In laboratory tests, tiny amounts of these protein extracts killed a so-called “superbug” called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The bacteria has made headlines in recent years because of its killing power in hospitals and its spread among athletes and others outside of hospitals.

The extracts also killed six of eight strains of a fungus known as Candida albicans, which causes a condition known as thrush, and other diseases that can kill people with weakened immune systems.

Gmail Failure

I really liked Gmail. Today Google has blocked me from accessing my email. I do nothing that remotely could be considered suspicious behavior. Yet without any preliminary warnings Gmail just blocked my access to email and provides only the following.

While this might not be evil it is extremely bad service. Email users need to trust providers to provide reliable service. To act with integrity, etc.. When instead they take unilateral, immediate action with no significant response one can only draw the conclusion that they are dealing with another Verizon or Comcast or the long litany of companies that cannot be trusted to treat you well or even remotely fairly.

They do provide a form to fill out, which I have done. They responded with the following: “Thanks for your report. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience. For your security, we may temporarily disable access to your account if our system detects abnormal usage. It will take between one minute and 24 hours for you to regain access, depending on the behavior our system detected.”

Not really clear is it? I still have no access. Google’s “mission”: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” How about making clear the information that Google itself says it has detected, this “abnormal usage.” Have they even made that information “accessible and useful.” No they have not. Google choosing to break Gmail access without notice and without explanation and even after questioning still providing no real explanation seems like a very serious threat to users of Gmail. Google seems to believe that breaking access to Gmail is not something they need to even know why they are doing it. I would say a policy that makes Gmail unreliable for users threatens to send users to a provider that does not chose to act in such a way. This seems like a very bad policy on Google’s part.

This is so frustrating, I actually liked gmail. But I guess I will have to look for a reliable provider unless Google can actually provide an explanation of how they will change to actually provide reliable email services.

My account is back now. Maybe it was down for an hour. Which, frankly, if it had been a technical glitch I would have been fine with. That it was a policy decision to break access without notice or explanation I find extremely worrying, however. How am I suppose to trust that they will not do so at any point in the future. If they send me some explanation of this choice to disable my account temporarily, I will update this post.

Data Center Energy Needs

It’s Too Darn Hot

The tech industry is facing an energy crisis. The cost of power consumption by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2006, to $4.5 billion, and could double again by 2011, according to the U.S. government. With energy prices spiking, the challenge of powering and cooling these SUVs of the tech world has become a major issue for corporations and utilities.
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The modern data center is like a vast refrigerator with hundreds or thousands of ovens blazing away inside. Six-foot-tall metal racks stacked with pizza box-size computers, storage devices, and network-routing machines are lined up in rows. Chilled air blows through the equipment from vents in the floors of “cold aisles.” Hot air blows out of the back ends into “hot aisles” and is drawn off and vented out of the building. Inside the centers, there’s a dull roar as large quantities of air shoot through ducts, vents, and computers.

So intense is the competition among tech companies to lower their costs of processing data that some treat information about their energy use like state secrets.
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The $4.5 billion spent in the U.S. in 2006 is the equivalent of the electric bills for 5.8 million U.S. households.

When you realize the huge cooling needs (in addition to the need for electricity to run the computers) you can see the huge advantage of a cold climate where you can take advantage of cool air for cooling.