‘Refrigerator’ Without Electricity

photo of pot in pot

2000 Rolex award to Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria for the Pot in Pot Cooling System:

Ingenious technique that requires no external energy supply to preserve fruit, vegetables and other perishables in hot, arid climates. The pot-in-pot cooling system, a kind of “desert refrigerator”, helps subsistence farmers by reducing food spoilage and waste and thus increasing their income and limiting the health hazards of decaying foods. Abba says he developed the pot-in-pot “to help the rural poor in a cost-effective, participatory and sustainable way”.

The pot-in-pot consists of two earthenware pots of different diameters, one placed inside the other. The space between the two pots is filled with wet sand that is kept constantly moist, thereby keeping both pots damp. Fruit, vegetables and other items such as soft drinks are put in the smaller inner pot, which is covered with a damp cloth. The phenomenon that occurs is based on a simple principle of physics: the water contained in the sand between the two pots evaporates towards the outer surface of the larger pot where the drier outside air is circulating. By virtue of the laws of thermodynamics, the evaporation process automatically causes a drop in temperature of several degrees, cooling the inner container, destroying harmful micro-organisms and preserving the perishable foods inside.

He also received the 2001 Shell Award for Sustainable Development. Great stuff:

Born in 1964 into a family of pot makers and raised in the rural north, Mohammed Bah Abba was familiar from an early age with the various practical and symbolic uses of traditional clay pots, and learned as a child the rudiments of pottery. Subsequently studying biology, chemistry and geology at school, he unravelled the technical puzzle that led him years later to develop the “pot-in-pot preservation/cooling system”.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is Not Natural Food

HFCS is not ‘natural’, says FDA

Products containing high fructose corn syrup cannot be considered ‘natural’ and should not be labeled as such, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said.
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Industry group Sugar Association, as well as consumer groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest categorically maintain that HFCS cannot be considered natural because its chemical bonds are broken and rearranged in the manufacturing process. The debate raged on for one simple reason: FDA does not define the term ‘natural’, and it has therefore been left open to different interpretations.

However, in response to an inquiry from FoodNavigator-USA.com, the regulatory agency examined the composition of HFCS, which it said is produced using synthetic fixing agents. “Consequently, we would object to the use of the term ‘natural’ on a product containing HFCS,” the agency’s Geraldine June said in an e-mail to FoodNavigator-USA.com. June is Supervisor of the Product Evaluation and Labeling team at FDA’s Office of Nutrition, Labeling and Dietary Supplements.

High fructose corn syrup is also high on the list of problem foods from a health perspective.

Orzel: What Everyone Should Know About Science

What Everyone Should Know About Science by Chad Orzel:

1) Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts The essence of science, broadly defined, is that it is a systematic approach to figuring out how the world works:

1. look at the world around you
2. come up with an idea for why it might work that way.
3. test your idea against reality.
4. tell everybody you know the results of the test.

Put those steps together, over and over, and you have the best method ever devised for increasing our store of reliable knowledge. The precise facts found by this method are not as important as the process for finding them– given the process, and enough time, you can reconstruct whatever facts you need. The facts without the process are worse than useless, they’re dangerous.

Royal Ant Genes

Royal corruption is rife in the ant world

“The accepted theory was that queens were produced solely by nurture: certain larvae were fed certain foods to prompt their development into queens and all larvae could have that opportunity,” explains Dr Hughes. “But we carried out DNA fingerprinting on five colonies of leaf-cutting ants and discovered that the offspring of some fathers are more likely to become queens than others. These ants have a ‘royal’ gene or genes, giving them an unfair advantage and enabling them to cheat many of their altruistic sisters out of their chance to become a queen themselves.”
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“When studying social insects like ants and bees, it’s often the cooperative aspect of their society that first stands out,” says Dr Hughes. “However, when you look more deeply, you can see there is conflict and cheating – and obviously human society is also a prime example of this. It was thought that ants were an exception, but our genetic analysis has shown that their society is also rife with corruption – and royal corruption at that!”

Interesting. I am not convinced of the “corruption” but maybe the research itself provides more evidence of this trait not just being interesting but equivalent to corruption.

Androgenesis

All Dad by Carl Zimmer

This week’s revelation is androgenesis. Androgenesis is what happens when kids get all their genes from their father.
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Androgenesis, it turns out, transforms fatherhood into a parasitic invasion. It begins like normal fertilization, with a sperm fusing to an egg. But then the egg’s DNA gets hurled out of its nucleus, so that the sperm’s genes are the only ones left in the egg. The egg begins to develop into an embryo, but only after it has lost the mother’s DNA.

Cancer Deaths Increasing, Death Rate Decreasing

Last year I questioned this quote “confirming” a declining trend of cancer deaths: “Cancer deaths in the United States dropped for the second year in a row, health officials reported yesterday, confirming that the trend is real and becoming more pronounced, too.” Well the data is in for the next year (2005) and cancer deaths increased – so much for the 2 year “trend.”

Despite a continuing decline in the cancer death rate from 2004 to 2005, there was an increase of 5,424 deaths (559,312 cancer deaths in 2005 compared to 553,888 cancer deaths in 2004). This increase follows a decrease in the number of cancer deaths in the two previous years.

The American Cancer Society provides much better wording this year, I believe:

“The increase in the number of cancer deaths in 2005 after two years of historic declines should not obscure the fact that cancer death rates continue to drop, reflecting the enormous progress that has been made against cancer during the past 15 years.” said John R. Seffrin, Ph.D., American Cancer Society chief executive officer. “While in 2005 the rate of decline was not enough to overtake other population factors, the fact remains that cancer mortality rates continue to drop, and they’re doing so at a rate fast enough that over a half million deaths from cancer were averted between 1990/1991 and 2004.”

Good news, and well stated. Related: Leading Causes of Death – Cancer Cure – Not so Fast

Babbage Difference Engine In Lego

Building A Calculating Machine Using Lego Pieces by Andrew Carol

Before the day of computers and pocket calculators all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes. The larger efforts involved rooms of semi skilled people, called ‘computers’, capable of doing reliable arithmetic who would be under the direction of a skilled mathematician.

In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built but, the most advanced and famous of these was not. The Babbage Difference Engine.

Because of engineering issues as well as political and personal conflict the Babbage Difference engines construction had to wait until 1991 when the Science Museum in London decided to build the Babbage Difference Engine No.2 for an exhibit on the history of computers.

Babbage’s design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using standard LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits. I have built two generations of Difference Engines and am designing the third version now.

Don’t Eat What Doesn’t Rot

Here is a nice interview of Michael Pollan by Amy Goodman – Don’t Eat Anything That Doesn’t Rot:

Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these nutrients and you know what they’re doing, that we know what cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And that’s a dubious proposition.
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if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven’t changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you’re going to do a lot better.

Warning on Two Cholesterol Drugs

Journal Issues Warning on Two Cholesterol Drugs

Two widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs, Vytorin and Zetia, may not work and should be used only as a last resort, The New England Journal of Medicine said in an editorial published on Sunday.

The journal’s conclusion came as doctors at a major cardiology conference in Chicago saw for the first time the full results of a two-year clinical trial that showed that the drugs failed to slow, and might have even sped up, the growth of fatty plaques in the arteries. Growth of those plaques is closely correlated with heart attacks and strokes.

Merck and Schering-Plough, the companies that make Vytorin and Zetia, said on Sunday that despite the results of the trial, they would continue to promote their medicines as first-line treatments for high cholesterol.

Ethanol Scam

The Clean Energy Scam

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It’s been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation.
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Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
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One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don’t gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. “People don’t want to believe renewable fuels could be bad,” says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. “But when you realize we’re tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious.”