Scientific Illiteracy Leaves Many at Risk in Making Health Care Judgements

Scientific literacy is important for many reasons and that importance has increased greatly over the last century. Medical research is often difficult to interpret. Often various studies seem to contradict each other. Often the conclusions that are drawn are far too broad (especially as the research conclusions are passed on and people hear of them overly simplified ways).

Many health care options are not obviously all good, or all bad, but instead a mix of benefits and risks, both of which include interactions with the individuals makeup. So we often see contradictory (and seemingly contradictory) advice. Without a level of scientific literacy it is very difficult for people to know how to react to medical advice.

We have numerous posts on the scientific inquiry process showing that acquiring scientific knowledge is complex and can be quite confusing in many instances. While understanding things are often less clear cut than they are presented it is still true that most often strategies for healthy living have far better practices that will provide far better results than alternatives.

The scientific illiteracy that has some think because their are risks no matter what is done that means there is no evidence some alternatives are far superior is very dangerous. As you can see in action now with those that risk their and others lives and health by doing things like not vaccinating their children, or driving when drunk, or driving when talking on a cell phone.

Without a scientifically literate society even completely obvious measures like not using antibiotics on viral infections are ignored.

Appropriate Technology: Solar Water in Poor Cairo Neighborhoods

Cairo Slums Get Energy Makeover

Since 2003 the nonprofit Solar CITIES project has installed 34 solar-powered hot water systems and 5 biogas reactors in Cairo’s poor Coptic Christian and Islamic neighborhoods.
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Solar CITIES’ hot water systems are constructed from recycled materials and are uniquely tailored to the parts of a city where water and electricity availability are often sporadic. “The problem with professional solar hot water systems is that they’re made for cities with continuous water,” Culhane said. By contrast, Solar CITIES’s water heaters use a city’s water when it’s available but draw from a backup storage tank when it’s not.

The setup consists of an insulated rectangular box covered in clear glass or plastic on one side. Inside the box are copper tubes wrapped in sheets of aluminum, which are painted black. Sunlight striking the darkened aluminum is converted to heat, which is then used to warm water flowing through the pipes. The glass sheet on top of the box prevents the heat from being carried away by wind.
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Solar CITIES also installs biogas reactors, which are based on designs Culhane saw while working in India. The reactors use microbes harvested from animal guts to break down food wastes into flammable gas that can be used for cooking and heating. If necessary, the reactors can draw hot water from the solar water heaters to maintain the warm temperatures the bacteria need to survive.

By attaching a simple plastic tube to the reactors, gas can be piped down several stories for residents to use. “In 24 hours, you’ve got 2 hours of cooking gas from yesterday’s cooking garbage,” Culhane said. The biogas reactors provide a more reliable supply of cooking gas than most residents currently have.

Awesome, I love to see people using engineering to make life better for those that can truly use help.

Researchers Work to Protect Bats Against Deadly Disease

Researchers work to protect Wisconsin bats against deadly disease

Redell, who studies bats for the Department of Natural Resources, lives every day now with the threat of a disease called white-nose syndrome hanging over his head. The disease, though not yet in Wisconsin, has killed more than 90 percent of the cave bats in Eastern states such as New York and Vermont. Experts predict it could make its way to Wisconsin, with its eight species and hundreds of thousands of bats, in as little as two years.
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One female little brown bat – with a body less than the length of your thumb – can eat its body weight in insects in one evening, Redell said. Such is the insect-hunting prowess of the bats that they are thought to save farmers billions of dollars in crop losses, according to Sheryl L. Ducummon, with Bat Conservation International.

In a recent scientific article on the ecological and economic importance of bats, Ducummon reported that, in one summer, the 150 bats in an average colony of big brown bats can conservatively eat 38,000 cucumber beetles, which attack corn and other farm crops. Damage from the beetle and their larvae cost corn farmers as much as $1 billion a year.

The loss of such an insect-eating force could be devastating, Redell said. The approximate 1 million bats that have already died of white-nose syndrome in the last three years on the East Coast would have eaten 700,000 tons of insects were they still hunting the night skies, he said.

Bats perform other important tasks, too. Several Western species serve crucial roles as pollinators for desert plants such as agave and as seed dispersers for dozens of species of cacti.
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“I mean, this is like a mouse that flies, but it has the predatory capabilities of a polar bear,” Blehert said. “They are physically adapted to command the night sky. You’re talking about a little thing with a body less than half the size of your thumb whose heartbeat can get up to 1,000 beats a minute when they are flying but that can slow when they are hibernating in the winter to 4 beats a minute. And they live 20 to 25 years!”

Bats really are amazing and very valuable animals.

Friday Fun: Bristol Zoo’s Human Exhibit

Photo of the Homo Sapiens zoo sign at the Bristol Zoo

A mysterious sign has appeared on the side of the Zoo’s popular Coral CafÃ©, designating the area as a place to spot one of the world’s most widespread species – Homo sapiens. The notice, which appeared without warning this week, shows humans ‘on display’ inside the cafÃ© and includes tongue-in-cheek description of the species and its characteristics.

Zoo staff were surprised and amused to discover the new fixture. Dr Jo Gipps, Director of Bristol Zoo Gardens, said: “This is definitely not one of the Zoo’s own signs, it is clearly a prank and a very good one too. It looks completely genuine. We think it’s great sign and we have absolutely no intention of removing it, however I think one of them is probably enough.”

From the sign:

After a gestation period of nine months, the you usually live in the parents’ next for around 16 years. While the parents are out foraging for food, juveniles are looked after in large groups by other adults.

In adolescence, the offspring adopt a more nocturnal lifestyle and engage in ritualized activities of drinking fermented liquids and dancing to rhythmical sounds, which scientists believe may help them to find a mate.
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They are known to adopt other species as pets, particularly dogs (canis lupus familians) and cats (felis catus).

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Why the World Needs More Engineers

Why the World Needs More Engineers by Sir James Dyson

I have always advocated for investment in engineering – to both improve society and stimulate economies.
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Today, the focus is on sustainability and making products and technology that will spur on economic recovery. Three billion dollars have been invested in the National Science Foundation already this year. And the U.S. plans to put more money into science research than ever before.

This is encouraging. We need to take a long term view of how engineering fits into our lives – from education and training, to job creation. The US, like the UK, needs more science and math teachers. But we also need to renew interest in these vital and pioneering fields.

The Value of Displaying Data Well

Anscombe’s quartet: all four sets are identical when examined statistically, but vary considerably when graphed. Image via Wikipedia.

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Anscombe’s quartet comprises four datasets that have identical simple statistical properties, yet are revealed to be very different when inspected graphically. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician F.J. Anscombe to demonstrate the importance of graphing data before analyzing it, and of the effect of outliers on the statistical properties of a dataset.

Of course we also have to be careful of drawing incorrect conclusions from visual displays.

For all four datasets:

Property	Value
Mean of each x variable	9.0
Variance of each x variable	10.0
Mean of each y variable	7.5
Variance of each y variable	3.75
Correlation between each x and y variable	0.816
Linear regression line	$y = 3 + 0.5 x$

Edward Tufte uses the quartet to emphasize the importance of looking at one’s data before analyzing it in the first page of the first chapter of his book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants creates great music and has moved into creating music aimed at kids, of any age, over the last few years. They are releasing a new Album and animated DVD Here Comes Science, is being released tomorrow. Their music is both enjoyable to listen to and educational, something that is often attempted but rarely done as successfully as they do.

The release include the following songs and videos:

1. Science Is Real
2. Meet the Elements
3. I Am a Paleontologist w/Danny Weinkauf
4. The Bloodmobile
5. Electric Car w/Robin Goldwasser
6. My Brother the Ape
7. What Is a Shooting Star?
8. How Many Planets?
9. Why Does the Sun Shine?
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Experimenting Social Network

Social media is definitely a fad filled with lots of ways to waste time. It also does have real value, ways to connect to things people care about and wish to focus on. Reddit is a good site for finding interesting resources online. Sub-reddits are topical areas within Reddit (I have set up management and investing sub-reddits). A new experiment subreddit looks very interesting:

Each experiment will go through a few threads. The first step will be a query for experimental methods. Someone will present a problem or piece of information they want to find out, and then others will suggest methods. Once this is agreed upon, it will be carried out, and a second thread will be posted detailing the method and providing a place to post results via the comments. Then, a third thread can be made to discuss the results. Having more than one thread for every experiment will make things more accessible and easier to sort.

Don’t research ways other people have experimentally determined these things. Submit original ideas to the experimental design thread. Try to come up with a novel way to discover things, but don’t be completely limited by this suggestion. This is chiefly about rediscovery, not repeating someone else’s experiment, but sometimes there’s fun and merit in that as well.

I have joined. You can go to Reddit and join this subreddit to see experiences with experimenting to learn about the world around us.

Atomic Force Microscopy Image of a Molecule

The delicate inner structure of a pentacene molecule imaged with an atomic force microscope. For the first time, scientists achieved a resolution that revealed the chemical structure of a molecule. The hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings in the pentacene molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be deduced from the image. (Pixels correspond to actual data points). Image courtesy of IBM Research – Zurich

IBM scientists have been able to image the “anatomy” — or chemical structure — inside a molecule with unprecedented resolution. “Though not an exact comparison, if you think about how a doctor uses an x-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,” said IBM Researcher Gerhard Meyer. “Scanning probe techniques offer amazing potential for prototyping complex functional structures and for tailoring and studying their electronic and chemical properties on the atomic scale.”

The AFM uses a sharp metal tip to measure the tiny forces between the tip and the sample, such as a molecule, to create an image. In the present experiments, the molecule investigated was pentacene. Pentacene is an oblong organic molecule consisting of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms measuring 1.4 nanometers in length. The spacing between neighboring carbon atoms is only 0.14 nanometers—roughly 1 million times smaller then the diameter of a grain of sand. In the experimental image, the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings as well as the carbon atoms in the molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms of the molecule can be deduced from the image.

Read full press release: IBM Scientists First to Image the “Anatomy” of a Molecule
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Lego Mindstorms Robots Solving: Sudoku and Rubik’s Cube

LEGO Mindstorms Rubik’s Cube Solver

Tilted Twister solves Rubik’s cube fully automatically.
Just place the scrambled cube on Tilted Twister’s turntable. An ultrasonic sensor detects its presence and starts to read the colors of the cube faces using a light sensor. The robot turns and tilts the cube in order to read all the faces. It then calculates a solution and executes the moves by turning, tilting and twisting the cube.
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The challenge was to build the robot using only the Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit. And to make it completely independent, without need of being connected to a PC.
The Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit contains three servo motors and four sensors (touch, light, ultrasonic and sound). How should I build the robot using only these items?
After a lot of experimenting I came up with a solution – If I tilted the whole robot, it would be possible for it to tilt the cube using only one motor, leaving the other two motors for turning the cube and for positioning the light sensor. Thus Tilted Twister.
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Scanning the cube: 1 minute
Calculating a solution: 20 – 40 seconds
Executing the moves: 1 – 5 minutes. Average 4.5 minutes (60 faceturns)
Average total time: 6 minutes

Very cool. Related book: Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms