This is kind of neat -- the game of Checkers has been solved; mathematically, if you play correctly, you cannot loose. I.e. you're basically now playing tic-tac-toe with a bigger board. Jonathan Schaeffer, the lead author, is now working on Poker, aka "never need to apply for a grant again".

Planet Gore:

I must protest as unfair the headline writer's recasting of the sentiments as "global warming, 'just hysteria'?". In truth, global warming is much, much more. It is a ready excuse for whatever afflicts or impedes you, an opportunity for the media to outdo past lows, a wonderful vehicle comfortably seating every exiled adherent of last century's failed "inevitability", and a very lucrative pony for rent-seeking business to ride to riches for making nothing. And it made a bunch of government weathermen briefly into rock stars no longer needing to beg for their annual appropriation of (taxpayer) debt-financed lucre, but whose area of interest actually now picks our pockets for the same amount we send, I submit, far more soberly, to the National Cancer Institute every year.

The Faithful Heritic:

[Reid] Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

The Globe and Mail this weekend reported on what may be a major breakthrough in stupidity cancer prevention:

But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are "looking for a bogeyman that doesn't exist," argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world's top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor "is more likely a lack of vitamin D."

[...] A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

There you go: quit smoking, take an aspirin every day and make sure either by supplements or by sunlight exposure make sure you get sufficient Vitamin D and you're likely to live longer and healthier. The beautiful thing is that the latter two items are pretty easy to do. What has the establishment been focusing on in the meantime? Statistically meaningless improvements to our life, such as banning home use of pesticides and reducing your exposure to second-hand smoke, all more about hairshirt-morality than health or science.

And on the subject of the establishment:

In light of emerging research on the benefits of vitamin D, the Canadian Cancer Society said Monday that Canadians could consider brief, unprotected exposure to the sun, increased dietary intake of the vitamin and the use of supplements.

Keep in mind that, if the Vitamin D science holds up, various cancer societies 30-SPF sunblock no-sun-is-too-much-sun recommendations puts them in the same place as doctors who developed and prescribed thalidomide in the late 50's/early 60's.

An interview with Derya Unutmaz, on the process of how life extension could be achieved. Unutmaz writes one of my favorite blogs, Biosingularity.

We might be alive a lot longer than we think after we die:

Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

[...] mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

[...] When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

There may be chemical angles opened for exploration here too, i.e. to temporarily suppress apoptosis.

CBC reports:

British doctors say they have made the world's first surgical attempt to treat a human sight disorder using gene therapy.

The patient, Robert Johnson, 23, has an inherited disorder called Leber's congenital amaurosis. The disorder, linked to a mutation in a gene called RPE65, is thought to lead to degeneration in the retina — the layer of cells at the back of the eye that detects light.

[...] The doctors — Prof. Robin Ali of the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and his colleagues at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London — said they injected non-defective copies of the RPE65 gene under the retina in one of Johnson's eyes.

A harmless virus was used to deliver the gene into the cells.

[...] However, it will be months before the team knows whether the approach worked for Johnson.

If I remember correctly from earlier gene therapy tests, the real trick is whether the genes don't get spliced into the wrong spot and cause nasty cancer. Maybe they've worked around this, which would be great news as there's many nasty diseases that may be treatable by gene therapy.

Selenian Boondocks has an interesting post on whether it's reasonable (or not) to assume that current suborbital private spacecraft efforts will scale up to orbital. Conventional wisdom says no (25-81 times the energy would be needed); Jonathan Goff says yes, because all the hard work is at the bottom of the atmosphere and that only 1.5-4x is needed (via Simberg).

From the "if you don't believe something, you'll believe anything files", the "Gore Challenge" (via Greenie Watch):

As a believer:

• that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
• that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
• that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
• that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;
• I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by one year from today

Note by selecting the "household" as the target, the energy profligate lifestyles -- first class seating, private planes, entourage, limos, SUVs, powertoys, cottages, etc. -- of the privileged are exempt from examination; whereas almost 100% of Joe Everyman's life is up for grabs.

Via NASA, for further perusal when I can find Trinity-Anne's 3D glasses.

I was going to link to the Reason piece "WHO Cares? The World Health Organization cares more about its own life than the lives of the poor" because the capture of useful  public health organization by social activists is a fairly universal problem, but this little section on suppressing the science about cancer and second hand smoking is too good to pass up quoting:

In its war on tobacco, WHO has attempted Orwellian moves of almost absurd incompetence. In 1998, for instance, the group was supposed to release an enormous 10-year study on second-hand smoke's links with lung cancer, the largest ever done in Europe. A small mention of it was printed in a WHO report before the whole study was available. The British Sunday Telegraph tried to get a copy of the study, since the brief reference intriguingly implied that it could not find a statistically significant link between second-hand smoke exposure and lung cancer. The Telegraph implied that WHO was trying to bury the report since its results went against their official anti-tobacco stance.

WHO and other anti-tobacco groups were outraged. One group, Action on Smoking and Health, filed an official complaint with Britain's Press Complaints Commission over the supposedly erroneous reporting. (The commission found in the Telegraph's favor.) WHO responded to reports that its study did not find a statistically significant link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer in a press release headlined, "Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You" -- strange, strained language from a supposedly scientific organization.

Underneath that colorful headline, the press release states, in italics, that "passive smoking causes lung cancer in non-smokers." Then, in the very next paragraph, it clarifies, "The study found that there was an estimated 16% increased risk of lung cancer among non-smoking spouses of smokers. For workplace exposure the estimated increase in risk was 17%. However, due to small sample size, neither increased risk was statistically significant." In other words, the Telegraph report was exactly correct: The study had found no statistically significant link between second-hand smoke and cancer.

As for the "suppressed" part, WHO insisted that the paper was merely being peer-reviewed, not hidden. Yet three years later, you'll still find no mention of the report on WHO's list of "Comprehensive Reports on Passive Smoking by Authoritative Scientific Bodies."

Curious about stem cells? Via Biosingularity, here's a couple of short, understandable videos:

Sonic Hedgehog, heh.

Interesting idea in The Economist:

One of the most ambitious ideas has been developed by Sky WindPower, a company based in San Diego and led by Dave Shepard.

[...]

Mr Shepard’s flying generator looks like a cross between a kite and a helicopter. It has four rotors at the points of an H-shaped frame that is tethered to the ground by a long cable. The rotors act like the surface of a kite, providing the lift needed to keep the platform in the air. As they do so, they also turn dynamos that generate electricity. This power is transmitted to the ground through aluminium cables. Should there be a lull in the wind, the dynamos can be used in reverse as electric motors, to keep the generator airborne.

Mr Shepard estimates these rigs could produce power for as little as two cents a kilowatt hour. That is cheaper than the three to five cents conventional energy generation costs. It is an attractive idea, but a flying generator is difficult thing to build—and there is a limit to how helpful existing helicopter technology will be. Aircraft require maintenance after a few days of operation, if not sooner. To operate cost-effectively, wind turbines will need to keep turning for many months without upkeep.

Mr Shepard, however, thinks he has a way out. Stabilising and directing a conventional helicopter requires that the pitch of the individual blades be adjusted with every rotation—up to a thousand times a minute. That puts massive stress on the turning mechanism and wears it out rapidly. On a four-rotor arrangement, you can achieve the same effect by changing the pitch of one or two whole rotors, rather than adjusting the pitch of individual blades. Mr Shepard reckons that this will make a big difference, and will increase the periods between maintenance enough to make the project viable.

See also:

• Canada's Magenn Power, 1km floating turbines

Iain Murray on the IPCC report (I've had this one in my to-blog pile for a while):

Yet the IPCC still admits we know very little about the role of aerosols, land use changes, contrails, water vapor and solar irradiance on global temperature, so they admit they make that assertion without full knowledge of the facts.Also, gone from the Summary is the icon of the Third Assessment Report – the “hockey stick” graph.  The fact that it took two amateurs to get the scientists to realize the hole in their argument there is indicative of the state of climate science today.  The IPCC has been wrong in the past.  The fact that there’s nothing really new in this document suggests that as we learn more about the science, yes we may well find more evidence of human involvement in the climate, but when all’s said and done it won’t amount to anything to worry about.  If we go down the road of emissions suppression, however, that will be something to worry about.  We could stabilize emissions at a cost to the world of 5 percent of GDP (bear in mind that the Iraq War is costing America 0.8 percent of GDP and the world as a whole a lot less) and still have warming or we can all get richer and more resilient.  That’s really the choice on the table.

First, via Cosh (and numerous others) the Greatest Rabble.ca Thread Of All Time. The amazing thing is you can hear them on CBC every day (and I mean every day) lecturing us on the science of climate. And now, via Blair, the The Most Outstanding Environmental Short Story Of All Time. Bridges really stuck it to the man with her Elevator story!

CBS:

The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998.

What they mean to say is that the warmest year on record was 1998; that doesn't sound very impressive though.

A few excerpts from a Lawrence Solomon article from last Friday's National Post about Hendrik Tennekes:

When Frans Nieuwstadt, a distinguished Dutch meteorologist, engineer, editor and professor, died in 2005, his obituary recounted seminal events in his accomplished life. Among the experiences worthy of mention: Nieuwstadt had studied under the celebrated professor, Henk Tennekes, and along with other colleagues had been instrumental in convincing Tennekes to return to Europe in 1978 to become director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and later chairman of the august Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

That's just to set up who he is. We know that only experts are allowed to talk about meteorology and the climate now.

Tennekes, more than any other individual, challenged the models that climate scientists were constructing, saying models could never replicate the complexity of the real world. What was needed was a different approach to science, one that recognized inherent limits in such scientific tools and aimed less to regulate the environment.

In a landmark speech to the American Meteorological Society in 1986, he argued that meteorology was poised to be the first of the post- Newtonian sciences because it was "at odds with the mainstream of the scientific enterprise of the last 300 years. One goal of science is to control nature, but we know we cannot control the weather. The goal of science is prediction, but we stand in front of the limits of predictability."

Meteorology, in other words, would be the first scientific discipline to hit this brick wall. As Tennekes argued, modern theory "unequivocally predicts that no amount of improvement in the quality of the observation network or in the power of computers will improve the average useful forecast range by more than a few days."

[...] Climate modelling is the basis of forecasts of climate change. Yet this modelling, Tennekes believes, has little utility, and "there is no chance at all that the physical sciences can produce a universally accepted scientific basis for policy measures concerning climate change." Moreover, he states: "There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies."

Needless to say, this sort of talk didn't endear him to his colleagues.

Lomberg and Rose (via John Ray):

But if we are to follow Mr. Gore's suggestions of radically changing our way of life, the costs are not trivial. If we slowly change our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, the U.N. actually estimates that we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world. However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30% poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change.

Clearly we need to ask hard questions. Is Mr. Gore's world a worthwhile sacrifice? But it seems that critical questions are out of the question. It would have been great to ask him why he only talks about a sea-level rise of 20 feet. In his movie he shows scary sequences of 20-feet flooding Florida, San Francisco, New York, Holland, Calcutta, Beijing and Shanghai. But were realistic levels not dramatic enough? The U.N. climate panel expects only a foot of sea-level rise over this century. Moreover, sea levels actually climbed that much over the past 150 years. Does Mr. Gore find it balanced to exaggerate the best scientific knowledge available by a factor of 20?

Mr. Gore says that global warming will increase malaria and highlights Nairobi as his key case. According to him, Nairobi was founded right where it was too cold for malaria to occur. However, with global warming advancing, he tells us that malaria is now appearing in the city. Yet this is quite contrary to the World Health Organization's finding. Today Nairobi is considered free of malaria, but in the 1920s and '30s, when temperatures were lower than today, malaria epidemics occurred regularly. Mr. Gore's is a convenient story, but isn't it against the facts?

He considers Antarctica the canary in the mine, but again doesn't tell the full story. He presents pictures from the 2% of Antarctica that is dramatically warming and ignores the 98% that has largely cooled over the past 35 years. The U.N. panel estimates that Antarctica will actually increase its snow mass this century. Similarly, Mr. Gore points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but don't mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing. Shouldn't we hear those facts? Mr. Gore talks about how the higher temperatures of global warming kill people. He specifically mentions how the European heat wave of 2003 killed 35,000. But he entirely leaves out how global warming also means less cold and saves lives. Moreover, the avoided cold deaths far outweigh the number of heat deaths. For the U.K. it is estimated that 2,000 more will die from global warming. But at the same time 20,000 fewer will die of cold. Why does Mr. Gore tell only one side of the story?

Spiked:

The notion that serious science could result from research sponsored by legal aid funding and administered by lawyers is nonsense. The team of experts assembled by Barr did not include a single recognised autism specialist, paediatrician, vaccine specialist, virologist or paediatric gastroenterologist who has a current public appointment or is currently in practice.

[...] What emerges from these documents is that there does not appear to be a single professional supporter of the Wakefield campaign who was not also a beneficiary of the anti-MMR litigation.

There's a tie-in here to two other threads running through this blog: one is that when policy is based on science and when those policies involve ipower and control and money, science is the loser. See climate. And be very wary of any report coming from the Lancet; science there seems to takes the back seat to axe grinding.

Dalrymple:

This standard or received view conceives opiate addiction as an illness and therefore implies that there is a bona fide medical solution to it. When all the proposed "cures" fail to work, as they usually do, and when the extension of quasi-medical services to addicts is accompanied not by a decline in the prevalence of the problem but, on the contrary, by an increase, who can blame addicts if, in continuing their habit, they blame not themselves but the incompetence of those who have set themselves up as their medical saviours and offered them solutions that do not work?

But where bureaucracies are concerned, nothing succeeds like failure. For example, the budget of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse increased by 16.2 per cent between 2001 and 2002, which would be quite a creditable performance if it had been a purely commercial enterprise. In the period, $US126,394,000 was added to its budget, but it would be foolhardy to suggest that a single drug addict stopped, or will stop, taking drugs because of this extra funding

[...] The addict has a problem, but it is not a medical one: he does not know how to live. And on this subject the doctor has nothing, qua doctor, to offer. What he ought not do, however, is to mislead the addict, or allow the addict to mislead him, into thinking that the problem is medical and requires, or is susceptible to, a medical solution.