Recently in Briefly Category

The NIH narrowed an AIDS vaccine trial planned for U.S. testing. The trial, called Partnership for AIDS Vaccine Evaluation (PAVE 100) will be pared down to focus on the question of whether the vaccine lowers amount of HIV virus in the blood of those who are subsequently infected after vaccination. Scientists questioned the sense of moving forward with this larger trial last year in light of the failure of the multi-country Merck vaccine trials, as we commented in "New Directions for AIDS Research Funding".

In other AIDS research news,Weijing He and a team of colleagues in the US and UK found that a protein called DARC (Duffy antigen receptor for chemokines), that makes some African people resistant to malaria may influence HIV infections and AIDS outcomes. The small study published by Cell Host & Microbes shows that the existence of certain DARC mutations enables resistance to some malaria parasites -- though not Plasmodium falciparum, the most prevalent and deadly parasite.

The DARC mutation that prevents infection by some malaria parasites also seems to influence how successfully HIV invades and attacks the immune system. DARC codes a receptor on the surface of red blood cells that binds or tethers the HIV virus. The researchers found that a particular mutation of DARC increases the odds of acquiring HIV-1.

However the mutation also seems to increase the DARC protein's interactions with chemokines. Chemokines are proteins in the immune system that trigger inflammation, and they interact with HIV virus. Researchers have shown that the DARC protein acts by scavenging, retention, or transporting chemokines, and mutated DARC protein seems to lower levels of chemokines. In this study, once infected, people with the mutated DARC lived 2 years longer than those with the normal copy of the protein. While the study helps pave an outline of these interactions the authors predict (with understatement) that future research will show "the net effect of the relationship between DARC and chemokines on HIV disease in vivo is likely to be much more complex."

Making Grad Work Easier

In "The Companions of Mad Cows" a couple of years ago we mentioned that veterinarians in Alabama had diagnosed mad-cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a downer cow. According to the Wall Street Journal article, officials had buried the cow on a farm in Alabama, but refused to divulge where. They were also searching for the bovine's "companions", to assure the disease was confined to one cow and hadn't been contracted through feed eaten by many cows. (Scientists don't think BSE is transmissible from cow to cow.) We wrote in that post: "we suspect that perhaps someday when the BSE stricken cow has long since been forgotten and decayed, some inquiring grad student will be stunned by the number of prions they unearth in a random soil sample of the unidentified burial site."

Now, a recent study indicates that prions could be made more infectious via certain soils. From the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Christopher Johnson et al. tested prions' ability to bind to different minerals that could then be orally transmitted to grazing animals. They published their results in PLoS Pathogens. According to the study, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), (which include BSE, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and chronic wasting disease) not only survive in some soils, but because prions selectively bind to certain minerals, clays containing these minerals might be more infectious.

Researchers in another study found that prions remain in biowaste after sewage treatment. Glen T. Hinckley and fellow scientists at University of Wisconsin published research in ASAP Environmental Science and Technology (via Nature News) showing that prions survive activated sludge treatment and anaerobic sludge digestion that's used to degrade waste in waste water treatment plants.

Lurking on Your Portabellos?

Nature News suggested forebodingly that we should assume prions are in biosolids leftover from wastewater treatment, and since "biosolids are often used as crop fertilizer, this raises the prospect of small amounts of prions being present on the surfaces of the crop plants - and without careful washing, they could therefore be ingested when the food is consumed." (Taken at face value this is bad and good. Bad for obvious reasons. But think how much less work grad students would have to do in gathering their specimens? -- straight from the dining hall salad bar to the bench.)

But really? Prions on your crudités? So far prions have not been found in wastewater, only in biosolids, and aside from the current research they haven't ever been found in routine tests -- although the authors of the wastewater paper point out that the the tests aren't sensitive enough to detect them. Prions would occur at very low levels since they are rarely found in humans, so the possibility that they would somehow end up on salad is not impossible, but according to an EPA scientist interviewed by New Scientist is quite remote. She added that alkaline treatment used by some treatment plants, though not the Madison one, would deactivate the prions.

Prions are know to be resilient to conditions that would kill viruses and bacteria, but studies have also shown prions sensitive to extremes in PH. For instance researchers found that prions that mice were less susceptible to prions than cows, because mice digestive systems contain greater amounts of hydrochloric acid. Authors of the first paper above hypothesize that when prions attach to minerals in soil this might protect them from acid and explain their enhanced ability to infect the host.

Charlie Rose concluded a thirteen part series on science earlier this week, with another interesting episode, "The Imperative of Science". Sharing his table were Paul Nurse, who shared the Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine in 2001 and is currently President of Rockefeller University; Bruce Alberts, a biochemist, author of texts like the definitive Molecular Biology of the Cell, former two time president of the National Academy of Sciences and Editor-in-chief of the journal Science; Lisa Randall, Harvard particle physicist and author; physicist Shirley Ann Jackson who is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Harold Varmus, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, headed the NIH through a heady science period and is now the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The focus was the importance of science and it naturally was an interesting, convivial, and lively, if general, discussion.

The group said that the US has become complacent about its long time position as a world leader in science and that increased global competition in science demands decisive action if the country is to maintain its status. The participants emphasized the need for better science education. Alberts brought up primary and secondary education, and they all discussed the importance of improving college curricula. They stressed that appreciation of the scientific process and experimentation should be a more central part of liberal arts education, and that all students, not just those who show great promise to be scientists, should learn and experiment at science.

Thinking scientifically is not only important to understanding science, these leaders pointed out, but to processing of all complex problems; the goal is not only to resist "the dogma of talk radio" but to be an active participant in democracy. (they ran with the science is democracy idea)

They all nodded, agreeing with one scientist who crisis in science to a frog sitting in the pot of water as the heat gets turned up. According to this allegory a frog that sits in cold water will stay and perish when the temperature is raised (by some demented frog torturer). When I heard this I applied the critical thinking and research skills that only scientific training can hone, and learned that the frog tale is an urban myth. The good news is that apparently frogs save themselves rather than fatally habituating to hot water -- though to be honest, mine is second hand information. Apart from urban myths, the urgency for science in America is real, as is the human tendency to disastrously ignore problems that creep up on us.

The group discussed various ways to reinvigorate American science as was done with focus and enterprise after Sputnik. Perhaps a problem like global warming could rouse national science spirit, they said. (Coincidentally, Al Gore applied the frog allegory to this problem in An Inconvenient Truth)

The scientists expressed nervous concern that our leaders be able to "connect the dots". A president needs to lead the nation to an understanding of science's central place in society and needs to focus attention on fundamentals like education and funding in order to assure both the nation's preeminence in science and increased public understanding of science. Politicians need to support science in a broad cross-disciplinary way, they said. The goal should not be to tackle a series of individual problems but to recognize the commonalities across disciplines and build a foundation upon which science progress thrives with long-term bipartisan support.

Rose asked whether there was enough interest in science among voters to warrant a presidential science debate, adding ""voters are there if you can get on the right side of it". The scientists righted course, expressing incredulity that there weren't already strong public science platforms, and supporting a debate to reassure Democrat and Republican voters of candidates' commitments to national competitiveness via science.

Here's the link to watch/listen to the video its entirety.

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Before scientists went snorkeling in Borneo and plucked a frog, the charming looking Barboroula kalimantanensis, out from under a large rock in a fast moving body of water, the elusive species had been found only twice before. In 1978 Djoko Iskandar described the new species of frog in the journal Copeia (Dec. 28, 564-566), cataloging its webbed toes, rugose skin, flattened head, and the myriad anatomical features that distinguished it as a unique species. The second find was sighting was almost 20 years later, 1995, by the same scientist, Iskandar, who also collaborated on the current research.

As an endangered species, the frog is perhaps lucky that it's so difficult to locate, although it's still subjected to environmental pollutants and habitat encroachment from logging and mining. Not so fortuitous for these primitive frogs, the scientists decided to dissect the specimens for the first time and found that the species has no lungs. David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore, explained that "because these specimens were so rare, they had never been dissected. If you have just one...in your museum, you don't want to rip it open!" (a different approach then some scientists take with their newly found marine species, Acronym Required has found). If unlucky for these frogs, the discovery was lucky for the researchers, as they got their name splashed across headlines around the world. ¹

The biologists hypothesize that the frog adapted to the highly oxygenated fast moving water by losing lung capacity. Since the frog lost its lungs, its body became more flattened and less buoyant, which researchers deduce helps it stay under rocks. As well, with its increased surface area respiratory capacity through its increased skin surface area.

Tetrapods without lungs are rare. There are lung-less salamanders and one species of caecilian, an earthworm-like amphibian, that don't have lungs, and some frogs with very diminished lungs, but this is the first species to have only cartilage in the place of lungs.

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¹ This news was in an advance press release supposedly ahead of a April 8th Current Biology article which we could not locate. Acronym Required usually doesn't publish research without reading the original source, but will update this post if needed. Update 05/06 - The article was published May 06, 2008 in Current Biology: Bickford, D.; Iskandar D.; Barlian, A; "Lungless frog discovered on Borneo": Current Biology, Vol 18, R374-R375, 06 May 2008.

A couple of years ago in "The Microbes Win", Acronym Required wrote about research done by Wright et al at McMaster University, who found that many species of microbes isolated from soil samples had significant antibiotic resistance to clinically useful antibiotics. Last week researchers at Harvard published a study in the journal Science (Dantas et al, "Bacteria Subsisting on Antibiotics":Vol. 320. no. 5872, pp. 100 - 103), advancing research in this area a step further.

The scientists managed to culture a significant number of soil isolates using antibiotics as the sole source of carbon. The bacteria that proliferated most proficiently on a diet of antibiotics were from the Pseudomoniale and Burholderiale orders. Bacteria in the genuses Pseudomonas or Burkholderia, like Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkoholderia cepacia are responsible for infections involved in meningitis, skin, lung and bone infections, swimmer's ear, and opportunistic infections in immunocompromised patients and those afflicted with cystic fibrosis.

The Harvard group suggest that the large genomes of Pseudomonas and Burkholderia species give them many diverse mechanisms of resisting bacteria and adaptive versatility, and that catabolism of antibiotics is just one tool in their arsenal of antibiotic resistance mechanisms.

These bacteria are very relevant clinically but scientists haven't observed utilization of this antibiotic catabolism, probably because there are many sources of carbon at infection site therefore catabolism of antibiotics isn't the most useful method of resistance. Since soil residing bacteria are exposed to natural sources of antibiotics, the research isn't extremely surprising, but may lead to further understanding of shared and unique antibiotic resistance mechanisms.

There's an interesting side note in the credit fallout, with its subprime mortage scandal, Bear Stearns debacle, and complex financial instruments that no one, not even the experts understand. The nervous economists desperately try to whistle past a recession, and people talk and write endlessly about pros and cons of regulation, then in the midst of all these problems, some prominent financiers are suddenly pushing for financial education of the public. Experts like Donald Trump, (an exemplar of financial responsibility), are speaking out and establishing programs to teach finance in high schools, colleges, and communities.

The Economist quotes Niall Ferguson, a historian at Harvard University, who says that no one understands finance and that even MBA students don't know "'the difference between the nominal and real interest rate."'

Blackstone CEO Peter G. Peterson is among the crowd bent on relaying a message of fiscal prudence. Part of his goal for retirement is founding and leading organizations like the Concord Coalition, whose mission is educating the public on financial responsibility, for instance by producing learning modules to sell to high schools and colleges.

Peterson is also organizing "grassroot" movements around financial education, and buying films that teach young people about responsible finance. He's especially intent on warning people about the pending disaster of entitlements, particularly social security.

Peterson's first film is scheduled for release in September and he's optimistic about its box office prospects. He told Charlie Rose the other night he's been "energized by what Al Gore's experience was" with the "Inconvenient Truth". However he added, "...I wish we had polar bears, I wish we had ice caps" to "dramatize" the story.

Ahh...but then he'd have the real problem of global warming to worry about.

The House voted 213 to 197 to expand the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But it did not give retroactive legal protection to telecoms. Instead the bill proposes that companies present their case arguments before a judge when state secrets are at stake.

The Republican Party spent considerable time organizing a secret session yesterday, only the fifth since 1825, to convince the Democrats of the bill's necessary aspects. A two hour security sweep of the House chamber was conducted before the GOP presented classified information that in the end failed to impress the Democrats."We probably could have gone and eaten together at McDonald's...", Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) told the Washington Post. Bush has said he would veto the bill.

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We also wrote about FISA here in "FISA: Turning Orwell On His Ear", and here in "FI-HISSS-SA".

In an essay on how to pronounce the surname of the Putin's presidential successor Dmitri Medvedev, Serge Schememann writes of English speakers vexed by the Russian language, and gently mocks language teachers who guide them. The author quotes a bilingual journalist from the Moscow Times, who once tutored an American actress how to pronounce the consonants T,D, and N: "the tongue must touch the upper teeth, not the alveolus like in English".

Schememann adds, "Russians have their own problems with American names". I bet. He writes, "I never touch the upper teeth with my tongue nor anything that comes up when I google 'alveolus'". Which is unfortunate, since I hear Ringley Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus salaries are somewhat comparable to journalists'.

"Alveolus", is simply a "a small cavity or hollow", and often refers to the pulmonary alveoli (plural) in the lungs, which function during respiration to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide to and from the blood. Accordingly, the Russian reporter's alarming suggestion -- tongue to alveolus -- might actually constitute a medical emergency. "Alveoli" also refers to other hollows, such as the sockets in which the teeth are rooted.

As most people know, the domesticated turkey that Americans eat for Thanksgiving descends from the wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, native to America. The Spaniards fancied the turkey when they invaded Mexico where turkey was indigenous, and then introduced the bird to Europe when they returned in the early 1500's. However, during the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, turkeys were thought by northern Europeans to be a product of Turkey.

Europeans also for a time called turkeys "India fowl", then confused the turkey with "Guinea fowl" and gave turkeys the same Latin genus name: "Maleagris". The species name that they settled on, "gallopavo" combines the Latin for rooster and for peacock. From these confusing origins turkeys have long struggled with their identity. First they were put in their own family, Meleagrididae; but now scientists consider turkeys to be part of the pheasant family, Phasianidae, in the subfamily Mealeagidinae.

In 1934, Dr. Frank Thone, a botanist and journalist for Science News Letter, wrote that other native American plants, tobacco, corn, and pumpkin, were also assumed by Europeans to be products of Turkey. ¹

The 1542 botany text by Leonard Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarri insines, described corn and pumpkin as Turkish. The Yale medical library has scanned the plates of the wood cuts from Fuch's 1543 German translation of De historia stirpium, called New Kreuterbuch. As Thone describes, the plates for pumpkin and corn, refer to the vegetables as "Turkish cucumber", and and "Turkish corn".

Thone translated Fuchs explanation of "Turkish corn" history: "The plant here considered has been brought to us only recently from Turkey, Asia and Greece... thus far it has no Latin name other than Turcico frumentum. Corn now, is of course known as Zea mays. Thone wrote in 1934 that turkey still retained its "red fez" misnomer, while corn, tobacco, and pumpkin had been popularly reconnected to their proper American origins.

Digesting that, you can sit back in your stretchy pants and put your feet up on the ottoman...

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¹Frank Thone wrote "thousands" (according to his obituary) of articles for Science News Letters, now Science News, which was started in 1921 as a part of the Science Service. He was one of the reporters who covered the Scopes trial in 1925 and sought to use the trial to educate the public about evolution.

(corrected link 11/24/07)

The site Collegehumor.com does a skit of the un-aired pilot for the Fox Show 24, back in 1994.

I've just finished reading a fun book that I got at a book swap called How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Bottom. I liked it of course, although other reviewers who are more opinionated about incorporating Proust in a book title found it alternatively "clever"- "witty..funny..tonic" or "superficial..contrived..patronising".

Happily, I can stay in theme by reading a couple of new releases that not only include Proust but science too. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer writes about artists who, ensconced in their writing or cooking or painting, conceived of some aspect of sensory science ahead of the scientists. In Proust and The Squid, Maryanne Wolf writes about human development and reading.

On Proust's place in neuroscience, I didn't bring Proust along to fill in the empty moments between my neurobiology experiments as Lehrer did, and have yet to finish "In Search of Lost Time" -- I may not be the best judge. While Proust inspired books divert my attention, Proust stares down from the spines of seven unfinished volumes shelved up by the ceiling, mocking my frenzied schedule. Although some reviewers make it seem unique or iconically 21st century to mix literature and science, I contend that the pairing is natural. Scientists have always been a cultured lot to my mind, especially neuroscientists, and artists forever inquisitive about the natural world. Whatever the circumstances or pretenses Proust so often finds himself as muse, these two new books promise interesting reading.

When a story about the human appendix not being "useless after all" hit the press and blogosphere a month ago, quite a few science blogs explained that this "new" functionality idea was flawed and carefully pointed out the problems with the research, in the midst of what was largely unabashedly uncritical enthusiasm. The writers noted that this was not new research, just a review of the literature. More importantly, the Duke authors' proposal in the Journal of Theoretical Biology that the appendix was not vestigial but served to house beneficial gut bacterial was unproven (though some deemed it interesting).

Despite the effort, I noticed that Answers.com featured the appendix story in "Today's Highlights", and alas it wasn't listed as "fake news".

Studs Terkel writes in "The Wiretap the Time", in the New York Times today, that the current government wiretapping defies a 1978 law, and that the case should be allowed to go to court. Mr. Terkel is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the telephone companies that conducted broad wiretapping on behalf of the Bush administration.

The administration has been seeking to grant immunity to the telephone companies to protect them from such lawsuits, a move that some say would set a dangerous precedent. The Senate has spent significant effort fighting the administration to gain access to key documents in order to proceed with the case. Civil liberties groups argue that the government is trying to cover-up possible wrongdoing.'"Immunity suggests that there's been a violation of the law and they want to be absolved from any liability," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters. "I would like to know what happened before I absolve anyone from liability."'

Mr. Terkel, 95, speaks of the wiretapping that he's witnessed, the Palmer raids in 1920, Bureau of Investigation raids, the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950's, in which Terkel was blacklisted and disallowed from working in television and radio "after refusing to say that I had been "duped" into signing my name to these causes."

In defiance of the 4th amendment, Bush has gutted the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, its "legal structure and social contract", saysTerkel, and of his century of experience: "nothing much surprises me anymore. But I always feel uplifted by this: Given the facts and an opportunity to act, the body politic generally does the right thing."

The Annals of Internal Medicine fails to explain its cover in its link, "About The Cover". So we'll guess. A face and neck transplant patient? A plug for the American Dental Association? A site hack by the Hell's Angels? Casual Friday at Kaiser? Any 'ole day in the Castro? Rounds on Halloween? Something else?

A Danish show called "Deadline" hosted an interview with Lawrence Lessig to discuss his new focus on government corruption. Lessig spent the last 10 years working to make copyright law more flexible and founding the Creative Commons. He's now turning his attention to political corruption, which he believes undermined his copyright efforts and subverts progress on monstrous issues where the U.S. lags behind, such as global warming and childhood nutrition. It's a good interview, and he gets to the heart of the problems. When challenged about whether we can actually pull this off he notes that it will be a long project, but says: "Even if I were absolutely convinced we're going to fail, that's no reason not to fight". Optimistically, Lessig points out that a positive first step towards progress is transparency in campaign finance, which is already well under way (he mentions the work of the Sunlight Foundation). Lessig also notes that the internet is only now starting to edge towards its democratic potential and that we are only now beginning to use peer production to solve these sorts of unwieldy problems.

Today, Craig Venter published his genome sequence in the journal PLoS Biology, along with a self-portrait so large, in the journal's 'Synopsis' version, that this startled reader recoiled with fright.

Sheesh. Science should be soothing...first you have your abstract, your introduction, the methods, results, discussion...No unassuming reader seeking to understand science's newest frontiers, for the greater good, should ever be confronted with SO MANY individual facial hairs, in such...lewd...detail. Shotgun sequencing indeed, he's a bit in the reader's face, as they say.

The published sequence is diploid, both his mother's and father's contributions. Much of the sequence may seem familiar, due to the fact that Venter contributed his DNA to the first composite sequencing human genome effort made by Celera (his company, which is also behind the current effort), the results of which were published in 2001. His genetic contribution to that effort was 60%. According to today's Financial Times unique scoop, Venter is predisposed to "novelty-seeking behaviour and a preference for evening rather than morning activity". News you can use.

However both the journal and the author stress that individual human traits are each influenced by many genes. The PLoS paper concludes that human-to-human sequence variation is five- to seven-fold greater than earlier estimates, which Venter says, proves that we are in fact more unique at the individual genetic level than we thought.

Yawn. Good enough. Nevertheless, maybe next time, a composite photo? Perhaps? To display your essential humanity?

Yesterday, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick expressed more indignation about the FISA vote last weekend, questioning the Democrats who voted for the bill:

With this FISA vote, the Democrats have compromised the investigation into the U.S. attorney scandal. They've shown themselves either to be participating in an empty political witch hunt or curiously willing to surrender our civil liberties to someone who has shown - time and again --that he cannot be trusted to safeguard them. The image of Democrats hypocritically berating the attorney general with fingers crossed behind their backs is ultimately no less appalling than an attorney general swearing to uphold the Constitution with fingers crossed behind his own.

Reason magazine also reasonably pointed out that Attorney General Gonzales once excused his own legal transgressions, because:

"the administration had to violate FISA because a Republican-controlled Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 would not have agreed to the changes that a Democrat=controlled Congress has approved by a comfortable margin six years later"

The Republicans didn't have to be so sneaky all this time because, really, no one cares? Bloggers all over the internet urge you to barrage your representative -- the one who voted to further increase executive power and wiretapping -- for answers.

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Acronym Required also wrote about CALEA.

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Older, somewhat related, worthwhile, thoughtful entertainment: "The Lives of Others", and "Kremlin, Inc."

Lapham's Quarterly: "The journal that enlists the council of the dead", juxtaposes Senator Brownback's repudiation of evolution, with Darwin's skeptical analysis of Christianity.

Last week's New Yorker has a cartoon with a couple of executives looking out over the smoke billowing out factory smokestacks. One guy asks, "Can't we just dye the smoke green?"

Like green beer on St. Patrick's day? There's a festival of green spirit taking over businesses these days. Everyone's doing it one way of another, although some companies manage to sashay further down the spectrum of bizarreness then others.

British Petroleum (BP), at sea perhaps, with Lord Brown outed in a British dither of morality, designed a website to take advantage of this brave new world of green sentiment. At http://www.greencurve.com, BP describes a gas station that pollutes less, bragging: "..Be sure to check out our toilet seats". British Petroleum also designed another website, http://www.alittlebettergasstation.com. This site actually looks remarkably similar to BBC's teletubbies site. The sites share the same kelly green colors, the same twangy children's tunes, and many of those misshapen babies. The gas station site has games for (I think) children, like one called "Gas Mania", as well ringtones, screensavers, and "baby mail" (I have no idea).

Petrol is fun kids!

The Wall Street Journal published a front page story today about Justen Deal, who last year confronted Kaiser Permanente management about a 4 billion dollar IT project he thought had gone awry, and a projected 7 billion dollar budget deficit at Kaiser. In "How an E-mail Jolted a Big HMO", (temporary link) the Wall Street Journal noted, "flicking away whistle-blowers isn't as easy as it once was".

Acronym Required wrote an account of the story, "Healthcare IT: The Perfect Storm", last November. Why this story bubbled up on the front page of WSJ now, (albeit in their middle, soft news, people focused column ), when there's not exactly a dearth of seemingly critical world news, we don't know. Local papers have pretty much spurned the story. The IT aspects have been mentioned sporadically in healthcare blogs, the IT media, and the LA Times. This is an interesting business case not only in terms of dealing with internal IT implementation strategy and PR, but also for corporate human resource teams, who in this case, perhaps anachronistically, underestimated his kamikaze-like persistence.

A couple of days ago the Sea Shepherd conservation group announced a $25,000 prize for coordinates of the Japanese Whaling Fleet operating in the Ross Sea. The information will help the conservation group save time as well as fuel. Apparently the Japanese whaling fleet invested in satellite technology to help them evade activists. This puts the pursuers at a disadvantage, although they said they could try to "hide behind an iceberg" (also a dwindling option) to avoid satellite detection.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Congress put forth a spending bill for 2007 that increases spending for physical-sciences and biomedical research. (Democratic Leaders in Congress Propose Increases for Scientific Research and Pell Grants in 2007 Budget, January 30, 2007). The Chronicle listed the proposed increases:

"The bill, which totals $463.5-billion, would be especially generous to scientific research. The research budget of the National Science Foundation would rise by nearly 8 percent, to $4.7-billion. Spending for the Energy Department's Office of Science would increase by about 6 percent, to $3.8-billion. Spending for the National Institutes of Health, the largest source of funds for university research, would rise by 2.1 percent, or $620-million, to $28.9-billion."

The bill also increases the maximum Pell grant award by 6% per year. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the bill on Wednesday. The bill also specifically bars the addition of any earmark funding.

The New York Times reported today that Bush updated an executive order that will alter public agencies' ability influence policy. The directive will impact government agencies when they issue policy guidance documents aimed at regulating industries, and as a result public health and the environment as well as civil rights and privacy measures will be effected.

Agencies are tasked with interpreting laws passed by Congress and making policy recommendations that are often non-binding, but can influence -- or as Bush claims, "coerce"-- policy regulation. The executive order, which the White House listed last week in the Federal Register, will give Bush more say over what the agencies publish by putting a political appointee in charge of a regulatory office attached to each agency.

Businesses welcome the executive order, which tries to prevent any "major" recommendations from being issued without significant vetting and oversight. Any regulation that would economically impact a sector by more than $100 million dollars is considered major. Agencies will also need to assess whether their recommendations can be accomplished through market mechanisms, which the White House deems to be the preferable. Bush further undermines potential agency clout by demanding they soften their language in guidance documents and not use "mandatory language". If the proposed regulation is considered potentially onerous to any business interest, the agencies will need to subject their recommendations to public comment, then accommodate the suggestions they receive.

These new rules keep the Bush agenda intact, even when a newly elected Congress might pursue a different ideological approach, for instance when balancing environmental imperatives with business priorities. Impeding the agencies clout by requiring an even greater prioritization of economic interests seems to compromise the mission of public agencies that are charged with assessing science data, health and welfare of citizens. At any rate the move underlines the administration's predilection for business -- sometimes at the expense of public welfare.

Update: In the final bill, San Francisco restricted Phthalates but not Bisphenol A.(BPA) A timeline of how this unfolded is included in the second half of the post "Phthalates and Bisphenol A: Media and Politics"

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The San Francisco Chronicle published an extensive article on a ban going into effect December 1st in the city of San Francisco, California, that will prohibit the sale, distribution, and manufacture of products that contain any bisphenol A (BPA) or certain levels of phthalates. Ordinance 060107 is specific only to products intended for children under the age of three, an age when kids are most susceptible to the toxic effects of the chemicals. The decision is supported by hundreds of studies showing deleterious effects of endocrine disruptors.

The Chronicle tested some products by purchasing "a random selection" of 16 children's products and sending them to STAT Analysis Corp., a laboratory in Chicago, for analysis. Among the findings, "A rubber ducky sold at a Walgreens store contained a carcinogenic form of phthalate, DEHP, at levels 13 times higher than allowed under San Francisco's pending ordinance. A second form of phthalate was found three times above the limit.". Bisphenol A was found in a Disney Co. Baby Einstein rattle and "the face of the Goldberger doll."

The study found that only three of the sixteen products didn't contain phthlates or bisphenol A (BPA). The full Chronicle story and details of their findings is here. The law is similar to bans in Europe on these products. However, the law is now the target of a lawsuit by chemical companies, toy manufacturers and retailers. These same parties have long waged a vigorous campaign to discredit the extensive research behind the health ordinance.

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Acronym Required previously published several extensive articles about bisphenol A, as well as about California's efforts to ban bisphenol A and phthalates. Plastic Bottles- Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC" January, 2005, discussed safety concerns with baby bottles manufactured with bisphenol A. Bisphenol-A and Phthalates Bill in California, January, 2006, reviewed research on bisphenol-A and campaigns of chemical industry organizations to discredit the research, and San Francisco Bans Bisphenol, Phthalates, in July, 2006, discussed this ordinance.

Researchers report in Naturwissenschaften (via Science) that women who test positive for antibodies to the Toxoplasma gondii virus bear more boys than girls. The virus infects over 20% of the world's population. Transmitted through raw meat or cat feces, it causes "flu symptoms" like muscle aches and pains in humans it infects, but is not considered dangerous unless the person's immune system is compromised or if they are pregnant. However, for women who have antibodies to the virus (from being infected previously) the sex ratio is increased from 51, meaning there 104 boys born for every 100 girls, to 60, which translates to 150 boys born for every 100 girls. Women with the highest levels of antibodies, about 72, have 260 boy babies per 100 girl babies.

The World Wildlife Fund lost seven members of their organization in a helicopter crash near the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area (KCA) last weekend. 24 people were killed in the crash including group including members of the WWF, and conservationists, scientists and scholars from Nepal, the U.S. Canada and Finland. The group had traveled to the area last week to hand over management of the Kanchenchunga Conservation Area to local groups. Our condolences to all involved, who collectively and individually accomplished tremendous work for our environment and communities.

Chris Mooney is everywhere. He just left La Jolla and Mountain View and he's in Portland. No he's not there anymore but he's coming back, after Seattle and before Madison and Raleigh. We saw him in the Haight, San Francisco, CA, when we were running errands. It was a little random. We had wended our way through the retro t-shirt shops and gutter punks who dye their snarled hair black to offset their blue eyes, the better with which to beseech you for money. Others asked for cigarettes...lights...change, with sleeping Rottweiller puppies chained to their sides and their appendages pierced with chains and pieces of washing machines and whatnot -- testaments to their pain and angst. We passed the tattoo parlors and stores with the incense and the 60's clothes from India and more gutter punks who chain-stitched crocheted scarves, perhaps for the upcoming winter and ongoing rebellion. This is the laid back pace of Haight street, where the clerks are a prouder, higher caste of punks, ordained to the chore of letting the masses know just how uncool they are. Fortunately, the clerks are most indignant about the gutter punks who should "just go back to their parents houses in Marin" or "get a job spraying deodorant in used shoes" -- at one of the many worn-out jean emporiums. Those are some highlights of the Haight - the craziness of the scene ebbs and flows. So with our errands checked off and our yen for hippy dippy punky Haight fulfilled, we ducked into a bookstore called The Booksmith, a clean, ambient, also well-lighted store, that's not a chain and not so much a scene. We wandered back to rows of folding metal chairs. They were testing the mike. Chris Mooney was scheduled to speak in 5 minutes.

So coincidental, I initially thought, since I had just read the book The Republican War on Science, and since Haight (though not the store) seemed like an unlikely venue. But it's not such a coincidence, since Chris Mooney is all over the place. Ubiquitous might be too strong a word, but, like Starbucks, he turns up everywhere, especially at adjacent corners of streets where you're likely to find liberal minded people convening to think the right things about political influence on the environment, evolution and other pertinent science fields. The Haight might not so easily fit this image, but The Booksmith, one of the few independent stores left in the city, certainly does.

The Republican War on Science covers the history and background of some big issues in public policy and science in detail. The introductory paragraphs of each chapter are especially catchy. If you happen to have been following this for the last 15 or 20 years (or more) you will be in familiar terrain, perhaps you will flip through and nod your head. If you are interested in the details they are all there. If you've followed other areas of science and public policy such as some of international development issues, especially around health, the tensions and compromises described will also be familiar. To the majority of people, and scientists, this book will be eye-opening. I think it's timely and important, as it shows the government's sometimes underated capacity to influence science (and other things) for better or for worse. Its easy to take for granted a government's ability to beneficially influence science. This book heightens awareness of our current opportunity to watch government's detrimental (at least that's our view) hand in science. Good, thorough reviews of the hard cover edition are here and here and here.

Mooney has apparently updated this paperback edition to address his audiences' burning question- "what can we do?". What can we do about problems like Republicans 'hijacking' good science and contorting it to promote bad policy, about media's banal coverage of science, about politicians who are uninformed, about the preponderance of political appointees. Happily it was a full to capacity crowd who sat at the edge of every available seat and were passionate about these issues.

They all wanted to participate in the answers and the question of 'what can we do?' . Of course many times people ask "what can I do", but what they mean is, "what can I do that doesn't take much time, that doesn't cost anything, that doesn't cause me discomfort, that appeals to my lifestyle, philosophy and religious convictions, where I can get credit for doing something? People are more likely to deny what they can do when they're asked to contribute. However this was a sincere, well-intentioned crowd. Some people had traveled great distances to see him speak.

Chris Mooney offered some suggestions in his talk to this perplexing question, and I will mention a few of them -- I'm sure there are others in the new edition of the book. The author said scientists should more actively engage the public and venture forth in public controversies. The valuable Office of Technology Assessment OTA should be reopened. Politicians shouldn't use junk science to defend policy. There should be fewer political appointees in science leadership positions. Journalists shouldn't cover stories in a such a rote fashion, they should stop trying to balance science to suit the business demands of the papers. Someone said the problem was bigger then science. Another person suggested that more scientists should become politicians. Mooney said that having a few less lawyers wouldn't hurt. We would say that many scientists have some hurdles to overcome before becoming politicians, but they could always send a pledge sheet around their lab, right after the one raising money for the post-doc doing the marathon for cancer or the triathlon for the natural disaster victims.

The subject of the book is focused, as was the talk, on the the political efforts of the government to denigrate good science and invite speculation about methods and process, while at the same time courting dubious science, and framing the debates and science discussions to support their own agendas. Complicating the question "what can we do", however, is the fact that while you can try to narrow the subject to 'political attacks on science', this is really a vast topic, in fact it's not really one topic, but many. As well, you can even widen the scope of these issues to a set of broader perfect circumstances that have influenced the problems, such as a lack of general knowledge and passion about science combined with overwhelming technological advances in science; an erosion of institutions that used to assure certain traditions of science funding and integrity, with a demonically business oriented government. In this perspective, everything can get swept into the discussion.

Education for instance, plays a role in forming peoples' ability to reason scientifically, it can help them judge the rhetoric of politicians, and advocate for better policies. A graduate assistant attendee asked what they could do to help. Teach, Mooney exhorted, luckily your at Berkeley, he added (education was not the main focus). Certainly all the problems in education and science ennui don't start at the college level but college science curricula often do a lousy job at encouraging lifelong interest in science. One deceptively simple suggestion is to assure that the students don't end up loathing science. Could this effect political outcomes? We're not as worried about A level students, the ones you want to have in your lab under the auspices of a Howard Hughes grant, but the bell curve is tyrannous to the others. It precludes the majority of them from acing *Science 101* and if those students get a Cs,Ds, or Fs in biology will they hate biology for the rest of their lives? Will they say, as one student recently did "I hated this class. The teacher taught entirely from PowerPoints. You don't need to go to class because it's all in the book. The mean grade in the class was 30/100. I'm done with biology" Or will they say, as another student did, "I got a mediocre grade, but I loved the class! This guy genuinely loves biology and the challenges students present, and he made me appreciate the subject". You can peruse on-line rating sites like RateMyProfessor.com to quickly learn that among the outlier posts, teachers can literally, make or break a student's experience.

Will the "non-scientists" exit class after finals and forever shun science and scientists? Will they look for the simplest solutions even though those may be motivated solely by politics and may be scientifically unsound? Will those students make financial investments in industries that are deleterious to the environment? Will they vote for candidates who waver on their science votes, who are influenced by the base? Not everyone will master the Kreb's cycle in their freshman science class. But don't scorn or alienate those who don't, they may be casting a vote on your behalf someday. Science education is certainly beyond the scope of the book. The solutions are elusive. Various aspects of teaching -- the competing goals of teaching and research, the budgeting that effects lab curricula, the attrition rate of promising students to other fields, and the near impossibilty of altering the curriculm make this an unwieldy as well as tangential subject. But Al Gore was apparently inspired as an undergraduate to care about the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere. Others will be similarly influenced.

One person asked: If we work in discipline that isn't political, but it is still written about by the press in a skewed way, what can we do? In brief the author advised: write to the editor, talk to the journalists, correct the record when the facts are misconstrued. We would add that if you take a broader view of "politics", there is no part of science where politics doesn't apply. That goes for business and economics too. If your field is that obscure, than undoubtedly much of your time will be spent justifying your existence. Oh, no? Has your funding been cut yet? That's political. That's business. Has the doctor who sits on the board of the foundation that funds your obscure area of science asked you if his son can work in your lab this summer in turn for a reference? That's political. Is your lab housed in the windowless seismically incorrect cellar of a Cold War era building with peeling paint and nasty pale green cinder block walls, while across the street they're building a state of the art business school or stem cell research facility? Did the CEO of your pharmaceutical company just get ousted over a patent controversy, and does the new one think your "product" (the one that you just invested the last five years of your life in) is a market loser? Do you work in the oil industry to pay your bills although your passion and PhD are in conservation geology? Are you a science PhD working at a non-profit in a city where your hourly salary is approximately one-tenth of what your hairdresser earns? It's not only stem cell research that is affected by business and politics and economics, all of science is. It has to be, economics, politics, business (religion) are enmeshed in our society.

But while these problems may be shared among different areas of science we defy anyone to come up with *a* solution. While Mooney's themes all fit neatly under the "Republican War On Science" umbrella at first, once you delve beyond a casual familiarity with any particular issue or shift the focus away from the broader underlying problems, the generalization doesn't provide a framework sufficient to understand the complexity of the political and economic difficulties facing science. Regardless of the overlap, each issue will need its own panoply of solutions because each has a unique set of challenges. In this regard Mooney acknowledges that the problems need to be tackled individually.

As we all know, and we have discussed here, the motivations that drive Intelligent Design proponents are not what drive the denial of global warming. Stem cell research will likely be privatized, and the fact that the government isn't contributing to the funding, growth and regulation of that industry will have different implications than the government's failure to acknowledge global warming, and its subservience to oil companies.One could argue that both of these decisions are guided by liberal ideology and that the science will always be forced to yield to more powerful interests. The government won't hinder the economic progress of the oil companies, nor will it fund research that clashes with the Republican religious base, but it won't often stand in the way of private corporate interests that might fund stem cell research. In this view, although The Republican War on Science slogan still holds a certain allure, the Bush administration has not so much waged a war on science, as it has pursued an agenda that inflicts collateral damage on science. The business interests that the current administration turns cartwheels for will still be there when the Democratics manage to regain power. Importantly though, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science raises awareness about these important and interesting issues, and it's good for us that he's on tour to promote these ideas. Here's a link to the book.

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Acronym Required covers these topics frequently. Articles such as "Big Labels, Little Science", and Sea Change or Littoral Disaster touch on some issues, as well as others, especially those in our Science and the Media, and Public Policy Higher Education and Environment, Public Health, as well as other sections.

"Computers write news", is the headline under the left "Briefing" column on the front page of the Financial Times today. The front page teaser says "Thomson Financial, the business data group, has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is using computers to write some of its reports. Page 3"

We can see how this might work. Your average financial story might very simply be composed of a noun (company name or sector), + a verb describing movement in space, + a number, and a few articles. For example: "Dow Industrials Climb 7.84 points to Extend Rally","...a slide in oil prices", "...futures contracts fell 2.5%", "...shares jumped 2%", "...the industrials have risen nearly 247 points" ...oil has plunged off 5.8% to a two-month low". Add a few adjectives like, "cloudy" "troubled", "psychological", "important", or "sunny", and you have the makings of a juicy investment news story if there ever was one.

But we can only speculate. There is no story about about computers writing news on page 3. Indeed, these new details might be hidden away somewhere in the paper, but we couldn't find them in today's FT. We know computers are already capable of generating "news", so what are those computers up to?

The New York Times author William Grimes reviews "The Big Oyster", by Mark Kurlansky, in "Before There Were Bagels, New York Had the Oyster". In an interesting sounding book, Kurlansky, the author of "Cod" and "Salt", details the history of the perished Hudson oyster. In Grimes' review, he contemplates "The Big Oyster" author's vision that the Hudson will be rejuvenated someday (in the nature sense here -- apart from the business sense).

"...[T]eeming mass of sturgeon, striped bass and shad swimming through the Narrows...up the Hudson...acres of fecund oyster beds...cleanse the waters of New York.

"This is no fantasy", Grimes says. Then, at the end of the book review, after contemplating the reality of the NY metropolis, its effluent, and its unlikely coexistance with oysterbeds, he asks "Is paradise lost forever?"

He points to groups like the Baykeepers, an environmental group devoted to the estuaries (who coincidentally, discuss the "commons" on their home page). The group projects hopefully that the estuaries and their oysters can be restored and served on NY restaurant tables. Oyster lovers we are, but realists also we tend to side with Grimes, who says: "You first."

Octavia Butler, who wrote captivating science fiction, died last week. She wrote short stories such as the award-winning Bloodchild, as well as fiction such as the Patternist series and was known for her humane, if to this reader sometimes alarming stories. Butler was a black, women writer, in a genre not known for black, women writers, but she was as matter of fact about her efforts to publish, as she was of her habit of writing a different sort of family history into science fiction:

"When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read," Ms. Butler told The New York Times in 2000. "The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing."

Octavia Butler achieved acclaim as the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, two Hugo Awards and Nebula awards. Here is a tribute to her via YouTube

The history of Thanksgiving is somewhat murky, but the first harvest festival in North America was probably in Newfoundland. The American colonists most likely had a somewhat more modest festival than our cranberry laden myths would have it. Tryptophan in turkey doesn't cause post meal sleepiness. Nevertheless, for some in our audience who have the day off, we hope it was a pleasant pause in this November week.

The current "end to end" principle is being challenged by telecoms who want to control the networks and arguably access to which services get to use what resources. A lot of people were alarmed by Business Week's interview with the CEO of SBC - "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes" Ed Whitaker - glibly outlined his plan for global domination. In Newsweek he elaborated about more actions he would take to wrest power over the networks. But wasn't SBC, at one time, dependent on the graces of the same regulations they now want to smother? On the other side of the issue, Doc Searls discusses the tussle over whether the networks should be "owned", "controlled" or "managed", along with his take on the rhetoric that different sides of the Internet privatization issue use, in this interesting essay.

The newly opened Global Stem Cell Consortium is on hold following allegations that the famous Korean cloning researcher, Hwang Woo-suk, the "cloning king", crossed ethical boundaries to obtain human eggs for his research. The rumor first appeared that the researcher had used eggs from junior members of his lab in Nature (429, 3; 2004), but the recent announcement that University of Pittsburgh cloning researcher Gerald Schatten broke off ties with Hwang gives additional credibility to these original reports. Hwang's work has now been reportedly "thrown into an ethical cloud" that affects many organizations and researchers.

Some, like the Children's Neurobiological Solutions Foundation (CNS) are taking a wait-and-see stance. More, like Schatten and affiliated colleagues across in the U.S., are breaking ties with the consortium. The newest development will also affect governments' willingness to fund or participate in the cloning research, which has been stymied by these very same ethical issues. Science (subscription) quoted Hans Scholer of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Medicine in Germany in "Stem Cells: Collaborators Split Over Ethics Allegations", (Nov. 18, 2005 vol.310; 5751, p1100), who said that the German government would now hesitate before letting its scientists to collaborate on the cloning project: "One argument will be that if Hwang was dishonest with a collaborator, how dishonest will he be toward the public?"

In last August's journal Stem Cells, scientists report that fetal cells enter the maternal brain in experiments with mice. In "Fetal microchimerism in the maternal mouse brain: A novel population of fetal progenitor or stem cells able to cross the blood-brain barrier?", Xiao-Wei Tan et al., found that fetal cell were especially abundant 4 weeks post-partum, and that the cells apparently differentiated. They also found that when a lesion was introduced, more fetal cells were present at that site. The authors did not investigate the physiological affects of the fetal cells. Via Scientific American's report: "Baby to Brain".

Hurricane "W"ilma comes from a place in the alphabet where hurricanes rarely emerge, though meterologists correctly predicted several late season storms this year. The 21st storm of the 2005 season ties this year with with 1969, which holds the record for number of hurricanes.

The storm is ferocious enough to wow former Hurricane Hunters who note with aplomb the stomach churning difficulties of flying into the hurricane eye:

"it's really tough to hit a 2 mile wide eye when you're flying crabbed over at a 30 degree yaw angle fighting horizontal flight level winds of 185 mph and severe turbulence".

I bet. Currently the forecasters predict that the storm will *weaken* to a Category 3 or Category 4 before hitting Florida then will track the NE coast perhaps to New England. It is now smaller then Katrina but that could change; optimistically, it is not estimated to generate the storm surge that Rita or Katrina did. There is more information at NOAA and here with intimidating satellite photos.

Nature (subscription) comments on the severe drought in the Amazon rainforest. In Santarem, where the Amazon and Tapajos rivers meet water, levels are 15 metres lower then normal.

Theoretically, drought could effect the forest by stunting growth so that the protective carbon absorption of the forest would be limited. This would add to the effects of deforestation, which hasn't slowed down despite years of attention to the problem. As well, fire damage from managed burning leaves the forest vulnerable to further drought. The result would be that the Amazon contributes to climate change rather then buffers it.

Note: Some people have commented that this is either a temporary effect, or drought due to local deforestation, rather than a permanent effect due to global climate change.

Science and Nature are reporting about reverse genetics research of the 1918 flu virus. The structure of the flu virus last year suggested that this virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.

President George Bush warned of the avian flu today and proposed that the military be mobilized to deal with public health threats. His proposal was roundly criticized by public health officials who claimed that cuts to public health funding shouldn't have been so severe. The Democrats criticized the president for not moving on the issue sooner and proposed a "director of pandemic preparedness and response", or as some agencies are reporting it, a "bird flu czar"

Acronym Required previously wrote about disaster preparedness with regard to Hurricane Katrina here and here. We also wrote about Avian Flu in these articles: "Hopes For Avian Flu Vaccine"; "Modeling Epidemics", and "Avian Flu in China- Increasing Resistance"

If one's science experiment or paper is "elegant", it arrives at the answer or explains a problem -- often one that has remained elusive for years -- with clear, insightful form that prompts smiles, admiration and sometimes chagrin from one's colleagues. Einstein's descriptions of matter and energy are perhaps quintessentially elegant, though the description no doubt underplays their significance. Physicist Brian Greene does justice to all his subjects as he eloquently walks through E=mc² and how Einstein's vision for physics described anew the relationships between mass, energy and the formation of the universe, in "That Famous Equation and You", published in yesterday's New York Times.

"But by September, confident in the result, Einstein wrote a three-page supplement to the June paper, publishing perhaps the most profound afterthought in the history of science. A hundred years ago this month, the final equation of his short article gave the world E = mc²."

The equation is well entrenched in our culture, it's faddish even, blithely plastered onto T-shirts and posters and paraphernalia for sale in campus stores. While many people wear the formula across their chests however, they often misconstrue its significance. Greene points out that Einstein actually published about M=E/c² and the paper emphasized the creation of mass from energy that Greene describes via a jousting scenario, not the creation of energy from mass associated with nuclear reactions. The equation describes not just the extraordinary energy reactions but ubiquitous, everyday ones:

"There is nothing you can do, not a move you can make, not a thought you can have, that doesn't tap directly into E = mc². Einstein's equation is constantly at work, providing an unseen hand that shapes the world into its familiar form..."

The theory reoriented how scientists thought about energy and led to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and then to Einstein's work to derive a "single theory encompassing all of nature's laws".

"For the better part of his last 30 years, Einstein pursued the "unified theory," but it stubbornly remained beyond his grasp. As the years passed, he became increasingly isolated; mainstream physics was concerned with prying apart the atom and paid little attention to Einstein's grandiose quest. In a 1942 letter, Einstein described himself as having become a "a lonely old man who is displayed now and then as a curiosity because he doesn't wear socks."

Today this work continues and it "is no curiosity - it is the driving force for many physicists of my generation", says Greene. Succinctly describing the formation of the universe is not trivial but the task has progressed significantly. Now scientists:

...[have] established beyond any doubt that a fraction of a second after creation (however that happened), the universe was filled with tremendous energy in the form of wildly moving exotic particles and radiation. Within a few minutes, this energy employed E = mc² to transform itself into more familiar matter - the simplest atoms - which, in the course of about a billion years, clumped into planets and stars."

"During the 13 billion years that have followed, stars have used E = mc² to transform their mass back into energy in the form of heat and light; about five billion years ago, our closest star - the sun - began to shine, and the heat and light generated was essential to the formation of life on our planet."

It's good to be reminded of this "unseen hand" that is so often subordinated to some distorted permutation of the "invisible hand". While the latter is used to press us on in our daily chores, when we understand the former we are put in our place and reminded of the relative power of each.

Obviously the excerpts cannot do justice to the article, located here. The author's research is in the area of string theory and he has written a couple of books including the well-reviewed popular science book The Elegant Universe.

A reader contributes pointers to an