China: An Earthquake in the Wrong Place

May 12, 2008 7:43 PM

Geologists say Sichuan Province was a surprising place for an earthquake.  The one that happened there Monday afternoon (before dawn in the U.S.) was a magnitude 7.9 -- stronger than anything Sichuan had had in 75 years.  The U.S. Geological Survey has details HERE.

Sichuan is not far from the natural fault line, marked by the Himalayas, that separates most of Asia from the Indian subcontinent.  India is very slowly pushing northward, with often-violent results.

But Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, is on a plain.  A 7.9 earthquake there?  Only 6 miles deep? 

"There's no clear fault line that you can put your finger on in the ground there," said Leonardo Seeber, a senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Sichuan, like much of the rest of China, has enjoyed rapid growth -- which means modern high-rises in the cities, surrounded by primitive huts in the countryside.  The skyscrapers, like many modern buildings, are designed to sway in an earthquake; better that they bend than break.  Older structures, especially if they were made of stone or brick, were more likely to collapse.

"Flexible structures, reinforced structures," said Geoffrey Abers, a colleague of Seeber's at Lamont-Doherty.  "On the other hand there's probably a lot of old construction that pre-dates this code."

Abers told us this may explain why most of the deaths in Sichuan were reported to be in the countryside, much of which is mountainous.  In the city of Chengdu, early reports said fewer than a hundred died, though obviously the number could go up.

Sichuan hadn't had an earthquake this strong since 1933. 

(Picture: Xinhua, Chen Xie, via AP)

May 12, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

By the Light of the Silvery Moons

May 08, 2008 8:05 AM

The Earth had a really bad day about 4.5 billion years ago.  Something about the size of Mars, so the theory goes, hit our still-forming planet, spewing debris in all directions.  Much of that material eventually coalesced to form the Moon.

Or maybe, say two scientists, it formed several moons. 

Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center and John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution of Washington have published a paper in the journal Icarus -- read the abstract HERE -- in which they do the math and conclude that debris could stay put for tens of millions of years at two of the so-called Lagrange points, places about a million miles from Earth where the gravity and the Earth and Moon effectively cancel each other out. 

The Lagrange points have proved useful to managers of space missions; the SOHO solar observatory floats in one of them.  But entire moons, even small ones?

Lissauer and Chambers say it's possible -- and given the eons they calculate debris could have stayed put, pieces of debris could have pulled together under the force of gravity to form moonlets. 

Whether this actually happened is conjecture; the Lagrange points are empty now.  The gravity of other planets would have been enough to destabilize objects there over time.

Ker Than of New Scientist has posted a short musing on the possibility, quoting Matija Cuk of the University of British Columbia, who's done similar modeling.

"They would have looked more like Jupiter or Venus in the sky than a satellite," said Cuk. "They would have resembled very bright stars."

Hat tip to Tuan Nguyen of our staff for noticing this.

May 8, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Body Parts for Sale

May 06, 2008 8:29 AM

A kidney specialist in Australia has created a ruckus by suggesting a way to end the shortage in organs for transplant -- let people sell their kidneys for $50,000 (Australian, equal to about $47,300 U.S.), to the government, for use on an open, legal market.

"Being forced to travel overseas and illegally buy an organ from someone who desperately needs the money, with no medical controls over the process and nobody checking whether the kidney is a good match, is what I call unethical," says Dr. Gavin Carney in the Sydney Morning Herald.

"But what is the option? Spending eight hours a day on dialysis for up to seven years? Dying on a wait list?"

The Herald says 1,800 Australians are waiting for kidney transplants, but only 343 were donated last year.

Trading in body parts is something most Americans find horrific, with all its implications of poor people selling their organs -- and well-being -- to those who can afford it.  But there are occasional calls, such as Dr. Carney's, for people to reconsider.  And there is one country -- Iran -- where the sale of organs is legal. 

My old friend Stephen Dubner, co-author with Steven Levitt of "Freakonomics", has written about this lately --find his post HERE -- and he points us to an analysis by Dr. Benjamin Hippen, a kidney transplant surgeon in Charlotte, posted on the website of the Cato Institute.  Take a look HERE.

"Although Iran clearly does not serve as a model for solving most of the world's problems, its method for solving its organ shortage is well worth examining," writes Hippen.

Hippen is quick to say he does not see Americans getting over their repugnance of organ-selling anytime soon, but he calls the shortage of organs for transplant the result of a "terrible policy failure."  He says, "The portion of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 which prohibits the sale of organs should be repealed," so that we can explore how a fair market for organs -- better, presumably, than Iran's -- might work.

Would you sell one of your kidneys?  Tuesday's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald carries a follow-up story: a man named Craig Gill called the paper to say he'd readily sell a kidney to secure the future of his two-year-old daughter Petal.

May 6, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (23) | TrackBack (0)

Here Comes the Sun

May 02, 2008 8:05 AM

A lame joke, from the early days of the Moon race, had a comedian/astronaut cheerfully claiming he was going to fly a mission to the Sun.

But it's too hot, the straight man would reply.  How will you get there?

Simple, came the answer.  We'll go at night.

Groan.

But now, after 30 years of planning and arguing and canceling because it was too hard and too expensive, NASA has finally ordered up a mission that, for now, it calls Solar Probe.  It's asked the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to work up a plan for a launch in 2015.  The spacecraft will have a carbon-composite heat shield, nine feet in diameter and six inches thick.  The Earth is about 93 million miles away from the Sun on average; Solar Probe would be sent within 4.1 million miles.

This is billed as pure science, but in a technology-driven world, engineers want to know more about the charged particles that come flying our way, as solar wind most of the time, and as giant flares -- Coronal Mass Ejections -- when the Sun is especially active.  Solar radiation has, on occasion, fried the electronics of satellites, and in 1989 a power blackout in Quebec was attributed to solar activity. 

Shield your eyes.

May 2, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)

Death and Your Digital Trail

April 30, 2008 3:30 PM

Someone has posed a heartbreaking question on Slashdot this morning: "A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide last week. He was a young, promising CS major who was close to being accepted into a very prestigious school." 

There was no suicide note, no explanation for the young man's death, says the writer.  "Some members of the family are hoping to find something, anything, that might explain why this all went down. Since I'm the most computer-skilled person the family knows, they have asked me if I could help them try to find some information. My possible approaches are: his Linux laptop, his university, Gmail And Hotmail email accounts, and a second MySpace profile that apparently has been tagged as private. How ethical would it be to, say, try to crack his root password in a situation like this?"

Read the full post HERE, plus the hundreds of comments that have come in.

It's a sad issue, which has taken on new layers of complexity in the digital age.  Each of us leaves a trail behind -- letters, financial statements, whatever -- and in days gone by they were passed on to our families when we died.  If your uncle passed away, and letters in the attic revealed he'd once had an extramarital affair -- well, there would be extra pain, but no question as to whether the family had the right to see those letters.

Today, though, we have email accounts, and Facebook pages -- and passwords, lots of them, creating the feeling that even in the wide-open world of the Internet, what you leave there is private.  Does it change when you die?

Actually, there is precedent for the case of the young man on Slashdot.  Here's one example.  Three years ago I did a World News piece on Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth, a Marine killed on patrol in Iraq.  His family asked Yahoo! if they could have his archived emails, just as a way of remembering him, and Yahoo resisted.

"The commitment we've made to every person who signs-up for a Yahoo! Mail account is to treat their email as a private communication," the company told me.  "Email often involves many individuals who have privacy expectations...."  To this day, when you register at many websites, the fine print will stipulate that your account will be deleted after you die.

Cpl. Ellsworth's family took the case to court, and won.  Yahoo sent them a CD-ROM and paper copies.  They have a website in his memory HERE.  They urged other families to get their loved ones to share their passwords, perhaps in a sealed envelope, just in case.

There's a coda to the story, though.  The email account contained hundreds of spam messages, but it turned out Cpl. Ellsworth had saved almost none of the emails he had written, and his family so much wanted.

April 30, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Hit 'em Where it Hurts

April 29, 2008 3:04 PM

The Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a survey on the rising cost of health care, and it's enough to give you a stomach ache.

In tough times there are other things on people's minds -- 44 percent of those surveyed said paying for gasoline was a "serious problem" -- but look at some of their numbers on what medical bills do to people:

--20% said they had been contacted by a collection agency because of unpaid medical bills in the last five years.

--20% said they "had difficulty paying other bills."

--17% said they "used up all or most of [their] savings" because of illness.

--12% said they had "been unable to pay for basic necessities."

The summary is HERE.  The numbers above are from p. 2 of the pdf file.

The Los Angeles Times reacted to one number in particular: "7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse."

A few days ago we did a World News story on a study of robotic heart-bypass surgery; read it HERE or watch it HERE.  The doctors who did the work suggested it may catch on, not because it's less painful for patients, not because it may provide longer-lasting benefits, but because it gets people out of the hospital and back to work more quickly, thus saving their employers money.

Ouch.

April 29, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

Is God 'Obsolete'?

April 28, 2008 2:27 PM

Often the best part, for me, of writing this page is reading your comments.  After thirteen hundred on natural selection and intelligent design (after the release of Ben Stein's "Expelled"), we're actually crashing that page on some computers.

So let's pick up the conversation here, if you'd like to continue.  And to add some new material, let me offer the following from the John Templeton Foundation: a debate titled  "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"  

"Absolutely not!" writes physicist William D. Phillips.

"No, but it should," writes Christopher Hitchens, author of "God is not Great."

The foundation assembled a diverse group of thinkers for its "conversation," and their answers to the question are both reasoned and passionate.

Click HERE to take a look at their essays.  The foundation took out full-page newspaper ads in Sunday papers to publicize its debate.  Sir John Templeton, who made his fortune in mutual funds, makes it clear that his personal faith is strong, writing that he hopes his foundation will support the work of those who might deepen our "knowledge and love of God." 

April 28, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (371) | TrackBack (0)

So You Want to Be an NBA Star: Do You Have the Genes?

April 26, 2008 4:45 PM

ABC News' Mike Lee reports from London: Something new is going on with the use of DNA that could make a very few lucky people rich, and devastate the hopes and dreams of many others. And it raises huge ethical issues for most of us, on top of the DNA issues we already worrying about.

Aside from being great athletes, what do you suppose Mohammad Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, and Tiger Woods all have in common?  If you believe some scientists, the logic is that they were all born to be great sports achievers because there are specific genetic traits that can predict exceptional athletic ability.

Of course this idea of predestined achievement by a few, and conversely predestined under-achievement by the many, goes against the teachings of a lot of philosophers and self-improvement gurus who say that most of us are capable of greatness. But, it seems, the lab boys disagree.

We use DNA to solve murders, screen for predisposition to diseases, study the evolution of prehistoric creatures, and match up children with their biological parents when a polygamy sect is broken up.

We debate how science can use DNA for the better good, while protecting society from the use of DNA to custom-build certain kinds of humans through DNA engineering.  That may seem a distant, maybe impossible, prospect.

But what you may not realise is that DNA profiling, which in scientific terms is off shelf technology, is now being used to identify a pre-disposition to "enhanced athletic performance."

In other words, we are on the verge of trying to identify the next generation of super athletes, and possibly on the verge of one of the great all-time robberies of the human spirit, the will to win based on pure desire, guts and determination.

Here is the background. According the Guardian newspaper of London, a leading sports scientist by the name of Dr. Henning Wackerhage of the school of medicine sciences at Aberdeen University, has been approached by an unnamed professional sports organization about the possibility of screening players to discover whether they have a genetic key to sports excellence.

"A football club was interested in doing genetic testing of athletes," he told the Guardian, and added, "It was a genetic performance test."

Dr. Wackerhage was not immediately available to speak with ABC News, but when he is, we will put more questions to him.

In Britain is it not illegal to carry out such tests, although it is not clear whether any organizations have yet to try. In Australia, one genetics company reportedly offers a $90 test the lab claims will identify whether customers have the fast-twitch muscle function gene called ACTN3, which is said to be found in leading sprinters.

Other genes associated with high athletic performance include PPARdelta, which controls human growth, and genes that regulate erythropoietin, a hormone that regulates the production of red blood cells.  Those are the little guys that deliver oxygen from the lungs to muscle tissue. The more efficient the delivery, the better the muscles perform.

Wackerhage published a scientific paper re-counting that have produced enhanced performance in mice and rats through "gene doping" and DNA screening for high performance potential.  He later also suggested that it might be possible to produce the human equivalent of a Formula One car by using genetic mutations (or engineering).

So some bright spark at a British soccer club got wind of the idea and called the professor.

"My advice was that there are questions of legality with an employer doing genetic tests on its employees.  They wanted to conduct a test (on current players) that is specific to genetics," Wackerhage said.

However, UK Sport, the group that governs drug testing in Britain, is quoted as saying it had no power to prevent clubs using genetic screening on players because it was not specifically prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

So where might this all lead? At the very least it appears that it is now possible to identify genetic traits found in top athletes, as well as potential top athletes at birth.

What will this do to the noble profession of sports scouts?

Instead of sitting through videotape of hundreds of high school football, basketball or baseball games every year looking for a promising rookie, will these legends of the sports world be replaced by clerks who go online and scan a lab’s data bank for genetic draft picks?

And what will happen to one of the greatest things about sports, the will to overcome what nature has given you and excel through hard work, guts and determination?

Huw Jennings, youth development manager at the Football Association Premier League, told the Guardian: "While you may be able to identify athletic ability, the road from promising youngster to top professional is far from smooth, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that talented athletes will become talented footballers."

Perhaps.  But DNA athletic profiling could fall hard on youngsters who need the traditional values of sports to help them develop into well-adjusted adults.  If they are told they are being bumped from their Little League team because their lab tests were dodgy, what will that do to future generations?

Despite some wonderful uses of DNA science, parents, would-be sports stars, and sports fans may eventually have to ask whether this is one scientific achievement too far.

April 26, 2008 in Science, Sports | Permalink | User Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Rough Landing

April 22, 2008 4:28 PM

Peggy A Whitson is now the single most experienced astronaut in American history.  When she landed Saturday with two crew mates, she had spent 377 days of her life in space.

But re-entry, in Russia's Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft, was not as planned.  There is now a story from the Russian news agency Interfax, saying the crew was in "serious danger" as they came down.

The ship landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan about 295 miles short of its target.  It took 45 minutes for a rescue helicopter to reach her and her two crew mates -- Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and South Korean astronaut So-yeon Yi.

Their ship, says Interfax, entered the atmosphere with its hatch facing forward instead of its heat shield.  The story quotes an unidentified Russian space official as saying the hatch was damaged, as well as a valve that equalizes air pressure between the inside and outside of the ship after it enters the atmosphere.

"The fact that the entire crew ended up whole and undamaged is a great success. Everything could have turned out much worse," the official is quoted as saying.  "You could say the situation was on a razor's edge."

It's the second time in a row, and the third in eleven flights for this series of Soyuz spacecraft, that a landing has gone awry.  Each time the capsule has made a "ballistic" re-entry instead of a guided one.

Yi was the first South Korean ever to fly in space, and the re-entry scared her.  The crew members felt ten times the force of gravity as they were slowed by the Earth's atmosphere.  The ship unexpectedly lost contact with the ground.  After it landed its parachute is reported to have caught fire.

What went wrong?  Did the landing capsule have trouble separating from its guidance and power module, as may have happened before?  Was there a short circuit in the guidance system, as there apparently had been on the previous flight? 

William Gerstenmaier, NASA's space operations chief, gave a telephone press conference this afternoon -- though he emphasized he doesn't have any answers.  "We've detected something on two flights significant enough that it needs to be understood," he said.  "But the good news is that we have the right people working on this.  The Russians are taking this extremely seriously." 

NASA says it is much too early to draw any long-term conclusions about the long-term reliability of the Russian ferry craft.  After the space shuttles are retired in 2010, the plan is to rely on Russian Soyuz ships for several years to get American astronauts to the space station.

(NASA Photo: Whitson and crew mates before launch in October.)

April 22, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Evolution: Now Showing at a Theater Near You

April 18, 2008 8:35 AM

The Ben Stein anti-Darwinist film, "Expelled," opens today in 1,100 Theaters.  We've posted before on it (look back HERE and HERE), so we thought we'd give you a sampling of what others have to say so far:

Ronald Bailey at REASON Magazine has a headline: "Flunk This Movie! Ben Stein's new anti-science movie Expelled is all worldview and no evidence."

He writes that "despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific content -- no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, and morphology."

Matt Barber, writing at TOWNHALL.COM: "If you're already a person of faith, prepare to have your faith strengthened. And even if you're not, you can't possibly walk away without at least admitting that the debate over who we are and how we got here is far from over."

Jeffrey Kluger of TIME (who covers science, not film), says Stein "quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't -- and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish."

John Rennie, Editor in Chief of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, has posted an extensive package on the film.  In his own review he writes, "Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks -- all recycled from previous pro-ID works -- would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."

Greg Stier, head of Dare 2 Share Ministries in Colorado, writing in the CHRISTIAN POST: "It was a funny, thought provoking, dangerous, serious, engaging (and did I mention “funny”?) documentary. I have been a fan of Ben Stein since his “Bueller, Bueller” days, but now he is a rock star to me. He was so tongue-in-cheek that he almost bit it off."

Sean P. Means of the SALT LAKE TRIBUNE complains he was not able to see the film in advance: "To keep a movie away from critics is usually a sign that things are really, really bad."

He concludes, "I can't help but be struck by the irony of Stein's own words in the movie's introduction (which is also on YouTube):

"'In my experience, people who are confident in their ideas are not afraid of criticism. So that tells me the Darwinists are afraid. They're hiding something.'

"What, pray tell, are Stein and the "Expelled" producers hiding? And what are they afraid of?"

And this from Charles Colson, who, like Stein, worked in the Nixon Administration, and later founded Prison Fellowship Ministries: "I urge you to go see Expelled when it opens at a theater near you. Believe me, in this case the truth really is stranger -- and more compelling -- than any fiction the film’s detractors could possibly dream up."

April 18, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (1325) | TrackBack (0)