Archive for November, 2007
In the seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, samurai pizza delivery man Hiro sums up the problem with children’s pyjamas: “You can have ‘em flame-retardant or non-carcinogenic, but not both.”. An article by Arlene Blum, published in Science recently, shows this is an issue that persists to this day.
Blum details how we’re still in a state of uncertainty when it comes to fire-proofing our homes, and points out the muddled policy choices that have been made subsequently. Although chlorinated tris was removed from children’s sleepwear in the 70s after it was found to be a mutagen (and probable carcinogen), it is now the second most used fire retardant in furniture. How did this happen?
In the 80s, pentabromodiphenyl ether (pentaBDE) was added to polyurethane foam to meet California’s Technical Bulletin 117. This had the unfortunate property of dissociating from the foam and migrating into household dust, eventually accumulating inside the occupants of the house. Showing a potential to be harmful, pentaBDE was banned in California in 2003, and the EU followed suit.
Manufacturers went back to using chlorinated tris and “unknown proprietary mixtures”, which may turn out to be no better than pentaBDE. Whether these chemicals are safe or not isn’t yet known - Blum states that all have “large data gaps for human health and environmental safety”.
Still, these are life-saving flame retardants, right? The benefits must outweight the costs. Well, no, argues Blum.
From 1980 to 1999, states that did not regulate furniture flammability experienced declines in fire deaths similar to that seen in California.
The unappreciated factors in reducing fire deaths include a 50% decrease in per capita cigarette consumption since 1980 and increasing improvements in building, fire and electrical regulations. New laws in Europe will require manufacturers to establish the environmental and human safety of all new ans existing chemicals - a move that could spell the end for toxic flame retardants. Rather than repeatedly replacing one hazardous chemical with another, Blum points to reducing incidence of fire (for example, implementing requirements for fire-safe cigarettes and increasing the use of sprinklers and smoke detectors), summarizing: “Fire-retardant chemicals in our homes should not pose a greater hazard to our health and environment than the risk of fires they are supposed to prevent”.
I expect the chemical-phobic groups to leap on Blum’s piece with glee, but I’m more interested in it as an example of problem solving within society. For example, now that smoking in public is banned in the UK, will the probable increase in smoking at home lead to a jump in the incidences of fire? And if so, would we be right to keep a hold of our pentaBDE until more conclusive data could be published on it?
November 26th, 2007
I spotted this splendid design over at Ben Blackburne’s blog. I think it’s fantastic! Textbooks would be so much clearer if the London Underground designed them.
Also: you can get this on a t-shirt! Awesome!
November 25th, 2007
Excellent geek-tech blog Wired has a roundup of their top ten pseudoscientific gadgets - including old SciencePunk favourites Steorn, Expertise e3P and Danie Krugel. Author Rob Beschizza is quite literally spitting venom over these products, and it’s nice to see such phrases as “perpetual motion machines are bullshit’s bread and butter”. See the full list here.
November 20th, 2007
Have a look at this tree. Notice anything strange about it? Looks like a regular tree to me.
But when we look down, it’s clear that not all is as it seems! This tree, and everything around it, has been cocooned in a creepy web. What demon spat from the nightmares of hell could do such a thing?
Turns out that the culprits are a living web of caterpillars. There are literally millions of them infesting this campus, spinning silky sheets over everything in sight. Trees, buildings, bicycles presumably anything else left stationary for too long ends up in their empire of silk.
Very awesome, and very creepy. I’d love it if anyone could tell me what kind of insect these little wrigglers are.
November 19th, 2007
What is a black hole? How does one form? What’s inside a black hole? If these are questions that have been bugging you, fear not. Think Technologies have a charming animated guide to these mysterious entities (although the bit involving wormholes seems a stretch). Learn the answers to the above and more by visiting the site.
November 17th, 2007
Cosmetics company iQ are boasting “the most advanced solution ever made for controlling wrinkles”, containing lot of fancy-pants ingredients like GabaTM, Marine Collagen and Matrixyl 3000TM. 24-Hour Age-Defying Face Therapy, however, doesn’t defy age so much as utter credulity. I’ve attached a graphic from their site below. Apparently this cream works by replacing your wife with a 20-year-old model overnight. Best not let anyone under 60 use it though, or you might wake up next to a foetus.
[FLASH]http://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/gallery/face2035071007.swf,200,300[/FLASH]
November 16th, 2007
Here’s a fun piece of trivia for you: whilst at the More4 studios, Kylie Morris confessed that she has an unfettered love of Venn diagrams. I can definitely understand that: just check out this pictorial guide for life!
Much more pictorial fun to be found at crappygraphs.com.
November 14th, 2007
*** Numbers in this post are liable to change. Homeopathic maths is tough! Thanks to all the eagle-eyed readers out there who’ve corrected my sloppy zeroes. ***
Author Jeanette Winterson, who you may remember from such “magical realist” novels as Sexing the Cherry, is busy defending homeopathy in the Guardian today. Her article will get ripped to shreds by a thousand bloggers, so I’ll just concentrate on one aspect that I found vaguely humorous. Says Jeanette:
Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory… …Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.
Oh Jeanie, if only this were the case with homeopathy. Let’s leave aside the ridiculous notion of water having a “memory” (you have to wonder, if you split the water into two bottles, which bottle will the memory live in?). Let’s look instead at that word nano. This doesn’t mean “very small”, it means “one billionth”, or in math terminology 10-9. A typical homeopathic remedy is 30C. This means it has been diluted down so that it is one part active substance mixed with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
-000,000,000 parts water.
Nano = 10-9
Homeopathic = 100-30 or 10-60
This means that a “nano” solution, if you want to call it that, is one billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times stronger than a homeopathic solution.
Interestingly, a 10-23 solution is likely to only have only one poor, lonely, molecule of active ingredient left. Therefore a standard 30C solution has only a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance of having a single molecule of active ingredient.
It’s not just Jeanette who’s confusing “homeopathic” with “nano” - here’s Dana Ullman, who thinks that homeopathy is “nanopharmacology”. Very Small Pharma being obviously better for you than Big Pharma. Yuk yuk.
To conclude: homeopathic measurements are not nano. They are non-existent. Yet another example of homeopaths adopting scientific phrases and getting them all confused, like the cargo cult they are.
November 13th, 2007
Contrary to popular belief, I am not fundamentally anti-homeopathy. It’s a nice way of dealing with minor, self-limiting complaints such as backache or stress. Someone listens to you moan for an hour, hands you a placebo and sends you on your way. In fact, recent research into 240 patients with back pain found exactly that: physiotherapy and strong pain killers made no impact on recovery time - reassurance and paracetamol were just as effective. I don’t think the NHS should pay for homeopathy simply because I think this kind of “chin up” therapy doesn’t need a £100-an-hour counsellor and bags of pseudoscience.
The problem, as I see it, is that some homeopaths forget that their treatment is only really useful for minor quasi-ailments, and lurch dangerously into the belief that they are real doctors. So it is with this seriously deluded group of people: Homéopathes sans Frontières, who traipse the world’s disaster zones handing out useless sugar pills to the shell-shocked populace. On their site, in a somewhat brutal translation from French, they claim to have treated wounds, eczema, persistent headaches, diabetes. If what I can infer is correct, their medication is free, while the local hospital charges for their prescriptions. No surprise then, that they are inundated with patients, all of whom will receive a sympathetic ear and some sugar pills. Those with minor symptoms get better; those whose minor symptoms belie something more serious probably don’t. I imagine they had to see a proper doctor eventually, I hope they delay didn’t prove fatal.
They also claim that homeopathic remedies performed as effectively as chloroquine in a double blind study. Here is the study. It doesn’t appear on PubMed.
Here, for example, is a thread on an alternative health forum, with homeopaths discussing the Asian tsunami disaster and what best remedies to use for the treatment of cholera. For those of you who don’t know, cholera is a particularly nasty water-borne disease that often crops up in disaster zones. Wikipedia puts it succintly:
Cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known—a healthy person may become hypotensive within an hour of the onset of symptoms and may die within 2-3 hours if no treatment is provided. More commonly, the disease progresses from the first liquid stool to shock in 4-12 hours, with death following in 18 hours to several days without rehydration treatment.
Cholera is not a minor, self-limiting illness. It is one of the most deadly diseases you can expect to catch these days, and sugar pills will do absolutely nothing to stop it.
Got a crisis? Maybe government stooges shot you while you were demonstrating for fair wages? No need to rush to the hospital, these people can prescribe you St John’s Wort for: “intolerable pain from lacerations, deep wounds, stab and gunshot wounds”. Though of course, at 200C, you’d need to drink enough remedy to fill the solar system to get a single molecule of active ingredient. I’d like to pretend homeopaths weren’t setting up shop in warzones, but that would be wishful thinking.
In any disaster zone, the chaos, language and cultural barriers will make it all but impossible for a resident to discriminate a trained health professional distributing effective medicines from a well-meaning yet highly delusional quack handing out placebos. These people look like doctors, act like doctors, and believe themselves to be doctors. They are not. And if the trend for humanitarian homeopathy continues, these people are likely to become as dangerous as the diseases they claim to cure.
November 11th, 2007
For those of you who enjoyed watching me struggle to defend the Ig Nobel prizes on More4 News a while ago, rejoice. The lovely Kylie Morris and her team liked me so much they had me back on last night, talking about making sense of science news stories. This was pre-recorded, which I thought would be easier, but it turns out it’s not. We took three takes from various angles, and I got so muddled I couldn’t remember what witty off-the-cuff (read: “painstakingly committed to memory”) remarks I’d already used.
Then I had to go back 20 minutes after I left because some technical glitch. Still, it was fun, and I got paid this time.
November 9th, 2007
In perhaps the awesomest advance in transportation since monster cars, Jake Layall has combined the motorbike, unicycle, and 1,100 lbs of badass to create the R.I.O.T. Wheel, the “first radical departure in single-wheel designs in over a hundred years”. Housing a motor and counterweight inside a giant wheel, the driver sits on a platform that extends out in front of the device, where they can fully appreciate the admiring glances from laydeez. It looks like it shouldn’t work, but it does. And if you feel the need to live out your steampunk / Dr Doom fantasies, simply stump up several thousands dollars and Jake will build you one himself!
See awesome video action below the fold!
November 8th, 2007
What do you do with several tonnes of a chemical so reactive no-one will agree to transport it? No, “hire the A-team” is not the correct answer. The correct answer is “throw it in a lake and enjoy the fireworks”.
November 7th, 2007
The Manchester Evening News reports that locals with poor math skills have been left confused over new lottery scratchcards. Camelot has withdrawn the cards after players failed to grasp whether or not they had a winning ticket.
In order to win the Cool Cash game, players had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the one displayed on the card. The frequent use of sub-zero temperatures baffled some players, who failed to grasp the concept of comparing negative numbers. The article states:
Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.
The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I’m not having it.”
Peter Hall, speaking for the Association of Teachers of Mathematics stated: “The concept of minus numbers is something we would cover with 11 or 12 year olds, and we would expect them to have come across it before,” but conceded “the concept of smaller numbers is something that some people do seem to struggle with”.
November 6th, 2007
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