March 20, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP (with excerpts from a novel)

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others.

As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 — in large part for the year-around access to diving — and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of Clarke’s novels, Fountains of Paradise:

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, having emigrated there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. Living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete. (link)

I first read The Fountains of Paradise many years ago, and I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon for a refresher. There is an intense opening, set in the classical period, 2000 years ago, involving a “Prince Kalidasa,” who does not seem to resemble the actual Kalidasa (who was not a prince, but a poet). And there are some rich descriptions of the island of Sri Lanka (named “Taprobane” — Tap-ROB-a-nee — by Clarke).

Here are a few paragraphs from the historical section involving Clarke’s Prince Kalidasa:

The air was so clear today that Kalidasa could see the temple, dwarfed by distance to a tiny white arrowhead on the very summit of Sri Kanda. It did not look like any work of man, and it reminded the king of the still greater mountains he had glimpsed in his youth, when he had been half-guest, half-hostage at the court of Mahinda the Great. All the giants that guarded Mahinda’s empire bore such Crests, formed of a dazzling, crystalline substance for which there was no word in the language of Taprobane. The Hindus believed that it was a kind of water, magically transformed, but Kalidasa laughed at such superstitions.

That ivory gleam was only three days’ march away - one along the royal road, through forests and paddy-fields, two more up the winding stairway which he could never climb again, because at its end was the only enemy he feared, and could not conquer. Sometimes he envied the pilgrims, when he saw their torches marking a thin line of fire up the face of the mountain. The humblest beggar could greet that holy dawn and receive the blessings of the gods; the ruler of all this land could not.

But he had his consolations, if only for a little while. There, guarded by moat and rampart, lay the pools and fountains and Pleasure Gardens on which he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom. And when he was tired of these, there were the ladies of the rock-the ones of flesh and blood, whom he summoned less and less frequently-and the two hundred changeless immortals with whom he often shared his thoughts, because there were no others he could trust.

Thunder boomed along the western sky. Kalidasa turned away from the brooding menace of the mountain, towards the distant hope of rain. The monsoon was late this season; the artificial lakes that fed the island’s complex irrigation system were almost empty. By this time of year he should have seen the glint of water in the mightiest of them all— which, as he well knew, his subjects still dared to call by his father’s name: Paravana Samudra, the Sea of Paravana. It had been completed only thirty years ago, after generations of toil. In happier days, young Prince Kalidasa had stood proudly beside his father, when the great sluice-gates were opened and the life-giving waters had poured out across the thirsty land. In all the kingdom there was no lovelier sight than the gently rippling mirror of that immense, man-made lake, when it reflected the domes and spires of Ranapura, City of Gold-the ancient capital which he had abandoned for his dream.

In this made-up history of the ancient kingdom of Taprobane, Clarke actually seems to know whereof he speaks; the injections of bits of Hindu culture seem to come from a position of knowledge.

And here is a little from the main section of the novel, set in the present day. The protagonist is a Sri Lankan named Raja (short for “Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe”), who has retired from public life, and moved to an estate built on the site of “Kalidasa’s” original pleasure gardens:

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never regretted his decision. Those who predicted that boredom would succeed where the temptations of power had failed did not know their man or understand his origins. He had gone back to the fields and forests of his youth, and was living only a kilometre from the great, brooding rock that had dominated his childhood. Indeed, his villa was actually inside the wide moat that surrounded the Pleasure Gardens, and the fountains that Kalidasa’s architect had designed now splashed in Johan’s own courtyard, after a silence of two thousand years. The water still flowed in the original stone conduits; nothing had been changed, except that the cisterns high up on the rock were now filled by electric pumps, not relays of sweating slaves.

Securing this history-drenched piece of land for his retirement had given Johan more satisfaction than anything in his whole career, fulfilling a dream that he had never really believed could come true. The achievement had required all his diplomatic skills, plus some delicate blackmail in the Department of Archaeology. Later, questions had been asked in the State Assembly; but fortunately not answered.

He was insulated from all but the most determined tourists and students by an extension of the moat, and screened from their gaze by a thick wall of mutated Ashoka trees, blazing with flowers throughout the year. The trees also supported several families of monkeys, who were amusing to watch but occasionally invaded the villa and made off with any portable objects that took their fancy. Then there would be a brief inter-species war with fire-crackers and recorded danger-cries that distressed the humans at least as much as the simians - who would be back quickly enough, for they had long ago learned that no-one would really harm them.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of Clarke himself, one of the world’s most famous writers, living in a remote part of Sri Lanka — away from it all.

After the opening, the novel has a more conventional science fiction story arc — the goal is to build a kind of massive space elevator from the top of a mountain in Taprobane…

amardeep at 12:50 PM in Fiction, In Memoriam, Literature, Science, Science and Technology · 23 comment(s) · Direct link

October 25, 2007

Is happiness linked to race?

Earlier this week, an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology detailed some provocative new findings:

Are you happy? Well don’t try to be happier; you might become less happy. That is the gist of a multi-cultural study published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study by University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues at three other institutions found that, on average, European-Americans claim to be happy in general - more happy than Asian-Americans or Koreans or Japanese - but are more easily made less happy by negative events, and recover at a slower rate from negative events, than their counterparts in Asia or with an Asian ancestry. On the other hand, Koreans, Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans, are less happy in general, but recover their emotional equilibrium more readily after a setback than European-Americans.

“We found that the more positive events a person has, the more they feel the effects of a negative event,” Oishi said. “People seem to dwell on the negative thing when they have a large number of good events in their life. [Link]

So in a nutshell, what this article is saying is that “Whitey” is happier than me on a day-to-day basis (which is why he’s always whistling), but that I get over a bad day or a negative life event with greater ease than him. Could it be that since Asian families are likely to be newer to America (i.e. fewer generations removed from Asia) we are instilled with a certain sense of fatalism engrained within the family? When a grandparent or relative died in India and our parents couldn’t be there, we watched them deal with it and recover as best they could from afar. As another example, when we are the victims of racism we have to shake it off and keep going. A European American may not have to deal with some of these things. The study (and take it for what its worth) is essentially saying that Asian Americans have built up a greater immunity to bad news than European Americans.

“It is like the person who is used to flying first class and becomes very annoyed if there is a half-hour delay. But the person who flies economy class accepts the delay in stride…” [Link]

Oishi ends with some solid advice:

“In general, it’s good to have a positive perspective,” Oishi said, “But unless you can switch your mindset to accept the negative facts of everyday life — that these things happen and must be accepted — it becomes very hard to maintain a comfortable level of satisfaction.”

His advice: “Don’t try to be happier…” [Link]

The article is: The dynamics of daily events and well-being across cultures: When less is more. Oishi, Shigehiro; Diener, Ed; Choi, Dong-Won; Kim-Prieto, Chu; Choi, Incheol. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007 Oct Vol 93(4) 685-698

abhi at 07:18 PM in Science · 28 comment(s) · Direct link

October 12, 2007

Help Me Sing It, Ma Ma Se, Ma Ma Sa, Ma Ma Coo Sa

When it comes to “hot fields of scientific research”, obviously desis are at the forefront of discovery and innovation; that’s not chauvinism, that’s just logic. Millions of brown people exist and a solid chunk of them are in science, so the odds are just stacked in our favor. But I digress. And there’s exciting stuff regarding Proteome Research to get to, so let’s get back on topic! [Via MSNBC]:

A small study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate’s allure.

That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.

This study isn’t biased at all:

Kochhar is in charge of metabolism research at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The food conglomerate Nestle SA paid for the study. But this isn’t part of an effort to convert a few to the dark (or even milk) side of cocoa, Kocchar said.

Here’s my favorite part of the study:

In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don’t eat chocolate.

BWAH! In your face, people who think chocolate craving = pre-menstrual misery and weakness. MEN! They couldn’t find eleven MEN who don’t indulge.

Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called “weird” for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.

The researchers examined the byproducts of metabolism in their blood and urine and found that a dozen substances were significantly different between the two groups. For example, the amino acid glycine was higher in chocolate lovers, while taurine (an active ingredient in energy drinks) was higher in people who didn’t eat chocolate. Also chocolate lovers had lower levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL.

That does it. I’m having red wine and Cadbury for dinner tonight. What to do? It’s the healthy choice.

The levels of several of the specific substances that were different in the two groups are known to be linked to different types of bacteria, Kochhar said.

They’re still not sure if it’s the bacteria that wants to be startin something, gots to be startin something or if diet affected the bacteria blah blah chicken egg.

How gut bacteria affect people is a hot field of scientific research.

I think my tummy is always warm, but that is based on highly unscientific rubbing of it, while attempting to pat my head simultaneously.

Wots this? A reference to my bellowed alma mater? GO AGS!

…Kochhar’s research makes so much sense that people should have thought of it earlier, said J. Bruce German, professor of food chemistry at the University of California Davis. While five outside scientists thought the study was intriguing, Dr. Richard Bergman at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, had concerns about the accuracy of the initial division of the men into groups that wanted chocolate or were indifferent to it.

What matters to Kochhar is where the research could lead.

Kochhar said the relationship between food, people and what grows in their gut is important for the future: “If we understand the relationship, then we can find ways to nudge it in the right direction.”

You can nudge me right in the direction of some hot cocoa on this oddly autumnal day; apparently we had a 40 degree temperature drop in a scant 48 hours, at some point this week (Can I get a hearty WTF? Or was this orchestrated in conjunction with the Nobel committee, to make us all think of global warming while Gore gets his props?).

I’m so not used to being cold. Right now, I’m wearing a turtleneck sweater with a thinsulate vest over it; I was wearing a sleeveless dress on Monday! Also, I am taking little breaks while I type this to nibble on a chocolate chip cookie. Apposite, nah? Admit it, you total want one, too. Awww, don’t feel bad…it’s not your fault. Thanks to Sunil, now you are aware of your status as an innocent captive to your gutsy bacteria. Blame the glycine— it gots to be startin’ something!

anna at 05:00 PM in Dance, Food, Health and Medicine, Humor, Science · 28 comment(s) · Direct link

September 06, 2007

A Potpourri of NPR

Not that you care, but I almost named this post A Salmagundi of NPR. However, I’m smitten with the way some Desis say “potpourri”, so I couldn’t resist the allure of that word. Oh, how do they say it? Like so: pottu-puri

None of these stories feels substantial enough to merit their own post; what does feel significant is perking up FOUR times during Morning Edition, because there are four different sepia-colored stories! That’s almost a fifth of the program! Here is what I (and undoubtedly fellow NPR-phile-Abhi, as well) heard:

1) Moray Eels are toothy!

Scientists in California have reported that Moray eels have a set of teeth within a second set of jaws, called the pharyngeal jaws, that help them capture their prey.

Once the Moray eel secures its prey with its first set of jaws, the pharyngeal jaws reach up from its throat, grabbing and pulling the prey down through its esophagus.

One of you already has an itchy-trigger-comment finger, I know it, so stop it— the brown angle is a-comin’…

Rita Mehta is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Davis who studies the evolution of diversity in eel feeding behavior.

Like, whoa. Not only is there a female scientist to celebrate, this has to do with my alma mater as well! w00t Davis! We study Moray Eels!

“What we discovered is that the pharyngeal jaws of Moray’s have the greatest mobility of any pharyngeal jaws ever documented,” Mehta says.

There’s this legendary tri-Delt who might have something to say about that finding, but whatevs. Listen to all this and more (though it won’t include anything about the storied, jaw-less one), for yourself, here.

2) This is a story that some of you have submitted to the news tab:

Air travel has been hellish this summer. And Nepal Airlines was no exception. Technical problems with one of its two Boeing 757 planes has meant weeks of delays. Finally, the state-run airline turned to the gods for help. It sacrificed two goats to the Hindu Sky god Akash Bhairab in front of the plane, and afterward the 757 made a successful run from Kathmandu to Hong Kong.

I just quoted the entire piece, but you may find it here if you are being the desiring.

3) Turnabout is a great play for Wipro:

Indian software firm Wipro plans to open a big software design center in Atlanta. The Bangalore, India-based firm expects to hire around 500 computer programmers in the next three years. It’s a curious turnabout from the much more familiar story: a U.S. software company creating jobs in India. [NPR]

I’ve heard various versions of this news story, but until today, it didn’t occur to me that one of the biggest reasons for this is “National Security”. Now Wipro can work on U.S. Defense contracts, thanks to Amreekan yengineers who are also familiar with this country’s mores. Why that matters in a cube farm, you will have to tell me.

Finally, 4). Another recycled blurb about the “unpredictable” happening in the world of business. First, Wipro comes to America, now B-school grads are going to Infy in India! Like you didn’t already know that…

Hundreds of recent business school graduates from U.S. colleges are taking jobs in Indian companies. India’s second biggest tech company, Infosys, just hired 300 Americans to work in its Bangalore office. They say it’s more exciting than an entry level job in the slower-growing U.S. economy. And with a much lower cost of living in India, it doesn’t matter if they only earn a fraction of what they would make working for a tech company in Silicon Valley. [NPR]

Am I the only one who is starting to feel like they’re missing out, by being here instead of yonder and by yonder, I mean the country my parents left, because they thought America was all that and a bag of jackfruit chips? Anyone? Buehler?

anna at 06:40 PM in Animals, Business, News, Science, Tech · 68 comment(s) · Direct link

August 14, 2007

It All Came from India, Ch LVIX

So here’s another piece of ammo for your “everything came from India” uncle -

Newton’s Infinite Series: We heard it in Malayalam first

NEW DELHI: A group of Malayali scholars had predated a ground-breaking Newton ‘discovery’ by over 250 years, according a research paper published on Monday.

The team of researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal that the ‘Kerala School’ identified the ‘infinite series’- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350.

And thus, by discovering one of the building blocks of calculus first, Mallu’s used the knowledge to, uh, well, uh, I’m not quite sure…. The researchers were quick to note that this discovery shouldn’t be used to reduce Newton’s stature but instead, add some brown names to the pantheon of genius -

[Dr George Gheverghese Joseph, one of the researcher and Honorary Reader, School of Education at The University of Manchester said,] “The brilliance of Newton’s work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished - especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus.

“But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava, Valloppillil, and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they discovered the other great component of calculus- infinite series.

However, Dr. Joseph does note that perhaps, just perhaps, Newton wasn’t inspired by the proverbial apple at all -

…there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.

That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself.

Let the attribution games begin! (Hat tip - Venkat & Sindhya)

vinod at 04:19 PM in History, Science, Short · 24 comment(s) · Direct link

June 08, 2007

The milk of human kindness does not curdle

Rani woke up one morning in Singapore with an idea - why not make paneer from the left over breast milk that was sitting in her freezer? [via BoingBoing] No, I’m not kidding:

Basically this is human cheese. Why would I do that?

Well, basically, there are about twenty bags (each 150ml) of frozen breastmilk in the fridge, and they have passed their three months drinkability period, which means I would not be able to donate the milk like I did before. But the milk is still less than six month old, which is the actual expiry date.

So what do I do with it? I could make cream soup like I did several months ago. But I really wanted to try something different, and making Breast Milk Paneer sounds really exciting. [Link]

I was a bit weirded out when I started reading this. Human milk is clearly a bodily fluid, it can even transmit HIV. Emotionally, it feels very different from cows milk, even though both come from teats so that mammals can feed their young.

I mean, when you’re eating brie you don’t say “I’m having moldy bovine bodily secretions” because you don’t deconstruct cheese. Human breast milk cheese, on the other hand, lays the process bare.

I also was uneasy at the idea that she was wasting something that precious, but interestingly enough, her motive for making the paneer was to avoid wasting any of the precious fluids. Given that she had frozen breast milk that she couldn’t use and couldn’t donate, wouldn’t it be less wasteful to eat it than throw it out? My curiousity overpowered my discomfort and I kept reading.

You know how to make paneer, right? You boil the milk and then you add something acidic to start the curdling process:

Just like when I’m making paneer, I added lemon juice at just the right time when it boils. Then I stirred the milk, waiting until curdle was formed. I waited, and waited, and waited, no curdle was formed although the milk turned a bit more yellow. So I added more lemon juice, this is what I usually do if the cow milk does not curdle. I added and added and added more lemon juice until I ran out of lemons, and I stirred and stirred and stirred, but the milk stood still.

Out of desperation because I ran out of lemons, I pour in a dash of vinegar too. Still, no change to the milk. I became really desperate and pour the whole bottle of vinegar! Nothing happened. [Link]

At this point Rani had a big smelly mess which she couldn’t salvage, and in fact had to dump. There’s a reason why she failed, and why nobody else has made human milk cheese before … it’s not possible!

It turned out that breast milk can not curdle, because the protein content is lower, and because the protein in breast milk is more easily digested compared to cow’s milk. That’s why, unmodified cow’s milk is unsuitable for babies. And on the other hand, adding acid to further ‘digest’ breastmilk protein won’t curdle the milk.

So, the moral of the story, YOU CANNOT MAKE CHEESE OUT OF BREASTMILK. Don’t even try. [Link]

You’ve just read a cheesy post about mammaries - while it has kept you abreast of science, don’t you feel like a boob ?

ennis at 04:06 PM in Food, Science · 57 comment(s) · Direct link

May 30, 2007

How to Save A Life

A tragedy, in five lines;

This is Vinay and his wife Rashmi.

They were married in 2005.

He was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 2006.

He is 28.

He needs a bone marrow transplant, in the next six weeks.

If you aren’t already part of the National Marrow Donor Program registry, please consider what you would be going through if this were your little brother, childhood friend or husband. Wouldn’t you want as many desis as possible to be in the database? Vinay’s greatest hope lies with someone like him, but the number of us who are registered is so low, it’s pathetic.

All it takes is a few minutes of your time. A swabbed cheek. And maybe, with that selfless gesture, you increase the chances that this person who probably has so much in common with you goes on to live the life we all deserve.

This is what Vinay’s parents have to say:

We cannot express in words what this is like. All we can do is implore you to close your eyes for a moment, and imagine that this is your son, your brother, your best friend. We are guessing you would move heaven and earth to help save his life…

Vinay is the world to us - he is warm, funny, loving. We have watched him grow from a little baby, to a young boy playing sports, to a fine young man determined to be a doctor, to a man marrying the girl of his dreams. Please help us help our son have a chance to live - to be with his wife, with us, and his friends. [Hema and Partha]

Drives are planned in Fremont, Cerritos, Anaheim and Livermore; additional information may be found here. Speaking of additional information, when I numbly surfed through Vinay’s website, the following three points made me cringe:

When a Caucasian is looking for a match they find 15 matches on an average where as opposed to an Indian they might find one match or none.

This can happen to anyone at any age and god forbid if you get into similar situation then this will be the only registry that will come to rescue.

There is no such registry in India and when an Indian kid is looking for a marrow match this registry is the only resort. [HelpVinay.org]

We’ve written about others whose lives were similarly threatened by our failure to represent in such a vital way. What would it take to move you to get involved? Would it matter if I told you that like every 8th desi, he’s from Fremont?

That he went to Ardenwood and eventually UCB (though not this UCB)?

That his favorite books were The Hobbit and Midnight’s Children?

That he liked The Godfather (but only 1 and 2), Garden State and Million Dollar Baby?

That he’s Seshu “Tiffinbox” Badrinath’s cousin?

He listens to Coltrane, Miles Davis and 2pac?

And yes, like every male I know, he likes to watch Scrubs and Sportscenter?

Do you identify with him yet? I pray you do. Because one of you could be his match and that would be the sweetest thing. My Uncle died of Leukemia and I’m sure each of us knows someone else who has been similarly affected.

Many of you possibly know Vinay, his wife Rashmi or his brother Bharath; I hope that even if you don’t, you’ll do the right thing and offer the tiniest part of yourself up. I dream of a day when we don’t have to forward these heartbreaking stories via GMail, publicize links to websites set up for the most tragic of reasons, pass around PDF flyers or beseech each other to get registered. It shouldn’t be this hard to save a life.

anna at 07:15 PM in Health and Medicine, Issues, Science · 84 comment(s) · 2 reader(s) linked · Direct link

May 22, 2007

The lost continent of Kumari Kandam

I’m sure the science-fiction geeks amongst y’all know about the lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu. These are the “missing continents” that were submerged in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans respectively.

[The story of Atlantis has its origin in the Platonic dialogues, while Lemuria was hypothesized in the late 1800s as an explanation for why there were Lemurs in both Madagascar and India but not in Africa or the Middle East. Both are now beloved of mystics and kooks. Nobody really cares about Mu, although it is sometimes confused with Lemuria.]

However, I’ll bet you’ve never heard of the Tamil analogue, the lost continent of Kumari Kandam! Proponents say Kumari Kandam is Lemuria, different names for the same continent that once covered most of the Indian ocean:

Sri Lanka together with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were a part of this continent. Many islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are remnants of this continent that in ancient time covered the whole area of today’s ocean. [Link]

The lost continent of Kumari Kandam

It turns out that everything does not actually come from India, it comes from Kumari Kandam. And by everything, I do mean everything.

“Homo Dravida” first evolved in Kumari Kandam; it is the cradle of civilization; the birthplace of all languages in general and of the Tamil language in particular. This is where the first and second great ages (Sangams?) of the Tamils happened, not in India, but in the true Dravidian homeland, further south.

R. Mathivanan, then Chief Editor of the Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project of the Government of Tamilnadu, in 1991 … [produced] the following timeline …:

ca. 200,000 to 50,000 BC: evolution of “the Tamilian or Homo Dravida”,
ca. 200,000 to 100,000 BC: beginnings of the Tamil language
50,000 BC: Kumari Kandam civilisation
20,000 BC: A lost Tamil culture of the Easter Island which had an advanced civilisation
16,000 BC: Lemuria submerged
6087 BC: Second Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
3031 BC: A Chera prince in his wanderings in the Solomon Island saw wild sugarcane and started cultivation in Tamilnadu.
1780 BC: The Third Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
7th century BC: Tolkappiyam (the earliest extant Tamil grammar)… [Link]

The continent was destroyed by three large floods which wiped out most of the golden civilization with it:

It is believed by some Tamil scholars that the first academy existed at southern Maturai and was terminated by sea devouring the city. The Pandya king established a second academy at Kapadapuram. Again, the sea devoured the city. The Pandya king established the third academy in present Maturai (far away from sea coast). [Link]

What was left was later wiped out by the Aryan invasion that corrupted the remnants of the once great Tamil civilizations:

“After imbibing the mania of the Aryan culture of destroying the enemy and their habitats, the Dravidians developed a new avenging and destructive war approach. This induced them to ruin the forts and cities of their own brethren out of enmity”. [Link]

I’m looking forward to seeing a version of the comic book Lemuria entirely settled by Tamils. When Aquaman or Namor come to visit, they can serve them Dosa/Idli .

ennis at 12:22 PM in History, Humor, Science, Travel · 119 comment(s) · Direct link

May 03, 2007

Miracle of science or antiseptic travesty?

Growing up, I never understood why some people found it necessary to use a bagel guillotine. It’s easy enough to cut a bagel with a sharp knife, and it avoids squishing the bagel the way a slicer does. Part of my rejection of the tool is probably New York Jewish snobbishness (coupled with fear that if I ever embraced such a shanda, I’d be required to return my virtual circumcision and fountain pen). But it also comes from a sense that using such tools makes the whole process of bagel eating less sensual and more antiseptic.

As such, I’m agnostic about the Oxo mango slicer until I actually get a chance to try one out for myself. On the one hand, if you watch the video below, you’ll see that it makes very quick work of a mango, turning it into two halves and the seed in no time flat. And honestly, I’m better at and more interested in mango eating than mango cutting.

On the other, I wonder if the tool exists because of the big deal that non-desis make about how messy mango eating is. I remember once somebody on the radio solemnly intoned “mangos should only be eaten naked and in the ocean.” My mother scoffed and replied “White people don’t know how to eat mangos, otherwise they wouldn’t make such a mess.” Sometimes I lose the fruit under all of the “exotic” subtext going on and I don’t know how much of this machine’s appeal lies in this myth of the messy, untamable mango.

Will any of you admit to having used a tool to (ahem) split the mango? If so, did it increase or decrease your pleasure?

Related Posts: Mmmmmmmangoes!, Flesh for Fantasy

ennis at 12:46 AM in Food, Science · 51 comment(s) · Direct link

April 25, 2007

Converts not invaders

A soon to be published genetic study of the population of Northern India is sure to get the attention of some right wing groups who like to come up with their own alternate “theories” with regards to the history of Hindu/Muslim interaction on the sub-continent.

Scientists have confirmed what historians have known.

Genetic studies have suggested that Muslims in northern India are mostly descendants of local people who embraced Islam rather than repositories of foreign DNA deposited by waves of invaders.

The studies by scientists in India, Spain and the US indicate that while the Shias and the Sunnis in Uttar Pradesh are mostly descendants of converts, the former have some elements of paternal foreign ancestry…

“In the mtDNA, we do not see discrete signals from outside India,” Rene J. Herrera, a biologist at Florida International University in the US and one of the collaborators, said. “Thus, both are, for the most part, descendants from local caste groups,” he told The Telegraph.

However, the Shias do show some signatures of foreign DNA from southwest Asia and North Africa in the Y chromosome, Herrera said. [Link]

Within the last decade it has continued to amaze me how some strands of DNA can help corroborate or disprove decades worth of historical investigation. As the techniques become quicker and cheaper I’m sure we’ll be unlocking all kinds of secrets about the movements of humans and whether they mated with each other or killed each other.

Principal component analysis (PCA), a statistical tool that separates individuals on the basis of differences in their properties was employed to place each social group on a plot. According to this plot Shias and Sunnis are much closer to Brahmins, Bhargavas, and tribals from Karnataka than people from UAE, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and or Central Asian countries. PCA generated a plot that showed three clear clusters- Souther Arabian Peninsula, North East African population in upper left quadrant, East Central Asian and Middle Eastern group in the lower right hand corner, and all Indian groups can be found closer to each other to the right. [Link]

A while back I blogged about this National Geographic Project that is looking to systematically trace the movement of humanity’s genes. Have any readers swabbed their cheeks and sent in their DNA yet? Want to share your results?

abhi at 10:00 PM in News, Religion, Science · 93 comment(s) · Direct link

Can’t buy me love?

All over the greater diaspora, Aunties bemoan that desi children are picky. How will they ever be satisfied? How will they ever settle down and start popping out the requisite grandkids?

Aunties can sleep better at night now that SCIENCE is on the job. Examining peoples’ behavior in online dating settings (which is equivalent to looking at biodata), they’ve noticed a few clear patterns:

Men are easy - they are generally interested in hotness above all.

Women are choosier, but it turns out their preferences are fungible. This is good news for aunties because it gives them a metric with which to translate different suitor’s attributes to a common scale, allowing them to rank apples and oranges. They can tell, for example, whether an average woman (in this study) is likely to prefer the not quite as handsome, shorter i-banker or the more gorgeous, slightly taller, high school English teacher.

What is this common scale? Money. According to these researchers, women will forgive men’s flaws if (gasp) they earn more.

Consider looks. A guy can compensate for ordinary looks with more moola, which tells us what he has to reveal in his biodata if he wants to be a playa:

Suppose you’re an ordinary-looking guy whose online picture is ranked around the median in attractiveness… And suppose you’d like to be as successful with women as a guy whose picture is ranked in the top tenth. Then you’d need to make $143,000 more than him. If your picture is ranked in the bottom tenth, you’d need to make $186,000 more than him. [Link]

Cash also acts like elevator shoes for our shorter brothers:

… a 5-foot-0 guy would need to make $325,000 more than a 6-foot-0 man to be as successful in the online dating market. [Link]

Race matters too. Generally speaking, men were more willing to date somebody of a different race than women, with the exception of Asian women who preferred White men over others. (3/4ths of Asian-white marriages have Asian women and white men [Link] )

For equal success with an Asian woman, an African-American needs no additional income; a white man needs $24,000 less than average; a Hispanic man needs $28,000 more than average. [Link]

It’s not clear whether brown women act like their other Asian counterparts - any thoughts?

Lastly, if you want to get around these sorts of hurdles, skip the biodata and move straight to cha:

… people who are terribly picky in choosing partners online will relax their standards if they spend just three or minutes talking to someone at a speed dating session. [Link]

There you go. Now that science has helped Aunties, maybe it will come up for a way for the rest of us to be able to evade them. Oh yeah, it’s called caller ID

In case you’re interested, here is the academic paper in question.

Related posts: Speed kills (part 1), Speed kills (part 2)

ennis at 01:05 PM in Humor, Issues, Kids, Science · 577 comment(s) · Direct link

April 03, 2007

The Probability of this Uncle Being Awesome is High.

An NYU Professor of graduate and undergraduate courses in statistics, probability and analysis at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Studies has won the Abel Prize for 2007. It’s kinda like the Nobel, but for maths and he’s the first desi to win it. In other words, this is a big deal (thanks, karmakong and Sanjiv).

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2007 to Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York. He receives the prize “for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviation”. [link]

As for the caption under the good Professor’s picture: don’t you ever see an Uncle or an Auntie and just want to hug them? Especially if they seem to be radiating wisdom and kindness? Ah, I’ve been taking what Saheli is on, so pardon us as we skip through flower-laden fields, seeing the absolute best in people. He just seems like the kind of Uncle I’d love to have (as opposed to most of my Uncles, whom I have to love). Well, that and my devotion to people who are fantastic at math is probably responsible for some of this effusiveness. :D

Back on topic:

Probability theory is the mathematical tool for analyzing situations governed by chance. The theory of large deviations studies the occurrence of rare events. This subject has concrete applications to fields as diverse as physics, biology, economics, statistics, computer science, and engineering. [link]

Unfortunately, there is a typo in the above definition, “my love life” should immediately follow “computer science”.

Varadhan’s theory of large deviations provides a unifying and efficient method for clarifying a rich variety of phenomena arising in complex stochastic systems, in fields as diverse as quantum field theory, statistical physics, population dynamics, econometrics and finance, and traffic engineering. It has also greatly expanded our ability to use computers to simulate and analyze the occurrence of rare events. Over the last four decades, the theory of large deviations has become a cornerstone of modern probability, both pure and applied.[link]

For more information on this dazzling desi, peep his biography here. Next up at SM: why Anna is the only South Indian person ever to have never taken calculus. Cause for shame or America is to blame? You decide.

anna at 07:30 PM in Humor, News, Science · 53 comment(s) · Direct link

February 21, 2007

The Science of TWA

Absolutely zero Desi Angle (TM) here per se, but a whole heap o’ relevance for anyone who frequents the comment threads here (and if you are one of those happy souls who only reads Sepia Mutiny for the blog entries, feel free to skip this one, as I’m about to get a little parochial). But I noticed that today one of the most-emailed articles from the New York Times is an essay by Daniel Goleman on the scientific explanation for why people say, uh, intemperate things online that they would rarely say — or at least say the same way — in person. So if you’ve ever wondered what it is that causes folks on discussion boards to insult each other, call each other idiots or worse, flagrantly mis-characterize each other’s points in order to drive home some strident and ill-conceived argument of their own, and generally stink up the joint — and if you’ve perhaps caught yourself doing so, whether here on in any other online exchange — you need look no further for your answer than your orbitofrontal cortex. (I trust that one of y’all medical/scientific macacas can explain the details to the rest of us, or indeed, critique the article — politely, natch.)

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. (…)

Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

But wait, what about :) and :P and ;) ???

True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.

And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail.

TWA - Typing While Agitated. Never happens to me. No, sir. I keeps cool calm and collected. But just in case…

The Times article is really about person-to-person email, although many of the points it raises extend to other kinds of online communications. However probably the more troublesome kind of social interaction deficiency that you find in online communities is the frequency of rude or thoughtless communications that are, in fact, entirely deliberate and don’t result in regret on the part of the person who issued them. This got me to wonder what work has been done on the psychology of trolling. It’s a topic that I am sure has been endlessly brought up over the years since the Internet became generalized, but this article from last year in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz seems to sum things up nicely:

“When I speak with someone and see his eyes, it is easier for me to understand that he is someone like me, with needs,” explains Weinberg. “On the Internet, you do not truly realize that opposite you is another person with his own world. The other has become text, making it hard to imagine there is a person behind the text, and not to turn him into an object. Furthermore, we extrapolate our world onto the other, attributing to him intentions he never had.”

Houminer says that many of the surfers (nicknamed “trolls”), who flood forum discussions with provocative and aggressive messages, are actually acting out their frustration at the Internet’s inability to meet their emotional needs.

“Silence and disregard are the most common forms of harm on the Internet,” continues Houminer. “A lack of response is perceived as an active refraining from supplying a need, and results in the creation of vengeful energies. A troll’s subtexts always contain a claim of injustice by someone.”

I wonder about the claim that follows, though. It seems to paint a lot of different kinds of trolling behavior with a possibly over-broad brush:

Psychologist Udi Bonstein notes that studies conducted in the U.S. show that, in many cases, people who speak aggressively online are themselves victims of aggression, on the Internet or in real life.

“This is evident in talkbacks,” says Bonstein. “People who write invectives and curses online are apparently people who do not feel strong in their lives.”

But I think many of us would agree with this bottom-line:

What is the solution? Houminer believes that an essential step in creating less hurtful relationships online is the removal of the anonymity barrier. “We need to examine whether the freedom we gain from anonymity is worth the price,” says Houminer. “When a person is only a user name, he is not much of a person.”

That rings true to me. I think I’m a lot more likely to take seriously an aggressive or possibly insulting statement when it comes from someone who, at a minimum, makes available a way of communicating with them personally (e.g., supplies an email address and responds to messages sent there). It’s much easier to give someone the benefit of the doubt when you know there exists an option for talking to them outside the performance-space of the public forum. Funkadelic (and later, EPMD) used to say, “Let’s take it to the stage, sucka!” Yet the bigger the stage and the more numerous the players who populate it, the more important it is to maintain escape hatches, back channels, side exchanges, and always, the liberating possibility of withdrawal.

siddhartha at 09:41 AM in Blog, Health and Medicine, Science · 40 comment(s) · Direct link

February 14, 2007

White Parents, Indian Baby

Bizarre and strange were the words that came to mind when I first started reading this article…

Wendy Duncan and her husband Brian are white. Nineteen months ago, the Lincolnshire housewife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy, Indian daughter. Freya, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, is not a medical miracle after a long and fruitless quest through IVF and adoption, but the product of a booming industry in India that is offering embryos for adoption.

Am I missing something? Why would you want to adopt an Indian embryo when there’s plenty of Indian children to adopt?

Embryo adoption was the culmination of an 18-year journey for the Duncans during which their attempts to become parents were frustrated by nature and bureaucracy. Being white and already having a mixed-race child (from Mrs Duncan’s previous relationship) meant that they failed the criteria for a normal adoption.

Seriously? Having a mixed-race child limits your chances of adopting in the UK? That’s racist!

IVF was unsuccessful and expensive for a family relying on Mr Duncan’s income as a lorry driver. The older Mrs Duncan got, the less the chance there was of any fertility treatment working. Their options were running out until they stumbled upon a website for the Bombay clinic. It was an easy choice.

Their choice has already garnered some criticism:

Social workers in India fear that poor women are being exploited for “rent-a-womb” services such as surrogacy, banned for commercial gain in countries such as Australia and China.

British health professionals, meanwhile, fear a rise in multiple births and an added strain on the Health Service. In Britain, embryo implants are limited to two at a time but in India, where there is no law governing fertility aid, doctors can insert up to five.

Duncan, however, is undeterred:

Their experience was so successful that they are returning next week to the Bombay fertility clinic that produced Freya, to try for a second child. Mrs Duncan, 41, plans to undergo the same procedure, which involves the implantation of up to five fertilised embryos into her womb. If successful, she will return to England after a short holiday knowing she is pregnant and give birth to another Indian baby.

Finally, this comment in the discussion section made me chuckle:

Not a bad idea. All of Western World can have brown and smart computer techies.

Thoughts, anyone? In case you’re wondering, I don’t have a serious problem with it. However, I don’t know if I’d feel the same way if the Duncans were not from the UK — where brown people are much more visible — but from some small town in Iowa. Then I might have some issues.

naina at 12:49 PM in Science · 85 comment(s) · Direct link

January 28, 2007

Vultures At Risk

I’ve had a warm feeling toward vultures, buzzards and other scavenger birds since the time I attended a wedding in Burkina Faso, the arid, land-locked West African country, back in the early 1990s, and looked up to see clusters of big, bad-lookin’ buzzards hanging around on trees, waiting for the event to be over so they could swoop in for the remnants of the dozen or so sheep that had been slaughtered for the occasion. It was one of those “hey, what’s up?” moments humans can have with animals, when you realize that we’re all in this together, that each creature serves its function, and that the social and cultural practices of one species have significant effects on the well-being of others. I want to say it “humanized” the buzzards for me, which obviously isn’t the right word, but it demystified them and made me appreciate them. Nuff respect to the scavenger birds.

Today tipster Sakshi brings to our attention a fascinating article from Smithsonian magazine on vultures in the subcontinent, which not only offers an interesting glimpse into the lives of these birds but, more importantly, shows how closely we and they — and other species — lead interwoven lives and how fragile that balance can be. It turns out that scientists, picking up on the observations of cattle herders and others in the field, have noticed a substantial decline in the long-billed vulture population in the subcontinent for some years. The disappearance of the lead scavenger has resulted in the accumulation of un-scavenged cattle corpses as well as the growth of packs of feral dogs, in ways that you can read about in the article. It has also placed a new burden on secondary scavenger birds that used to only come in after the larger, more powerful vultures. Those birds in turn have become vulnerable to whatever it is that has decimated the vultures:

… across the subcontinent all three species of Gyps vultures are disappearing. Dead livestock lie uneaten and rotting. These carcasses are fueling a population boom in feral dogs and defeating the government’s efforts to combat rabies. Vultures have become so rare that the Parsi in Mumbai have resorted to placing solar reflectors atop the Towers of Silence to hasten the decomposition of bodies. International conservation groups now advocate the capture of long-billed, white-backed and slender-billed vultures for conservation breeding.

So what’s the cause? After initially speculating it was some kind of virus, scientists now have strong proof that it’s a particular medication that herders give cattle that is toxic to the vultures. This brings into the story the Indian pharmaceutical industry and its history of reverse-engineering cheap drugs, which arguably has done a lot to save human lives but has also resulted in a proliferation of drugs on the market without necessarily sufficient regulation or understanding of appropriate use. The chain of effects goes on:

Public health officials say it’s likely that India’s rat population is growing too, sharing the bounty of abandoned carcasses with feral dogs, and raising the probability of outbreaks of bubonic plague and other rodent-transmitted human diseases. Livestock diseases may increase too. Vultures are resistant to anthrax, brucellosis and other livestock diseases, and helped control them by consuming contaminated flesh, thus removing reservoirs of infectious organisms. Some municipalities are now resorting to burying or burning carcasses, expending precious land, firewood and fossil fuels to replace what Rahmani calls “the beautiful system nature gave us.”

In all, this is a powerful story of interdependence and one that, just possibly, might have a happy ending, as the governments of India, Pakistan and Nepal have grown aware of the problem and taken remedial action. Read the article for that story as well as a rich perspective on the interconnectedness of all things, one that might, at a minimum, help us step back from some of the ridiculous disputes over trivial matters that we humans, including those of us who hang out at this site, sometimes so enjoy wallowing in. There’s also a nice sidebar interview with the article’s writer, Susan McGrath:

Well, I knew that my trip to India was going to be different than most people’s trips to India. All my friends were saying, “Oh you’re so lucky! The crafts! The clothing! The wildlife!” And I spent half my time in India in carcass dumps.

Glad you did, Ms. McGrath. And to the vultures: keep ya ugly heads up, my avian brothers and sisters, stay strong!

siddhartha at 11:40 AM in Animals, Environment, Science · 22 comment(s) · Direct link

September 08, 2006

Sexy Desi Geologists (Reprise)

Someone want to let me in on the secret that is South Carolina? It was the only state of the union that, until recently, has a capital forgotten on almost every geography bee and prompted one to think of secession and stars-and-bars. Suddenly, everyone from my boss to a close friend is interested in purchasing property there, and this patch of Southern Appalachia is turning into quite the desi magnet. Not only has a doctor friend set up shop in Columbia, but has invited my very eager brother to do so as well.

I considered it all a coincidence until the discovery that famous geophysicist, Pradeep Talwani, is a professor at the University of South Carolina and director of the South Carolina Seismic Network, and Vijay Vulava has joined the faculty of the College of Charleston as an environmental geochemist. Hmmmm … the thot plickens.

Hark, what light through yonder passport photo breaks? Move over, Michael Manga - there’s a new sexy desi geologist in town. Unfortunately, like Michael, Vijay is married. His wife, Sirisha Vadlamudi, is an electrical engineer who specializes in virtual and augmented reality (sound familiar?).

Not to be excluded from the running is UTIG’s Abhijit Gangopadhyay.

While you investigate the South Carolina riddle, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for more kannu-candy at the upcoming SEG conference in New Orleans.

maitri at 12:37 PM in Science · 57 comment(s) · Direct link

August 10, 2006

Liquid explosives

I’ve decided to split the speculation concerning the science that may have been involved in the plot into a separate post since it is getting long.

Some experts think that the bomb might have involved TATP, the same compound used by the 7/7 bombers.

While there are several liquid explosives that could be used to bring down an aircraft, chemists believe it is more likely that terrorists planned to mix liquid materials that are not themselves explosive but can be combined into a bomb. The liquid explosives that are sufficiently destructive in their own right to blow up a plane are generally too unstable or too easily detected to be readily smuggled aboard.

A more subtle approach would be to combine two or more liquids that are stable by themselves, but which form a powerful explosive when mixed together. A prime candidate for this would be triacetone triperoxide (TATP), the explosive used by the July 7 bombers. Its two raw ingredients are both liquids, which could potentially be carried on board in sufficient quantities in containers such as bottles of shampoo or contact lens solution.

These could then be mixed in a toilet to make TATP, which is a crystalline white powder. The problem here is that the solid has to be dried before it becomes a reliable explosive. It can also be difficult to detonate, as attested by the failure of the attempted suicide attacks on London on July 21 last year.

The problems of assembling and then detonating an improvised bomb of this sort in an airline toilet could explain why the terrorists targeted so many aircraft. It is likely that many of the devices would have failed, so attacking 10 flights would have greatly increased the chances of blowing up one or two. [Link]

There have also been at least two prior terrorist attacks planes using liquid explosives, KAL 858 and PAL 434. [Details follow after the fold]

In 1987, KAL Flight 858 was destroyed using the explosives C-4 and PLX, the latter of which is a liquid:

PLX, or Picatinny Liquid Explosive, is a liquid binary explosive, a mixture of 95% nitromethane and 5% ethylene diamine. It is a slightly yellowish liquid. It was developed at Picatinny Arsenal during World War II for cleaning of minefields. It was to be mixed just before use. PLX was one of the explosives used to down Korean Air Flight 858. [Link]

More recent was the bomb that killed one passenger on board PAL Flight 434 in 1994 [Thanks Sage]:

On December 11, 1994, Flight 434 was on its second leg from Cebu to Tokyo when a bomb exploded, killing one passenger. Authorities later discovered that a passenger on the aircraft’s preceding leg was Ramzi Yousef, who United States authorities have branded a master Al-Qaida bomber and terrorist. He was later convicted of the first World Trade Center bombing, for which he was sentanced to death by lethal injection. Yousef boarded the flight under an assumed name…

US prosecutors said the device was a “Mark II” “microbomb” constructed using Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of Operation Bojinka of which this was a test. On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January of 1995. The bomb was designed to slip through airport security checks undetected. The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid. The wires he used were hidden in the heel of his shoe. At that time, metal detectors used in airports did not go down far enough to detect anything there. [Link]

Operation Bojinka was very similar to the plot that the British claim to have uncovered:

Starting on January 21, 1995 and ending on January 22, 1995, they would set the bombs on 11 United States-bound airliners that had stopovers all around East Asia and Southeast Asia… The bombs would have been timed before the operatives stepped off the planes. The aircraft would have blown up over the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea almost simultaneously. If this plan worked, several thousand would have perished, and air travel would have been shut down worldwide for days, if not weeks. The U.S. government estimated the prospective death toll to be about 4,000 if the plot had been executed. [Link]

Right now, the only method of detection of any potential explosive precursors seems to be the old fashioned taste test:

Liquids were banned, except for baby formula and prescription medicines, and travellers were being told to be prepared to show that these were harmless by tasting them at the security gate. [Link]

ennis at 11:50 AM in Science · 12 comment(s) · Direct link

July 31, 2006

More Tragedy For The "Elephant" Men

On March 16th of this year, Abhi wrote about a first-in-man trial in the UK which went horribly awry for six volunteers who experienced heart, kidney and liver failure after they were given an experimental drug made by German firm TeGenero, called TGN 1412:

It is an anti-inflammatory agent makers hoped would become a lucrative treatment for rheumatism, leukaemia and multiple sclerosis.[link]

When we first posted about this nightmarish story, Doctors said they were “in the dark” and that they did not know exactly how these human guinea pigs would be affected. Unfortunately, now it seems we have an answer—and it is tragic:

Victims of the disastrous “Elephant Man” drugs trial have been told they face contracting cancer and other fatal diseases as a result of being poisoned in the bungled tests. [link]

Nav Modi, 24, whose bloated face and swollen chest led to the nickname “Elephant Man”, said he did not know how long he would live.[link]

“It’s a really bizarre feeling when you discover you might be dead in a couple of years or even in a couple of months,” he said. “I feel like I’ve given away my life for £2,000.”[link]

It seems that not only were the volunteers (quite predictably) assured before participating in the trial that they would not suffer any life-threatening illnesses, they were told that after it was obvious that the test results were disastrous, too.

Four months later he still suffers from occasional lapses of memory, severe headaches, back pain and diarrhoea. (Modi) and the others had been led to believe that while their symptoms might persist for a while, their long-term future was not at risk.[link

Wrong. So very wrong.

One of the six victims was told last week he is already showing “definite early signs” of lymphatic cancer.

He and three others have also been warned that they are “highly likely” to develop incurable auto-immune diseases.[link]

anna at 08:24 PM in Health and Medicine, News, Science · 5 comment(s) · Direct link

June 23, 2006

It Sounds Like Bologna To Me, But...

Usually, an article related to the process of sex selection would sadden me because I think the brown preference for boys blows, but this one which was submitted to our news tab (Thanks, Premii!) had me laughing, because I immediately thought of celebrity evidence to back it up. Apparently, it is possible to choose whether you are going to have a male or female…calf:

Want to have a baby boy? Tuck into the burgers, fries and ice cream. Want a girl? Then go on a diet and lose some weight.

It works for cows, according to John Roche, a scientist at New Zealand’s dairy research organisation Dexcel. “And we would expect what holds true for one mammal will hold true across the board,” he said.

Also, if it can be applied to celebrities, it must be true. Angelina stayed rather sleek while incubating the most attractive celebrity baby possible, to the point where useless weeklies which cost $1.99 and all run the same story (though with slightly different covers) speculated that based on the lack of fat around her elbows, the lippy star was way too skinny. (I kid you not. I read this while waiting for my train.) Angelina, the magazines screeched, was “dangerously thin”. She had a girl, in case you haven’t had access to television, radio, newspapers, the internet, carrier pigeons, flaming arrows etc.

Meanwhile, Kate Hudson put on an amount which was almost equivalent to my mother’s entire body weight pre-pregnancy-with me; Hudson gave birth to a boy, Ryder. Britney…well, we all know about Britney. Do not read anything in to the fact that the quote I’m about to use contains the word “heifers”. I am establishing no connection between Britney and one of those. If you are currently thinking that thought, it’s your bad, not mine. ;)

They found that cows that gained weight before conceiving were more likely to give birth to bull calves. Those shedding kilos before conception had a better chance of producing heifers (females).

Roche told the Waikato Times , published in Hamilton at the heart of New Zealand dairying country, the research underlined the theory that humans had some control over the sex of their children…Roche said it was not clear exactly why weight affected the sex of a cow’s offspring.

I hope none of those troglodyte Uncles (or their Mothers) who blame their poor wives (or daughters-in-law) for failure to bear an heir with outdoor plumbing reads the following, lest they somehow feel vindicated…ugh.

Although the male determined the sex of the embryo at conception, the female had some control over whether to keep a male or a female one.

…Roche said a cow losing weight before conception may have some mechanism that prompted it to reject a male embryo because it was not up to supporting the development of a bull calf.

I know that the above quote is referring to pregnancy, but whatever. (Razib, don’t hurt me!) Like it’s so difficult to take care of little boys. They eat, sleep and poo (…much like their adult counterparts). If they are taxing at all, it might be in their inexplicable taste in music; the perfect, adorable, scrumptious baby you see pictured above is “drumming” along to some Rush concert movie. I like Rush about as much as I like crustaceans.

Finally, now you know that you would buy me pink or lilac baby shower gifts; if I ever do decide to procreate, then like my Mother who is vegetarian, I’ll apparently have girls. Good for me. :)

anna at 06:45 PM in Humor, Science · 20 comment(s) · Direct link

June 22, 2006

Everything Brown Is Better ;)

This is going to seem highly random, but I was meandering about Wikipedia thanks to this thread, because I thought I’d read more about Bigelow teas after this comment. Whenever I wiki, I always peep the main page to see if there is something interesting and or brown (since I’m the one who named this category).

Today’s featured picture of mictyris longicarpus captured my attention for two reasons:

1) I am absolutely terrified of crustaceans and think eating them is just gross. They remind me of insects and one of you more useful (read: non-poli-sci major) types told me that the two groups of ickiness are actually related.

2) LOOK at those COLORS. Have you ever seen a prettier icky creature?

Here, learn something:

The light blue soldier crab (Mictyris longicarpus), inhabits beaches in the Indo-Pacific region. Soldier crabs filter sand or mud for microorganisms. They congregate during the low tide, and bury themselves in a corkscrew pattern during high tide, or whenever they are threatened.

I googled a bit more and found out that this thing (more formally known as the “soldier crab”) scurries about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This proves my E.C.F.I.-Uncle-esque theory that everything South Asian is prettier. ;)

anna at 05:48 PM in Animals, Photos, Science, Wiki Wiki Wiki Wiki · 40 comment(s) · Direct link

June 01, 2006

25

I just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that AIDS “turns” 25 this week. India now has the largest number of infected people and is still trending downhill:

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’ AIDS agency said.

Peter Piot was speaking as UNAIDS released a report which declared that the world’s response to the disease, that has infected about 65 million people and killed 25 million, has been nowhere near adequate. Five years after a special U.N. session pledged its commitment to halt the AIDS pandemic, only a few countries have met the targets laid down…

India has the largest number of people living with the virus. With 5.7 million infections, it has overtaken South Africa’s total of 5.5 million. But, the epidemic is still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the world’s HIV-infected children live. [Link]

The first reported case in India came nearly 5 years after the first reported case in the U.S.

The first case of HIV infection in India was diagnosed among commercial sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 1986. Soon after, a number of screening centres were established throughout the country. Initially the focus was on screening foreigners, especially foreign students. Gradually, the focus moved on to screening blood banks. By early 1987, efforts were made up to set up a national network of HIV screening centres in major urban areas. [Link]

The statistics are grim:

The UN Population Division projects that India’s adult HIV prevalence will peak at 1.9% in 2019. The UN estimates there were 2.7 million AIDS deaths in India between 1980 and 2000. During 2000-15, the UN has projected 12.3 million AIDS deaths and 49.5 million deaths during 2015-50.

A 2002 report by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council predicted 20 million to 25 million AIDS cases in India by 2010, more than any other country in the world. [Link]

So you guys tell me. We know what some of the problems are. What more can be done to stop this boulder from rolling?

abhi at 12:22 AM in Health and Medicine, History, News, Science · 25 comment(s) · Direct link

May 15, 2006

Yes, We Have No Bananas

In what can only be described as poetic injustice, the most priapic fruit in the world may go extinct within five to ten years for lack of sex. I feel for you, brutha. India’s glorious, 12” long banana fruit has been neutered by the cruel, cruel world (thanks, tipster):

The world’s most popular fruit… is in deep trouble. Its genetic base, the wild bananas and traditional varieties cultivated in India, has collapsed…

The main hope for survival of the Cavendish [variety] lies in developing new hybrids resistant to the [black sigatoka] fungus, but… the seedless modern fruit does not reproduce sexually and has to be bred from cuttings.

… wild banana species are rapidly going extinct as Indian forests are destroyed… In fact many of the genes that could save the Cavendish may already have been lost… One variety that contains genes that resist black sigatoka survives as a single plant in the botanical gardens of Calcutta… [Link]

The banana’s problem is that it is the seedless, infertile mutant cousin of a wild herb. The absence of seeds makes its fruit edible, but also genetically vulnerable… They have survived only because for some 10,000 years banana-lovers have propagated the fruit by taking shoots from the base of the plants…

The most widespread banana disease currently is a leaf fungus called black Sigatoka. It cuts yields by 50 percent or more on hundreds of millions of small farms across the tropics. Commercial banana plantations keep up production with weekly applications of fungicides - the most intensive application of chemicals on any major food crop. But now a new strain of an old disease, Panama disease, threatens to make even fungicides useless…

“In the 1970s we controlled Black Sigatoka by spraying 10 to 12 times a year…” That frequency has jumped to almost weekly… [Link]

Our Cuban brothers have access to a hybrid fruit which I dub the banapple. In Uganda, you can even buy banana beer.

… little research has been done. Almost the only result of 80 years of endeavor has been a banana that tastes like an apple and is only eaten in Cuba, where there is nothing else on the supermarket shelves. [Link]

In the densely populated countries around Lake Victoria—Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda—bananas are primary nutrition, accounting for near-total carbohydrate consumption in some diets (in Uganda, the word for food, “matooke,” translates from Swahili as “banana”). The bananas eaten in East Africa are not the dessert-style fruit consumed in the West; they are far more versatile (there’s even a beer brewed from bananas sold in Kampala). [Link]

A banocalypse has already happened once before:

The banana producers began as railroad companies, with friendly local governments granting thousands of acres of surrounding rainforest for each mile of track laid… By the early 1900s, bananas surpassed apples as the nation’s favorite fruit…

Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest…

… the 1923 musical hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is said to have been written after songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn were denied in an attempt to purchase their favorite fruit by a syntactically colorful, out-of-stock neighborhood grocer…

Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike’s replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. [Link]

One solution is to force a reverse mutation back into sexual reproduction using seeds:

The goal of all this is to get seeds, and to use them to grow Aguilar’s experimental varieties, one of which, he hopes, will ultimately yield a tasty, market-friendly Cavendish replacement. What are the odds of an individual seed ultimately yielding a thriving hybrid? “About 1 in 10,000,” Aguilar says.

It takes about four months for a pollinated plant to bear fruit, which is harvested and brought to a processing shed for seed extraction. Workers press thousands of bananas through mesh strainers. About one seed is found for every 300 bananas. The seeds are then brought indoors, to what Aguilar calls the “embryo rescue unit.” Of the tiny number of seeds, only a third of them actually germinate. [Link]

Another researcher thinks the threat of banana extinction will force the first mass adoption of genetically modified food:

How much time is left for the Cavendish? Some scientists say five years; some say 10…

The race to save the banana is personal. “The bananas,” he says, “are my children…”

Swennen emphasizes that biotech is literally the only way to save the Cavendish, which, because it is 100 percent seedless, can’t be improved on by traditional hybridization methods… “I can’t understand this romantic idea that nature is perfect, and that what we do is create Frankensteins,” Swennen says. People “are frightened—and they’re wrong.” He believes that the threats bananas face mean that they are likely to be the bioengineered food that finally forces global shoppers to consider—and accept—science’s inevitable intervention in the agricultural process. [Link]

But if the banana does ever die out, it’s peanut butter jelly time for all of us (audio)

manish at 08:49 AM in Food, Humor, Science · 56 comment(s) · Direct link

May 09, 2006

Cowabunga!

NASA has inked a deal to launch two scientific instruments on an Indian rocket bound for the moon within the next two years. Even space is being outsourced:

The picture either means ‘satellite’ or ‘no head-in parking’

U.S. space agency NASA entered into an agreement with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday to send two scientific instruments on board Chandrayaan-I, the country’s first unmanned moon mission scheduled for 2008…

[The U.S. instruments include] a mini synthetic aperture radar (miniSAR), developed by the agency’s applied physics laboratory and a moon mineralogy mapper, built by [NASA] Jet Propulsion Laboratory…

Chandrayaan-I will be launched from… Sriharikota on the east coast of Andhra Pradesh, using the new polar satellite launch vehicle… [Link]

The first payload will look for polar ice on the moon and the other will study the moon’s surface mineral composition. [Link]

NASA won’t be the only hitchhiker in the galaxy — the Europeans are also aboard:

… the Chandrayaan payload… will have 15-20 instruments, including 11 from India and three from the European Space Agency. [Link]

India’s own payload is a lunar surveyor:

The instruments will perform photo-geological mapping of the lunar surface apart from mineral content. [Link]

One of India’s rockets may be converted into an ICBM in the future. Does anyone else find it scary that, worldwide, weapons of mass destruction are under the control of anti-science yahoos who visit astrologers and think condoms are immoral?

India could convert its Polar Space Launch Vehicle into an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile within a year or two of a decision to do so, says a National Intelligence Estimate, representing a consensus of all US intelligence agencies, including the CIA… Most components needed for an ICBM are available from India’s indigenous space programme… [Link]

India will soon develop an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a flight range of 9,000-12,000 km… The ICBM would probably be a three-stage ballistic missile with solid fuel rockets in the first and second stages, and a liquid propellant rocket in the third stage. [Link]

Interestingly, India’s dual-use space program doesn’t seem to get Uncle Sam’s chuddies in a twist the way that taikonauts do. China wants a space station and deeds to the moon:

China has begun construction of a rocket to carry astronauts into orbit in 2008 for its third manned space launch, state media reported Monday…. the mission probably would include a spacewalk and possible maneuvers meant to practice docking at a planned Chinese space station. [Link]China must overcome U.S. misgivings about the military nature of its space program

More than a decade ago, the United States thwarted efforts by China to join the 16-nation partnership that financed and built the international space station… China must overcome underlying U.S. misgivings about the military nature of its space program… [Link]

I wonder whether the Chandrayaan launch vehicle will be a new design (the chart above suggests it won’t be). First launches of new rocket technology tend to fail at a very high rate. In 2003, a Japanese rocket launch failed and its payloads were lost:

Japan’s beleaguered space programme suffered a blow [in Dec. 2003] when a rocket carrying two spy satellites was forced to self-destruct 10 minutes into flight. The satellites were to… keep tabs on the military machinations of neighbouring North Korea.

Japan’s space programme “is in deep trouble” says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in the US. “They’ve had too many failures of this rocket,” he says, referring to two botched launches in the late 1990s. [Link]

For exactly the same reason, NASA is reverting to an older, simpler capsule design for its space shuttle replacement. At least that’s what the SMU gathered from our resident NASA expert’s briefing on publicly-disclosed specs:

NASA is to design a new rocket based on the technology from its ageing shuttles that are to be retired in 2010… the new rocket would be “very Apollo-like, with updated technology. Think of it as Apollo on steroids.” But the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) will enable astronauts to spend four times longer on the moon than the Apollo astronauts. The new missions will spend up to one week on the moon. [Link]

The next U.S. moon landing is tentatively scheduled for 2018. Since the moon is so Summer of ‘69, Dubya’s new stated goal is to put a man on Mars. (The Venn intersection of those who believe ‘the moon landing was faked’ and ‘Kaavya is innocent’ is probably a perfect circle, the Nile of Denial.)

Recent plans to put an Indian astronaut aboard a NASA flight have been tabled, though desi American astronaut Sunita Williams née Pandya is already scheduled to fly:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Indian Space Research Organisation have shelved plans to train an Indian astronaut at NASA to be part of a manned mission of the American space shuttle… A total of 17 flights are planned, for which international agreements already exist, he said, adding no seats are available for the next four years. [Link]

India-U.S. canoodling in space dates back to even before the the Summer of Love:

Space cooperation between the two dates back to 1963 when an Indian atmospheric experiment was carried on a U.S.-made rocket. [Link]

Ironically, the launch site for which the U.S. signed the deal is still subject to American sanctions from the bad ol’ days of Indian nuke tests:

On Tuesday India’s space agency urged the US to lift sanctions on three of its operations to allow more high-tech imports… sanctions were still applied to its Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre in Kerala state, and the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Andhra Pradesh. [Link]

Historically, India innovated in military rockets, which were copied by the British and ended up in the American national anthem (‘And the rockets’ red glare / the bombs bursting in air…’)

The one thing I’m sure of when it comes to Indians in space is that the Restaurant at the End of the Universe will not serve cow, and it definitely won’t be out of tea.

Related posts: Will the U.S. participate in an India moon mission?, The Right Stuff, Malaysia’s first astronaut?, Space and Politics, The Final Frontier, “… is worth the risk of life”, How can a flag “blow” on the moon?, The Tao of Abhi

manish at 03:32 PM in Military, Science · 27 comment(s) · Direct link

May 05, 2006

Bang bang, you’re alive

A new theory in cosmology sounds much like the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist concepts of cyclical creation and mind-boggling timescales. I don’t mean to sound like Religious Uncle, rather to evoke a neat coincidence (via Slashdot):

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thoughtThe universe may be 986 billion years older than previously thought, and creation may be cyclical and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago…

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs and big crunches - where every particle of matter collapses together…

“I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large…” [Link]

… According to Steinhardt and Turok, today’s universe is part of an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches, with each cycle lasting about a trillion years. At every big bang, the amount of matter and radiation in the universe is reset, but the cosmological constant is not. Instead, the cosmological constant gradually diminishes over many cycles to the small value observed today… the cosmological constant decreases in steps, through a series of quantum transitions. [Link]

As I’ve noted before, the Hindu concept of time is so over-the-top that it beats even the Chinese long view quoted sanctimoniously by bestsellers on the business shelves:

… the life cycle of Brahma is… 311 trillion years. We are currently in the 51st year of the present Brahma and so about 155 trillion years have elapsed… [Link]

As Carl Sagan wrote in his book Cosmos (via Slashdot commenter):

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day