One, two, three, er…many.

By: | November 20, 2012

It’s amazing what scientists can do nowadays. They can get right down into the center of an atom. They can tell us in detail about rocks on other planets. So it’s no wonder when they report there are a certain number of very large animals in an area – and they only have to count up to a thousand or two – we tend to believe the number is pretty close. Population surveys for polar bears, for example, sound a bit like taking the census, only the bears don’t have phones.

In reality, counting white animals against a white backdrop from a helicopter, over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, is actually pretty tricky. Ditto caribou against the tundra. It’s also really expensive, so when a survey is done, those numbers have to be used for a decade or two, in combination with other measures, to estimate the health of a population.

When an August 2011 survey of Hudson Bay’s 8000km western coastline found 1,013 bears – 66% higher than the extrapolated estimates that had led to endangered status and trade moratoria on bear parts in the EU and US –the results were met with incredulity. The numbers confirmed reports from the Hunter and Trapper Associations in the area who have consistently seen more bears, but have been discredited by their immediate financial interest in raised hunting quotas.

Every year, about 450 foreign hunters each pay around $50,000 for a tag to shoot a polar bear, accompanied by an Inuit guide. For the North American Super Slam, and other large animal lists that prescribe the hunter’s complete trophy room, a dead polar bear is de rigeur. In China and Russia, a polar bear pelt can fetch $15,000. (You may be thinking laws against this would be wise regardless of bear population numbers, and you would not be alone.) Continue reading →

MATTER Takes Online Publishing Out on a Limb

By: | November 19, 2012

Back in March 2012, more than 2,500 people declared their support for a pretty modest idea: that the world is full of interesting, relevant, important science stories that aren’t being told. No shocker there — that’s pretty much the operating principle of LWON, too, or one of them anyway. But these particular people did something I found quite surprising. They coughed up money, to the tune of $140,000, to support a new venture that would try to bring some of those stories to light. Thus was born MATTER, via the fundraising website Kickstarter, a digital thing that promised to “focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science … Just one unmissable story.”

Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson launched MATTER with their first story last week. It’s called “Do No Harm,” and fits into the loose genre of medical oddities — and it will be no spoiler to suggest that the medical dictate is not the only thing violated over the course of the narrative. I know Jim far too well to write an objective review, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t give him a bit of a grilling about MATTER and the first story, “Do No Harm.” And I can say that you should definitely read it. Seriously. Just as soon as you’re finished reading the  LWON v. MATTER Q&A that follows: Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 17, 2012

12 – 16 November

This week, our site went boom. But we’re all better now.

Cassie explored the compelling pseudscience behind chronic Lyme’s disease, and why it can sway even people who should know better.

Ann considered gravity’s uncompromising brutality.

Heather’s chilling story about how Fritz Haber changed her grandfather’s life is a reminder of how casually any of us can be sideswiped by scientific glory.

Ann reminds Abstruse Goose that we have been programmed by eons of evolution to know that “a skittery thing with too many legs is just deeply wrong.”

And Ginny’s heart-melting new puppy got her interested in the astounding engineering feat that is a dog’s nose.

See you back here on Monday!

 

 

The Pseudoscience of Chronic Lyme

By: | November 16, 2012

In 2009 science writer Laurie McClellen’s husband, Pat, fell ill. The exhaustion came first. He grew too tired to exercise. Even the office left him fatigued. “He was so tired that he needed a two-hour nap every night after work,” McClellan wrote in her account of the ordeal. Then came other symptoms. One night Pat forgot the name of their subway stop. He complained of cold feet, and began to stumble. His joints burned.

McClellan’s doctor suggested Pat might have chronic Lyme disease. The test came back negative, but she prescribed a course of antibiotics anyway. Pat began to feel a little better. At a clinic specializing in Lyme disease, “Pat was given prescriptions for a sophisticated regimen of drugs to control his symptoms, plus multiple antibiotics to fight the infection. He would need to take the drugs for the next year or so. He started swallowing some twenty-five pills a day, and the pace of his recovery picked up,” McClellan wrote.

While all infectious disease doctors acknowledge that Borrelia burgdorferi, the corkscrew-shaped bacterium that causes Lyme disease, can stay in the body for years, most believe that a short course of antibiotics is enough to wipe out the infection. However, an increasingly vocal group of patients, advocates, and doctors believes the bacteria can hide out in the body and persist even after treatment, causing a laundry list of vague symptoms — everything from night sweats and depression to back pain and vertigo. They argue that a cure requires not weeks but months or years of strong antibiotics, and that relapses are common. They portray Lyme as “a disease that is insidious, ubiquitous, difficult to diagnose, and almost incurable,” according to one group of infectious disease physicians from Johns Hopkins.

The debate has been raging for years, but evidence has yet to emerge in support of an epidemic of persistent yet invisible B. bergdorferi infections. And three clinical trials funded by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases failed to find any benefit of long-term antibiotic therapy in individuals like Pat who have no evidence of active infection. In fact, long courses of antibiotics can be dangerous. Continue reading →

We’re Back

By: | November 15, 2012

We were stuck in a black hole for a while but we blasted loose and now we’re back home.  And grateful for your patience.

_____

Photo: Koshyk

Falling

By: | November 15, 2012

From “On Being the Right Size,” by J.B.S. Haldane:  “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away.  A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

Recently, a couple of my friends have fallen.  One, a woman, maybe 5’5″, maybe 130 pounds, tripped on a sidewalk, fell forward, and caught herself on her hands.  Both wrists were shattered; she had surgery, now has casts on both arms with titanium plates holding both wrists in place, and will have surgery again to remove one of the plates, but the second plate is permanent and she thinks she’ll never be able to bend that wrist.   The other, a man, maybe 5″8″, maybe 180 pounds, also fell while walking, and hit his head.  Two days later, he was found to have a diffuse bleed into his right brain, was hospitalized, had another bleed, and somewhere in there, a stroke.  His language, memories, and concepts are all fine, but his spatial orientation is off and now, a month after the fall, he’s still in a rehab hospital and will be for the foreseeable.  Neither of these people fell down Haldane’s thousand-yard mine shaft; they fell only the lengths of their bodies.  Both of them are going to be fine and functioning, though as Haldane says, they’re a little broken.   And the fault lies completely with gravity. Continue reading →

The Trainman and the Nobel Laureate

By: | November 14, 2012

According to his discharge papers, he stood five feet, eight inches tall. He had a pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, two moles on his back, his sole distinguishing marks. In June 1918, he was discharged from the British Army with a disability received in the Great War–a sadly innocent term that people used before they became accustomed to slaughter on an industrial level.

I barely knew my grandfather, James Cooney. He was a distant man who spent much of his time in his room reading, as I recall. I don’t know exactly when he became so distant and remote, but I am pretty certain that it began in the Great War, most likely  on a spring day in 1915, when he discovered for himself the brilliance of a renowned German scientist, Fritz Haber.

Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Disproportionate Reaction

By: | November 13, 2012

I should never argue about anything whatever with someone who understands math, especially someone who understands it as well as our boy, AG, here.  But I wonder whether “disproportionate” isn’t confusing statistics with neuroscience.

Let’s say AG is 30 years old, meaning he’s lived for 10,800 days, so finding the spider one day out of 10,800 and thereafter checking his shoes daily?  Yes, statistically his reaction is disproportionate.   But the reaction to spiders isn’t statistical.  It’s hard-wired since birth, a little neural pathway with its little neurotransmitters locked in the hippocampus or amygdala or some place that Virginia knows about that has been programmed by natural selection over eons of evolution to know that a skittery thing with too many legs is just deeply wrong and to react accordingly, proportionately.  God.  I get jumpy even thinking about it.