Mr. Sandman’s Diet Plan

By: | February 4, 2011

I love sleep, but I’ve been getting far too little of it. My harried days have been stretching into late nights spent staring at the computer. And I’m not alone. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that the average American gets just 6.7 hours of sleep a night on weekdays.

We’re all familiar with the side effects of sleep deprivation — drowsiness, crankiness, an unnatural fixation with beds and pillows. But did you know that a lack of sleep can cause weight gain?

Anecdotally, this feels true. Late at night you can find me ransacking the cupboards for wayward cookies or stuffing myself with gummy bears. Staying up late makes me want to eat junk. And my unhealthy cravings continue into the next day. Tired and cranky, I make myself bacon or tater tots or peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches (shut up, they’re delicious). Continue reading →

Muppet Messaging

By: | February 3, 2011
TM and © 2011 Sesame Workshop. All Rights Reserved.

American readers will probably recognize the dopey guy on the right as Elmo, of tickling fame, who lives on Sesame Street. But this isn’t Elmo, it’s his doppelgänger, Neno, who appears on Takalani Sesame, the South African version of the show. The blonde is his co-star, Kami, who will also appear on Sesame Square, a new Nigerian adaptation, slated for launch in March.

Kami is only 5 years old, but she has grown-up problems. When she was an infant, a blood transfusion left her HIV positive. Her mother had AIDS and died, leaving her orphaned.

Her story is tragic, but all too common among her audience. In South Africa, some 1.2 million children are orphaned by HIV/AIDS, and 18.1 percent of all adults carry the virus, according to UNICEF. Despite the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, South Africans have heard many confusing messages about the disease. For example, Thabo Mbeki, who was president from 1999 to 2008, is an HIV denialist: he believes that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiviral drugs are poison.
Continue reading →

Oh no! Not another Iraq

By: | February 2, 2011

For the last five or six days, I’ve been searching the web for good, reliable news about what is happening to Egypt’s antiquities as the turmoil deepens in Cairo.

Are Egyptian artifacts safe in the country’s many museums, protected by soldiers perched on tanks or by human chains of young Egyptians? Or are gangs of looters taking advantage of the legitimate quest for democracy in Egypt,  and breaking into the country’s many museums and plundering its archaeological sites? In other words, are we about to see a dire loss of archaeological data similar to the one that took place in Iraq shortly after the American- and British-led  invasion in 2003? Continue reading →

Railroads, brownfields and the healing power of vegetable oil

By: | February 1, 2011

It has been a long time since railways in North America counted as anything like new technology or even, in many areas, crucial infrastructure. Still, even as recent U.S. funding for high-speed rail lines seeks to make rail travel cutting edge again, the deep legacy of the golden age of rail still marks the continent in persistent, and sometimes surprising ways.

Many of the small towns in my home province of Saskatchewan, for example, exist only because they fell at regular intervals along nascent trunks and spurs, and they still bear the names of foreign places and railway functionaries doled out by surveyors in alphabetical order. Allan, Bradwell, Clavet … on to Zumbro, and repeat.

Larger centers, such as my current hometown of San Francisco, were marked by rail lines in different, but equally lasting ways. Few people other than riders of the Caltrain commuter service here are aware that the gleaming, high-tech Bay Area has its own rust belt of derelict and barely-hanging-on industrial sites, stretching along the rail line from near downtown south into San Mateo County, along the marshy shores of San Francisco Bay. Many vistas in the San Francisco region, whether shaped by nature or man, are deservedly renowned for their splendor. Those along the Peninsula rail line, equally deservedly, are not.

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This Is Not About Climate Change

By: | January 31, 2011
Scientist advising

I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple.  What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties.  I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.”  Not that this post is about climate change because it isn’t.  And anyway, don’t we all know that climate is more complicated than that? and that the science of its change is deeply uncertain? And wouldn’t politicians like knowing which uncertainties can be measured and which are so uncertain they’re not even measurable?  Distinguishing measurable from unmeasurable uncertainties is, for me, both thrilling and disturbing.

I have digressed.  Could the essay’s author – Andy Stirling, a policy researcher in the UK — kindly give me an example of science advice that isn’t simplistic?  He could, and I closely paraphrase: the chances that climate change will make the world A degrees hotter in region B over period C in relation to baseline D are in a range between E and F.  And interpretation G tends toward the E end of the range because of reason H, based on perspectives associated with context I.  “Good luck with telling politicians that,”  I thought. Continue reading →

In Defense of Hippie Cigarettes

By: | January 27, 2011

Yesterday I stumbled on a Mancouch blog post (don’t ask) in which ‘the_static’ — a young mohawk-ed guy who rides motorcycles and plays video games — sings the glories of electronic cigarettes. E-cigs, in case you haven’t heard of them, are cigarettes without the smoke. You put in a few drops of a liquid nicotine solution (‘e-juice’), and a battery-powered ‘atomizer’ heats it up. You suck in the vapors to get your fix.

Static says e-cigs are “ridiculously cheaper” than regular cigs. (It’s true in the long run: the e-cig device runs $50-100, but the liquid refills cost about $2.50 for the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes. Regular cigs cost $4.50/pack in Virginia, and $11/pack here in tax-crazed New York.)

Plus, static says, the vapor “doesn’t stink,” and you don’t have to worry about those pesky smoking bans in bars and restaurants. “Of course, a few friends of mine teased me that I was smoking a ‘hippie cigarette’,” he writes. “But then it didn’t really matter when they had to step out of the club just to smoke while I continued socializing, enjoyed my drinks and kept my urges at bay with my new e-cig.”

Oh, snap!
Continue reading →

Guest Post: Bottle Insouciance

By: | January 26, 2011

Are scientists who work with living organisms less germ phobic than civilians? When a science-writing colleague (okay: LWON’s own Ann Finkbeiner) apologized to an infectious disease specialist for giving him an insufficiently rinsed coffee cup, he responded, “Nothing in there I’m worried about.” I once watched a microbiologist cut her bagel with a butter knife after using it to pry the top off a terrarium teeming with termites, whose hindguts she’d soon slice up and examine under a microscope. Such insouciance bolsters my general sense that most of us worry way too much about getting sick from “germs.” They are definitely out there, but most of them are definitely not out to get you. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Band of Brothers

By: | January 25, 2011

Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons.  And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers.  The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the band leaps toward it in a flash of tiny lightning.  It really is the same as lightning, just smaller — for which we can all be grateful.

Also we can be grateful the electricity is static.  Imagine if it were dynamic, like in an electric wire, and just kept coming.

Credit:  http://abstrusegoose.com/324