BBC releases their wildlife archives
I really like the BBC. They’re all about making their content freely available. First it was all 9 of Beethoven’s symphonies, and now they’re releasing their wildlife archives for free as well.
Access to the BBC’s extensive news archive is seen as giving the British public a chance to share and keep “the punctuation marks in the stories of our lives”.
How, not where, you die matters
Research out of Queen’s University in Canada has come up with some surprising findings: namely that conventional wisdom that terminal patients would rather die at home than anywhere else isn’t nearly as important to them as dying under the care of competent doctors. (Why is it that conventional wisdom turns out to be anything but wise under scrutiny? Hooray scientific discovery, I suppose.)
Dying at home ranked 24th on the list of 28 factors. “[T]o have trust and confidence in the doctors looking after you” and “not to be kept alive on life supports when there is little hope for a meaningful recovery” were the most important to terminally-ill patients. It’s interesting to note that family members rated dying at home 14th on a list of 26 factors. (more…)
The fleecing of cancer patients
I don’t often criticize the pharmaceutical industry, because I am a capitalist at heart, and there are enough other, often ill-informed people out there to do it for me. I don’t begrudge the pharmaceutical industry its high prices on patent medicines. I do think that some of their practices are a little over the top. On the other hand, some of the major players in Big Pharma are considered some of the world’s most ethical companies.
Imagine my dismay, then, when I came across an article that I’d printed out from the New York Times back on February 15 about Avastin, a drug from Genentech that shows significant effect in terminal cancer patients suffering from colon cancer as well as late-stage breast and lung cancer. Avastin will cost upwards of $100,000 a year for treatment. While most patients that take Avastin won’t last a year, that breaks down to over $8,000 a month. (The average colon cancer patient on Avastin takes it for 11 months.) Naturally, insurance companies are reluctant to pay for the medication, and one can hardly blame them. (Contrary to popular belief, most insurance companies are not minting money.) (more…)
Why sex?
Sex is something that most people think about on a minutely basis, but most don’t *really* think about it. From a macroscopic evolutionary view, sex doesn’t really make sense. The amount of effort that males put in to attract females, even outside the human species, is extreme. Sex is expensive in terms of time, effort, and stress. It would be much easier and less expensive from a reproduction standpoint to undergo binary fission, or drop pieces of oneself every time one wanted to reproduce.
Of course we don’t do that, and there are a few explanations as to why this is. (Because it’s “fun” doesn’t apply: that’s an evolutionary byproduct of needing to reproduce.) One hypothesis put forth almost 20 years ago suggests that sex evolved as a way to purge harmful mutations from the population. By shuffling genes “randomly” (mixing chromosomes is anything but random — any sociologist will tell you that), the harmful mutations would be concentrated into a few select individuals who would be weaker and less likely to reproduce, and therefore these mutations would be weeded out through natural selection. (more…)
Autistic intelligence
I was just reading a BBC News report about autism and measuring an autistic person’s intelligence. While I agree with Dr. Mottron’s assessment that real autistic people — those characterized by mental impairment — may be scored unfairly low on intelligence tests, I question his assertion that by recognizing their innate gifts, they can be more productive members of society. While there’s no doubt that some could, I wonder how many. Even in highly-structured and focused jobs like areas of law and science.
Having worked a little bit with autistic children (and those you would think were children) I wonder whether this is actually the case. All jobs require some degree of social interaction, unless you’re someone who runs their own business out of a home (freelance writing, for example), and many of the autistic people I’ve interacted with have a complete lack of social skills.
Though I think if even a handful of autistic people are able to live fuller lives, then Dr. Mottron’s research was worth the time, effort, and expense. After all, who is to say how many people have to be impacted before research becomes worthwhile?
Technorati Tags: autism, intelligence
Miscellania
School has been kicking my ass lately, so here’s a quote that I really like instead of a real writeup…
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
-Charles Darwin
Indeed. It’s been my experience that those in the know know they don’t know everything, and are more likely to be open minded about something new.
SuitSat coming to an orbit near you
On February 3, one of the strangest things to make its way into orbit will be released by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. It’s an old Russian spacesuit, nicknamed SuitSat, packed with batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power. The life support systems will be powered down for the duration of the suit’s orbit.
It’s an experiment to see how well using old spacesuits works as a means of protecting sensitive equipment from the hazards of space: excessive temperatures on both ends of the spectrum, and fragments that a satellite is exposed to as they orbit the Earth. If it’s successful, the space agencies will consider using old suits as vehicles for short-lived satellites.
If you’ve got a ham radio or police scanner capable of tuning into 145.990 MHz FM, you can listen to SuitSat transmit information about its current condition to the ground when it passes over your neck of the woods (under Options -> all passes).
“Point your antenna to the sky during the 5-to-10 minute flyby,” advises Bauer, and this is what you’ll hear:
SuitSat transmits for 30 seconds, pauses for 30 seconds, and then repeats. “This is SuitSat-1, RS0RS,” the transmission begins, followed by a prerecorded greeting in five languages. The greeting contains “special words” in English, French, Japanese, Russian, German and Spanish for students to record and decipher.
Next comes telemetry: temperature, battery power, mission elapsed time. “The telemetry is stated in plain language—in English,” says Bauer. Everyone will be privy to SuitSat’s condition. Bauer adds, “Suitsat ‘talks’ using a voice synthesizer. It’s pretty amazing.”
The transmission ends with a Slow Scan TV picture. Of what? “We’re not telling,” laughs Bauer. “It’s a mystery picture.”
The batteries inside SuitSat are expected to last 2-4 days, and shortly thereafter it will fall into the upper atmosphere where it will burn up like things that fall into the atmosphere at high speed tend to do.