Month: July 2009

As we’re in a testing frame of mind, I thought I’d discuss a little quiz that was published as a kind of quasi-scientific assessment of intellect. The basic premise was to find out whether you, the participant, knows more science than the average American.

In The Science Knowledge Quiz you’re asked 12 questions, that most Sciencebase readers will perceive as relatively simple and straightforward, but the shock comes when you get your 12 out of 12 score and discover that you are in the top 10% and that 90% of previous respondents didn’t get them all right.

They’re multiple choice questions, which makes them even easier/harder, depending on your perspective, but I’m just going to list the questions without possible answers:

• Which over-the-counter drug do doctors recommend that people take to help prevent heart attacks?
• According to most astronomers, which of the following is no longer considered a planet?
• Which of the following may cause a tsunami?
• The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?
• What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise?
• How are stem cells different from other cells?
• What have scientists recently discovered on Mars?
• The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future – true or false?
• Lasers work by focusing sound waves – true or false?
• Antibiotics will kill viruses as well as bacteria – true or false?
• Electrons are smaller than atoms – true or false?
• All radioactivity is man-made – true or false?

To be honest, many of these questions are not testing your scientific acumen at all, but your ability to retain “facts” several of which have been repeated in the media in recent years, such as the aspiring and Pluto questions (#1 and #2). The plate tectonics question also seems to be loaded as if they’re testing your belief in a static earth. Similarly question 5 about climate change gives us the “most” scientists notion that implies there are plenty who don’t believe that carbon dioxide causes global warming

That aside, I posted the original quiz on Twitter* with the provocative query: “Do you know more science than the average American?” and got a lot of responses from fellow Twitter users telling me that they too had got 12 out of 12 and were in the upper intellectual category. Many were relieved to be so. One respondent admitted to getting only 11/12…ouch. Another said the quiz was a simple ceiling to hit while another suggested that the questions were too easy…

But, that’s the point, these were relatively easy questions, wouldn’t you hope that most people would be able to answer all of them correctly without much effort? But, that was not the case, the vast majority of people who have taken the quiz got several wrong. A detailed analysis of the results of the survey can be found here.

In it, the researchers discuss the results of this quiz and several other surveys and come to the broad sweeping conclusions that the public praises science; scientists fault the public and the media and scientific achievements are less prominent than a decade ago.

Of course, those in the arts and humanities, could argue that the same kinds of results might emerge from a survey that asked questions about literature, poetry, history etc. It would be nice if everyone could receive an equitable and broad education that equipped them with a multitude of factoids and important information.

However, one point that always emerges when watching the likes of Mastermind and University Challenge is that the so-called scientific questions are almost always of the sort – what is the chemical symbolised by a K in the periodic table, or what type of substance neutralises an alkaline. In contrast, questions about Picasso or Orwell, for instance, invariably dig much deeper than that. It’s as if knowing about science comes with less kudos than knowing almost any other stuff. Knowing about aspidistras and how to keep them airborne is fascinating in its own right, but knowing about aspirin could mean a matter of life and death.

*That tweet was one of the most popular links I’ve ever tweeted with almost 1000 referrals back to the quiz page itself and dozens of retweets. It obviously touched a nerve…

Digital industries continue to wage an unwinnable war against the people and organisations that illicitly copy, share, and sell their products, whether DVD rips, DRM-free music files, or pirated software. But, while arguments about lost revenues, performing rights, and the rest of it rage, at least digital copyright theft is not usually a matter of life or death. Crime syndicate conspiracy theorists would probably beg to differ, but counterfeiting and piracy in another industry – the pharmaceutical industry – most certainly can be.

Many users of online file sharing systems and those who seek out the cheapest “generic” pharma products on the net, without regard to whether they are counterfeit or not, often cite the enormous profits made by the industries as some kind of excuse for not paying their own way.

Big businesses do make big profits (present credit crunch excepted, of course).

But, for the pharma industry those profits offset the initial 10-15 years of effort and expense that usually accompanies each drug brought to market and compensates for the thousands more failures that fall at various hurdles in the research and development process.

There are now vast markets for counterfeit medicinal drugs. They exist across the internet where consumers around the world seek the cheapest price for drugs they might not otherwise be able to afford and are often sold counterfeit products with doubtful chemical provenance.

In the developing world, there are additional socioeconomic problems around counterfeit and “generic” drugs produced despite patent limitations. And in China, a parallel industry exists to reverse engineer countless products and create facscimiles. It is not only the problem of intellectual property rights ignored and shareholders duped out of their dividends, it is a problem of health and safety and so-called pharmaco-vigilance.

The US Food & Drug Administration defines a counterfeit drug as:

A drug which, or the container or labelling of which, without authorisation, bears the trademark, trade name, or other identifying mark, imprint, or device, or any likeness thereof, of a drug manufacturer, processor, packer, or distributor other than the person or persons who in fact manufactured, processed, packed, or distributed such drug and which thereby falsely purports or is represented to be the product of, or to have been packed or distributed by, such other drug manufacturer, processor, packer, or distributor.

Now, writing in the aptly named International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, Derek Bosworth, at the University of Manchester and Senior Research Associate of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre, argues that counterfeit pharmaceutical products bring with them several major risks.

The main risk is one of health for the individual appear, particularly in the developing world, and to people naively purchasing counterfeit drugs on the internet. There is also a risk to the legitimate manufacturers who may lose the confidence of the public and medical professionals as medical problems associated with the counterfeit product are reflected on the branded product. At least one company, Pfizer, is fighting back through transparency and product recall in the face of counterfeit versions of its products entering the market. Nevertheless, such detrimental image problems could stoke up anti-industry feeling and persuade patients away from genuine treatments into the hands of snake oil sellers.

“There can be little doubt that some forms of counterfeiting and piracy are associated with higher economic and welfare costs than others,” says Bosworth, “The costs associated with pharmaceutical and certain other products, such as aeroplane parts, are probably amongst the highest of all.” He points out that there are many cases of counterfeit pharmaceuticals leading to illness and even death. There are even strong links between the counterfeiters and other criminal activity and terrorism.

Bosworth adds that research is underway to tag and track pharmaceutical, and other products, although RFID technologies are still too expensive for most applications. More importantly, however, the legal penalties imposed on counterfeiters are too small in most countries, he points out, although in 2003 India proposed the death penalty for those who manufacture or sell counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Much still needs to be done to stop pharma piracy. If as much effort were focused on this serious issue as there seems to be in chasing after file sharers, it could be a battle fought and won.

Derek L Bosworth (2009). Counterfeiting in global pharmaceuticals sector: its consequences and management International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, 3 (4), 343-356 DOI: 10.1504/IJIPM.2009.026911

More on counterfeit drugs

• China unfairly targeted as fake drug centre, says national watchdog (cbc.ca)
• Trade in illegal medicine exposed (news.bbc.co.uk)

Service helps Africans spot fake drugs (boingboing.net)

Elemental Discoveries, the precursor to this blog, existed in various forms on the AFN, the Tallahassee Freenet and enterprise.net from Spring 1996. But, today (July 20) is the official tenth anniversary of when I registered the sciencebase.com domain. At that point I started to get serious about building up a science portal (as they were then known) and publishing regular science news, views, and interviews in a precursor to the blogging format. Quite by chance it’s also the fortieth anniversary of a slightly more globally significant event – the first manned moon landing…

Anyway, in celebration of my small achievement as opposed to a giant leap, I was going to pick a few items from the archives to try and show just how diverse is Sciencebase coverage, but I suspect, everyone will be wanting to know about that other anniversary today, so I’ve decided not to run with the original plan…

Oh, by the way, this is the 1600th blog post on Sciencebase, although there are hundreds of other items on the site in the archives, and lying outside the blog framework. Assuming 2000 articles averaging 500 words each, that’s approximately 1 million words, about 100,000 words per year, 250 working days per year(?) that’s 400 words per 8h day, 50 words an hour…doesn’t seem an awful lot. But, then check out my science writer resume page to see how I fill the rest of the work time.

The UK media has been full of swine flu (H1N1) again this week, it’s been trending, to borrow Twitter terminology, what with reports on the tragic deaths of a young girl and a family doctor, advice on virulence and research from Imperial College London that suggests we need better research into the disease. Widespread anecdotal evidence of the spread of H1N1 abounds too.

I should also point out that since coming back from WCSJ09 I’ve had a rather nasty cough, a bit of a sore throat and have felt quite lethargic…but that’s more likely to do with all the mixing in smoky Westminster pub outdoor areas and the talking loudly to be heard over speakers at social events (apologies Natasha, Ed).

Anyway, back to the swine flu. The number of people contacting their doctor because they think they have swine flu has jumped almost 50% to 40,000 a week, according to a BBC report. The actual number of diagnosed cases has risen sixfold in the last week in some parts of the UK, The Guardian said. The Royal College of General Practitioners has criticised the government’s overall handling of H1N1.

The case of the GP who died this week is intriguing from the semantic point of view. According to various outlets, no inquest will be held into the death of 64-year-old Dr Day, who died on Saturday in the Luton and Dunstable Hospital of “natural causes”.

That last phrase covers an awful lot of issues with a nice shiny gloss, it’s the official stance on a whole range of causes of death used on death certificates. But, it doesn’t actually tell is what Dr Day died of and police have criticised the media for reporting his death as a swine flu death. But, of course, it was swine flu that killed him, even if it induced cardiac arrest or some kind of toxic overload. In the absence of the infection would he have otherwise died of “natural causes”? The phrase “natural causes”, is apparently legalese and we should be avoiding it like…well, the plague…for the sake of epidemiology and long-term public records in the face of an emergent virus.

As to the cause of death of an apparently healthy six-year old girl, the post mortem is underway…

Meanwhile, despite declarations to the contrary, it seems that a swine flu vaccine is still months away, according to The Guardian, and is likely to not be ready for the so-called second wave predicted for the autumn.

Several weeks ago, a GP friend told me that word on the street was that one in three people would be infected in that second wave, that ratio was confirmed by BBC news coverage today; some sources say ultimately half of us will eventually be infected. Although the Telegraph reports that according to chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, just one in eight workers will be forced to stay home because of H1N1.

The BBC’s report was made almost in the same breath as they reported the Imperial College research that says it’s almost impossible to tell who has and who hasn’t been infected and so impossible to determine a true mortality rate value for H1N1 (something I discussed here and elsewhere when information about the disease first emerged).

Now, if one in three are likely to be infected and the mortality rate is a conservative 2%…then that will be approximately half a million UK deaths. The mortality rate may be lower, but the second wave could be more virulent and some researchers, as I’ve reported previously, suggest that 6% might die, that’s three times as many deaths. Official guesstimates are saying 65,000, but they admit that the figure is essentially plucked from the air.

One other point of semantics that is rather irritating and could have been avoided with a simple word switch is regarding the usage of “pandemic”. The word has a strict definition in medical circles, referring simply to how far a disease has spread into the world population.

However, many media talk about “pandemic” as if it were synonymous with lethality or virulence and use it to differentiate between the H1N1 flu virus and so-called “seasonal” influenza, which incidentally kills half a million people each year. If only the WHO had chosen the term “emergent” influenza, then I think many of the misconceptions regarding their announcements on pandemic flu would have been avoided…too late now, of course.

Solar power need not be complicated. Research into complex materials that convert the energy from sunlight into electricity is well underway, but offers only low efficiencies.

In contrast direct heating of water sidesteps the intermediary of converting sunlight into electricity and then using that to power a heating element in a water tank. All you need is some kind of pipework on a southerly facing roof in a hot climate. The pipework, painted matt black, carries a cold water supply and being held beneath glass heats up very quickly during the day, transferring the sun’s energy into the flowing cold water and producing piping hot water on the outflow.

Similarly, as any sadistic school child with a magnifying glass and a trapped ant will tell you, focused sunlight can produce a lot of heat in a small volume very quickly. Perfect for cooking.

There is no need for this inefficient conversion. Instead a reflective sunlight collector with a parabolic profile can be used to focus sunlight up and on to a hotplate. Such solar cookers are already well known and many a green barbecue enthusiast will have one in their garden near their greenhouses for cooking burgers, veggie and beef, and anything else they care to eat. The potential for summer savings in the developed world are immense if one removes the requirements for bottled gas and charcoal from the BBQ equation. You could spend more time and finances on creating a luxurious back patio. One complete with rattan garden furniture and colourful decorations.

In the developing world, however, solar cookers might be seen as an essential domestic tool.

• In Ghana, for instance, Zouzugu villagers are using solar cookers to pasteurize water and so kill off waterborne disease, without the need to light a fire.
• In Lesotho, small groups of women now have access to communal solar ovens they use for baking bread.
• In the silk-producing village of Bysanivaripalle, India, an entire village uses solar cooking.
• In Gaza, solar cookers are becoming increasingly common as fuel is in short supply.

The list goes on.

There are dozens of designs for solar cookers and solar kettles, some commercial, some created by aid agencies, others improvised based on published schematics. Fundamentally, they all work by concentrating sunlight. A curved sheet of polished metal or a mirror concentrates sunlight into a small cooking area. Black-bottomed pots and pans are the best receptacles for absorbing heat effectively. Some kind of casing can augment the effect by trapping the heat within the cooking area. This makes it possible to reach similar temperatures on cold and windy days as on hot days.

There is always room for improvement, and if solar cooking is to be adopted more widely and not simply seen as a novelty barbecue tool in the developed world or a rare convenience in the developing world, then inexpensive design improvements are needed.

With this in mind, Nitesh Rathore and Shailendra Shukla of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Banaras Hindu University, in Varanasi, India, have investigated the efficiencies of different approaches to solar cookers. Specifically, they have looked at two major designs: the flat plate box type solar cooker made of steel and the solar parabolic cooker which uses an acrylic mirror.

Shukla points out that there are two classifications of solar cooker: domestic and communal. Domestic type cookers may be either box-type or parabolic, but community solar cookers are usually of the parabolic concentrator type. There are also cookers that track the sun. “A tracking type parabolic concentrator is most suitable for community cooking including restaurants and hotels,” Shukla explains. “One can cook not only food, but also roast nuts, dry vegetables and fruits, pasteurize water and even bake bread, idly on a clear day at noon.”

The solar cooker is a very versatile machine. The domestic type kept in the sun is like having an oven kept to temperature provided you have clear skies. “You can place anything in it at any time and take it out when it’s done,” Shukla told Sciencebase, “What is important for solar cooking is not how hot the sun is but how clear the sunlit sky is. In most places in India one can cook for 70-80% of the days in a year. One can thus solar-cook in all seasons, with unmatched cost-efficiency.”

The teams tests confirm that solar cookers are just as “inefficient” in absolute terms as photovoltaic electrical generation systems. In other words, very little of the energy from the incident sunlight is converted into usable energy. However, with a solar cooker as opposed to a PV system, this matters little as long as the water gets boiled and the food cooked relatively quickly. Different cooker geometries and setup can affect cooking times significantly and they suggest various design modifications that could make solar cooking a viable alternative to a wood-burning fire for millions of people.

The team points out that the main problem with solar cookers in India is not efficiency or design but simply awareness. “There is less knowledge of solar energy utilisation equipment among the people of the country,” Shukla explains, “The use of SC could help in the conservation of conventional fuels, such as firewood and agricultural waste in rural areas of India.” Promoting a shift to solar cooking would preserve ecosystems, and reduce soil erosion and desertification, and unused animal waste could be employed as agricultural fertiliser rather than as fuel.

India has the right climate for solar cooking – with around 3000 sunshine hours a year – has thousands of villages and a population of well over 1 billion many of whom have very little money and limited access to fuels and who could well benefit from solar cooking.

Of course, if you can concentrate sunlight well, then you can sidestep the problem of low efficiency photovoltaics by simply using the heat produced at the focal point to run a generator produce steam for producing electricity.

Stirling Energy Systems and Tessera Solar are developing solar power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories called SunCatchers, the dishes are designed to pipe energy from the sun uses precision mirrors attached to a parabolic dish to a Stirling engine.

The Sterling engine (invented in the early nineteenth century) is a sealed system filled with hydrogen and as the gas heats up and cools down, its pressure rises and falls, this changing pressure drives the engine’s pistons. These pistons can then do mechanical work or drive an electric generator. So direct solar heating might not only be useful for cooking and boiling water, but could also be used to provide electric light and power for mobile phones, laptop computers, and other equipment, all without resorting to fossil fuels, or burning valuable wood and animal waste resources.

Nitesh Rathore, & S.K. Shukla (2009). Experimental investigations and comparison of energy and exergy efficiencies of the box type and Solar Parabolic Cooker Int. J. Energy Technology and Policy, 7 (2), 201-212

Summer science reading requires a sequel as I suspect most of you have read all the previous recommendations for science books, or if you haven’t you’re not likely to pick them up now. So here are a few more choice tomes.

In this 40th anniversary year of the first manned moon landing, Jim Bell brings the lunar surface into stunning three-dimensional relief in Moon 3-D. I am sure children will enjoy this book for the 3D pictures alone. There are plenty of words too, but you’re going to look very silly on the beach this summer with your Moon 3D specs on squint at moon buggies, astronauts, and craters.

Mark Changizi, in The Vision Revolution, is not trying to understand how the brain works the way it does, instead he wants to find out why it works that way. Changizi is a theoretical neurobiologist and his insights could overturn everything we thought we knew about human vision.

What the drug companies won’t tell you and your doctor doesn’t know is not the snappiest of titles and the presence of Andrew Weil’s name on the cover was not a deciding factor in my listing this book. Author Michael Murray is described as a leading authority on natural medicine, whatever that is and his book seems to suggest that so-called modern medicine has created the so-called health crisis we currently face. It always irritates me to read phrases like “natural medicine” as if popping any drug, whether made in a pharma factory or dug up and brewed into a tea is any differently natural. Judge for yourself, but it looks like a conspiracy theory to me.

Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman in Seasons of Life discuss the biological rhythms that living things need to thrive and survive. The season of our birth, apparently, can affect our physiology in many ways, including asthma, possibly autism, eating disorders, and even Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia in later life. It seems somehow vaguely plausible. It will be interesting to see whether the theories of Foster and Kreitzman bear up to close scrutiny.

In The Selfish Genius (geddit?), Fern Elsdon-Baker discusses how Richard Dawkins rewrote Darwin’s legacy. On 1st July 1858, Charles Darwin unveiled his (in)famous theory of natural selection, who was to know that it would still be causing such an intellectual crisis more than a century and a half later. While Dawkins has certainly helped give prominence to evolution, Elsdon-Baker takes issue with his neo-Darwinist spin on the theory. As a pro-science atheist and specialists in the history and communication of evolutionary theory she alludes to the idea that Dawkins’ prescriptive and restrictive approach to the evolution of life on earth may have Darwin spinning in his grave.

Finally, Fixing Climate definitely has the snappiest title of this latest round up of summer science reads. But, a snappy title is what you would expect from the scientist who coined the phrase “global warming” back in 1975. Wallace Broecker, and co-author Robert Kunzig describe Earth’s volatile history and the origins of anthropogenic climate change. Their solution to the imminent global catastrophe is to remove carbon waste from the atmosphere and in support of the concept, Broecker is backing the development of artificial trees that can sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There are many such schemes around, whether we can offset the energy and resources to implement them on a global scale remains to be seen.