Potential neurotoxin in our food

Wired Science published an article a couple of days ago on PBDE, a neurotoxin that also found its way into found in our food.

PBDE (PolyBrominated Diphenyl Ethers) are compounds that are used as flame retardants and therefore can be found in a wide array of products, including building materials, electronics, furnishings, motor vehicles, airplanes, plastics, polyurethane foams, and textiles.

Since the 1990s scientists have questioned their safety. People are exposed to low-levels of PBDEs through ingestion of food and by inhalation. PBDEs bioaccumulate in blood, breast milk, and fat tissues. Personnel associated with the manufacture of PBDE-containing products are exposed to highest levels of PBDEs. Bioaccumulation is of particular concern in such instances, especially for personnel in recycling and repair plants of PBDE-containing products.

People are also exposed to these chemicals in their domestic environment because of their prevalence in common household items. Studies in Canada have found significant concentrations of PBDEs in common foods such as salmon, ground beef, butter, and cheese. PBDEs have also been found at high levels in indoor dust, sewage sludge, and effluents from wastewater treatment plants. Increasing PBDE levels have been detected in the blood of marine mammals such as harbor seals.

Click on the link below to read the Wired Science article.

Another geo-engineering gimmick: dumping lime into oceans

The following Guardian article talks about another one of those half-cocked geo-engineering fixes: liming the world’s oceans. The guy who promotes the idea is a former management consultant, which immediately raises the question: what makes him qualified to design climate change solutions?

Apart from that minor detail, this band aid, like all the other ones, makes no attempt to determine any possible consequences of lime dumping for the complex web of interactions within the oceanic environment as well as between it and weather patterns.

Sometimes I feel these self-proclaimed geo-engineers are the modern equivalent of snake oil peddlers …

Just add lime (to the sea) – the latest plan to cut CO2 emissions

• Project ‘could turn back clock’ on carbon dioxide
• Guardian conference will select top 10 climate ideas

Duncan Clark
The Guardian

Putting lime into the oceans could stop or even reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, according to proposals unveiled at a conference on climate change solutions in Manchester today.

According to its advocates, the same technique could help fix one of the most dangerous side effects of man-made CO2 emissions: rising ocean acidity.

The project, known as Cquestrate, is the brainchild of Tim Kruger, a former management consultant. “This is an idea that can not only stop the clock on carbon dioxide, it can turn it back,” he said, although he conceded that tipping large quantities of lime into the sea would currently be illegal.

The oceans are a key part of the natural carbon cycle, in which carbon dioxide is circulated between the land, seas and atmosphere. About one-third of the CO2 released into the air by humans each year is soaked up by the oceans. This helps slow the rate of global warming but increases ocean acidity, posing a potentially disastrous threat to marine ecosystems.

Kruger’s scheme aims to boost the ability of the oceans to absorb CO2 but to do so in a way that helps reduce rather than increase ocean acidity. This is achieved by converting limestone into lime, in a process similar to those used in the cement industry, and adding the lime to seawater.

The lime reacts with CO2 dissolved in the water, converting it into bicarbonate ions, thereby decreasing the acidity of the water and enabling the oceans to absorb more CO2 from the air, so reducing global warming.

Kruger said: “It’s essential that we reduce our emissions, but that may not be enough. We need a plan B to actually reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We need to research such concepts now – not just the science but also the legal, ethical and governance considerations.”

Kruger’s plan was one of 20 innovative schemes proposed at the Manchester Report, a two-day search for the best ideas to tackle climate change staged by the Guardian as part of the Manchester International Festival.

A panel of experts chaired by Lord Bingham, formerly Britain’s most senior judge, will select the 10 most promising ideas. These will be featured in a report that will be published in the Guardian next week and circulated to policymakers around the world.

Climate change secretary Ed Miliband told the conference the biggest danger faced by campaigners was creating a sense of defeatism. “We need to show people how they can aggregate their individual actions and be part of a bigger whole,” he said.

Cquestrate is one of a number of so-called “geo-engineering schemes” that have been proposed to intervene in the Earth’s systems in order to tackle climate change.

Kruger admits there are challenges to overcome: the world would need to mine and process about 10 cubic kilometres of limestone each year to soak up all the emissions the world produces, and the plan would only make sense if the CO2 resulting from lime production could be captured and buried at source.

Chris Goodall, one of the experts assessing the schemes, said of Cquestrate: “The basic concept looks good, though further research is needed into the feasibility.”

Another marine geo-engineering scheme was presented by Professor Stephen Salter, of Edinburgh University.

His proposal is to build a fleet of remote-controlled, energy-self-sufficient ships that would spray minuscule droplets of seawater into the air. The droplets would whiten and expand clouds, reflecting sunlight away from the Earth and into space.

Salter said 300 ships would increase cloud reflectivity enough to cancel out the temperature rise caused by man-made climate change so far, but 1,800 would be needed to offset a doubling of CO2, something expected within a few decades.

Further Reading

New Geoengineering Scheme Tackles Ocean Acidification, Too (Wired Science)

Programmed for the Pleistocene Age, our brains don’t grasp the dangers of climate change

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Our political system sometimes produces such skewed results that it’s difficult not to blame bloviating politicians. But maybe the deeper problem lies in our brains.

Evidence is accumulating that the human brain systematically misjudges certain kinds of risks. In effect, evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs, but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.

If you come across a garter snake, nearly all of your brain will light up with activity as you process the “threat.” Yet if somebody tells you
that carbon emissions will eventually destroy Earth as we know it, only the small part of the brain that focuses on the future — a portion of the prefrontal cortex — will glimmer.

“We humans do strange things, perhaps because vestiges of our ancient brain still guide us in the modern world,” notes Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and author of a book on how our minds assess risks.

Consider America’s political response to these two recent challenges:

1. President Obama proposes moving some inmates from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to supermax prisons from which no one has ever escaped. This is the “enemy with club” threat that we have evolved to be alert to, so Democrats and Republicans alike erupt in outrage and kill the plan.
2. The climate warms, ice sheets melt and seas rise. The House scrounges a narrow majority to pass a feeble cap-and-trade system, but Senate passage is uncertain. The issue is complex, full of trade-offs and more cerebral than visceral — and so it doesn’t activate our warning systems.

“What’s important is the threats that were dominant in our evolutionary history,” notes Daniel Gilbert , a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In contrast, he says, the kinds of dangers that are most serious today — such as climate change — sneak in under the brain’s radar.

Professor Gilbert argues that the threats that get our attention tend to have four features.

First, they are personalized and intentional. The human brain is highly evolved for social behavior (“that’s why we see faces in clouds, not clouds in faces,” says Mr. Gilbert), and, like gazelles, we are instinctively and obsessively on the lookout for predators and enemies.

Second, we respond to threats that we deem disgusting or immoral — characteristics more associated with sex, betrayal or spoiled food than with atmospheric chemistry. “That’s why people are incensed about flag burning, or about what kind of sex people have in private, even though that doesn’t really affect the rest of us,” Professor Gilbert said. “Yet where we have a real threat to our well-being, like global warming, it doesn’t ring alarm bells.”

Third, threats get our attention when they are imminent, while our brain circuitry is often cavalier about the future. That’s why we are so bad at saving for retirement. Economists tear their hair out at a puzzlingly irrational behavior called hyperbolic discounting: people’s preference for money now rather than much larger payments later. For example, in studies, most Americans prefer $50 now to $100 in six months, even though that represents a 100 percent return.

Fourth, we’re far more sensitive to changes that are instantaneous than those that are gradual. We yawn at a slow melting of the glaciers, while if they shrank overnight we might take to the streets.

In short, we’re brilliantly programmed to act on the risks that confronted us in the Pleistocene Age. We’re less adept with 21st-century challenges.

At the University of Virginia, Professor Jonathan Haidt shows his Psychology 101 students how evolution has prepared us to fear some things: He asks how many students would be afraid to stand within 10 feet of a friend carrying a pet boa constrictor. Many hands go up, although almost none of the students have been bitten by a snake.

“The objects of our phobias, and the things that are actually dangerous to us, are almost unrelated in the modern world, but they were related in our ancient environment,” Mr. Haidt said. “We have no ‘preparedness’ to fear a gradual rise in the Earth’s temperature.”

This short-circuitry in our brains explains many of our policy priorities. We Americans spend nearly $700 billion a year on the military and less than $3 billion on the F.D.A., even though food-poisoning kills more Americans than foreign armies and terrorists. We’re just lucky we don’t have a cabinet-level Department of Snake Extermination.

Still, all is not lost, particularly if we understand and acknowledge our neurological shortcomings — and try to compensate with rational analysis. When we work at it, we are indeed capable of foresight: If we can floss today to prevent tooth decay in later years, then perhaps we can also drive less to save the planet.

[Original article published in the New York Times under the title “When our brains short-circuit“]

On psychotherapy and the potential and limits of personal power

I don’t wanna raise the spectre of NLP here, but there could definitely be some poignancy in this hilarious “MadTV Bob Newhart/Mo Collins STOP IT” skit in regards to the relationship between clients and therapists: both sides for their own reasons very often depend on prolonging the journey. The latter for the money to be made and status to be gained from other people’s suffering, and the former from not wanting to give up the ingrained attachments to their mind’s habits.

Of course: it’s not always that easy. There are lots of justified questions marks behind therapeutic approaches like CBT, NLP and the like that are aimed at the behavioural or functional level but don’t attempt to address the underlying root causes for dysfunction. On the other hand, psychotherapies, which do claim to go deep, are often not very successful either, with people spending decades with their therapists without much to show for (and let’s not even talk about drug dependent psychiatry or the unregulated counselling industry).

What I take from this humourous skit is to first learn to become self-aware and to trust oneself with developing ways of relating differently to the world and, even more important, oneself – after all: the world happens in our minds. If the most sincere and disciplined self-directed efforts don’t work, then think of seeing a professional – while remembering though that even in these situations it us who need to do the work. Therapists are facilitators – we are the healers.

Gaia or Medea: is Earth driven by maintaining life or fostering self-destruction?

(Image: Sarah Howell)

I don’t think it’s an either/or question but one of difficult to predict cycles with uncertain outcomes. Scientists nevertheless try to come up with simplistic explanation for highly complex systems evolutions; the Gaia hypothesis is one of those, and the New Scientists’ article below uses the Medea metaphor to coin what it considers is the proof for the other extreme: the planet’s inherent drive to self-destruction.

Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis is based on the notion of homeostasis, meaning the Earth as a living organism itself constantly provides maintaining conditions that support life. “The entire range of living matter… from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts,” wrote Lovelock in his groundbreaking 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth.

The New Scientist on the other hand points out that the opposite seems to be the case, citing a growing body of research which shows that life on Earth has repeatedly endured “Medean” events that brought the planet’s biosphere to the edge of total destruction. The article explains quite a few of them, grouping them into the categories of atmospheric crises, total glaciations and mass extinctions of life forms; the article also provides a link to an interactive timeline of those events.

I think our recent ancestors, while not having had our scientific tools, had a much better understanding of the changing fortunes of life on Earth and in our universe. Hindu literature of old for example talks about Brahm constantly devouring life forms while giving birth to new ones – a principle applied to the whole universe, not just to the planet we inhabit (they also knew about expansions and contractions of the universe). Maybe our scientists should now and then consult works like the Vedas when forming theories about life ;).

Bacteria produce network via nanowires

Microbes May Be More Networked Than You Are

Wired Science
By Yuri Gorby

When we think of networks, we think of humans and the cables we’ve run around the world to connect our species. Figuring out how to move electrons has transformed human society, but we are not the only species on earth that lives in a wired world.

A few years ago, microbiologist Gemma Reguera of Michigan State University reported that a certain type of bacteria could use rust to grow electrically conductive appendages. Shortly thereafter, my lab showed that many more bacterial species also had the ability to grow nanowires. The oxygen-making cyanobacteria that “invented” photosynthesis produce conductive nanowires in response to limited amounts of carbon dioxide. Heat-loving, methane-producing consortia of microorganisms even appear to produce nanowires that connect organisms from separate domains of life.

We are slowly, yet steadily, realizing that many (perhaps most?) bacteria produce nanowires. And the extracellular structures connecting bacterial cells into complex integrated communities create a pattern that looks suspiciously like a neural network.

I believe we now stand at the edge of a new scientific frontier. The study of Electromicrobiology will certainly provide new insights into the components, reactivity and roles of bacterial nanowires. Deeper knowledge of bacterial activity is tantamount to greater knowledge of our own bodies and the Earth. A human body contains a natural complement of 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Prokaryotes, organisms that lack a cell nucleus like bacteria and archaea, form the majority of the Earth’s biomass and are responsible for cycling its most important nutrients.

We’re still in the early stages of this research: Only six studies have been published on bacterial nanowires, but a number of intriguing possibilities exist about what role they could play in the bacterial world.

It is already generally accepted that many species of bacteria communicate by releasing and sensing certain types of chemical signals. One of the most exciting hypotheses concerning bacterial nanowires is the possibility that they are part of another type of primitive (or advanced?) communication system. When one considers that individual cells — each with their own set integrated of metabolic reactions — are connected by electrically conductive filaments, this hypothesis is quite reasonable. The rate or frequency of electron transfer from one organism to another could reasonably serve a form of communication.

Demonstrating that bacteria can communicate using integrated neurobiological circuitry will be no easy feat, but success in this pursuit will fundamentally change our understanding of microbial physiology and ecology.

Scientists in my lab and others are still characterizing these tiny electrical appendages. We know that nanowires are composed largely of protein, but the type of proteins appears to vary from organism to organism. They can grow to be more than ten times the length of a typical bacterium and are typically 8 to 10 nanometers in diameter. Long wires like this could be used as a kind of breathing tube. The evidence suggests that nanowires can transfer electrons over distances ten times the length of an individual cell. This would allow cells to access an energy source that is relatively far away from them, but it’s still unclear whether the nanowires can be used this way.

Perhaps more importantly, understanding the strategies for efficient energy distribution and communication in the oldest organisms on the planet may serve as useful analogies of sustainability within our own species.

Yuri Gorby is an electromicrobiologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego. He began his groundbreaking work on the electrical interactions between microbes at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. His previous work included major publications on bioremediation of contaminated locations by bacteria.

See Also:

• Wired Science’s Complete ‘From the Fields’ Series
• Op-Ed: Why the Elevator Floor Is So Interesting
• Op-Ed: Stop Trying to Save the Planet
• Op-Ed: What Marmots Teach Us About Terrorism
• Op-Ed: Reversing the Congressional Science Lobotomy

A cosmological timeline

Visualisation of the Big Bang

I had this piece sitting on my ‘to-publish’ list for a couple of weeks now. It was created by a friend of mine, to be written into a 30m long brass spiral, which is the main feature of the floor for a ritual space she has created at her and her partner’s home. The spiral is kind of a walk along the unfolding of our universe according to the cosmological views of a range of scientists, authors and poets, including mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris and cultural historian, geologian and planetary guardian Thomas Berry.

Musical ability and social bonding genetically linked

It sounds warm, fuzzy and kind of uplifting: those with musical talents also have a strong desire for social bonds. The following New Scientist article points to two variants of a gene correlating with musical ability, a gene that also is linked to bonding, love and altruism. It’s important though to note the word “variants”; it might explain the many exceptions from the hypothesis.

MUSICAL ability is linked to gene variants that help control social bonding. The finding adds weight to the notion that music developed to cement human relationships.

Irma Järvelä of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and her colleagues recruited people from 19 families with at least one professional musician in each and tested their aptitudes for distinguishing rhythm, pitch and musical pattern. These abilities – which are thought to be innate and unteachable – ran in families, consistent with their being under genetic control.

When the researchers scanned the volunteers’ genes, they found that two variants of the gene AVPR1A correlated strongly with musical ability (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005534). AVPR1A codes for a receptor for the hormone arginine vasopressin and has been linked with bonding, love and altruism in people.

Järvelä thinks musical aptitude evolved because musical people were better at forming attachments to others: “Think of lullabies, which increase social bonding and possibly the survival of the baby.”

US Association of Physicians calls for Moratorium on GMO Foods

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has just issued a call for an immediate moratorium on Genetically Manipulated (GMO) Foods.

By F. William Engdahl
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13701
Reposted from Global Research, May 22, 2009

In a just-released position paper on GMO foods, the AAEM states that ‘GM foods pose a serious health risk’ and calls for a moratorium on GMO foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes ‘there is more than a casual association between GMO foods and adverse health effects’ and that ‘GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health.’ The report is a devastating blow to the multibillion dollar international agribusiness industry, most especially to Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and related herbicides.

In a press release dated May 19, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, which describes itself as ‘an international association of physicians and other professionals dedicated to addressing the clinical aspects of environmental health,’ called immediately for the following emergency measures to be taken regarding human consumption of GMO foods:

• A moratorium on GMO food; implementation of immediate long term safety testing and labelling of GMO food.
• Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community and the public to avoid GMO foods.
• Physicians to consider the role of GMO foods in their patients’ disease processes.
• More independent long term scientific studies to begin gathering data to investigate the role of GMO foods on human health.

The AAEM chairperson, Dr Amy Dean notes that ‘Multiple animal studies have shown that GM foods cause damage to various organ systems in the body. With this mounting evidence, it is imperative to have a moratorium on GM foods for the safety of our patients’ and the public’s health.’ The President of the AAEM, Dr Jennifer Armstrong stressed that ‘Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions. The most common foods in North America which are consumed that are GMO are corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil.’ The AAEM’s position paper on Genetically Modified foods can be found at http:aaemonline.org.

The paper states that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) technology ‘abrogates natural reproductive processes, selection occurs at the single cell level, the procedure is highly mutagenic and routinely breeches genera barriers, and the technique has only been used commercially for 10 years.’

Perfectionism shortens life

It’s not really surprising given the increase in stress levels: perfectionism and neuroticism are deemed to shorten people’s life span according to this report on a Canadian study (reposted from Miller-McCune):

Perfectionism, as a way of life, tends to be self-defeating. New research suggests it may also be deadly.

That’s the conclusion of a Canadian study of senior citizens just published in the Journal of Health Psychology. Researchers conducted psychological tests on 450 elderly residents of southern Alberta, and then kept tabs on them for 6½ years. During that period, just over 30 percent of the subjects, who ranged in age from 65 to 87, died.

Perfectionists — that is, those who expressed “a strong motivation to be perfect” and revealed a tendency toward “all or nothing thinking” — were approximately 51 percent more likely to have died during the life of the study than those with more reasonable self-expectations. Those who were rated high on neuroticism — for instance, those who reported often feeling tense — did even worse: Their risk of death nearly doubled compared with those with a more relaxed disposition.

In contrast, “risk of death was significantly lower for high scorers in conscientiousness, extraversion and optimism,” reports lead author Prem S. Fry, a research psychologist at British Columbia’s Trinity Western University. She notes that previous research has found that “perfectionism exerts a great deal of stress on health,” while optimism “is viewed as a stress-alleviating factor.”

“In short, our findings confirmed that conscientiousness and extraversion are health-related dimensions that are enabling in their effects, and perfectionism and neuroticism are disabling,” she concludes. “It is noteworthy that these associations endure well into late life.”

The findings have interesting implications for seniors’ health care providers and caregivers. They suggest physicians and family members are well-advised to be vigilant in noticing perfectionist tendencies, and understanding of the physical and psychological toll they can take.

The desire to pursue a favorite task or hobby at the same high level one achieved in previous years is very understandable, and in many ways commendable. But at the same time, it’s important to be cognizant of the stress such an effort can produce and the negative health effects that can result.