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January 13, 2016
What Did Obama Have To Say About Science In His State Of The Union Speech?
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The White House/YouTube
Last night was President Obama’s eighth and final State of the Union address. While the usual chat of nationhood and foreign policy set the tone for the annual speech, Obama made several arresting and exciting references to science.
The speech addressed the United States' advances in science and technology over the past year, along with teasing a handful of new initiatives to support the spirit of science, technology, and the environment.
Where Are The Missing Gravitational Waves?
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A visualisation of gravitational waves emitted by two orbiting supermassive black holes. CSIRO, Author provided
Neutron stars – the dead stellar remnants of old, burned-out stars – are some of the most extreme objects in the universe. They weigh as much as the entire Sun, but are small enough to fit into Sydney’s CBD, and they rotate up to 700 times every second. Imagine that: a whole star rotating faster than the fastest kitchen blender.
Take An Online DNA Test And You Could Be Revealing Far More Than You Realise
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Shutterstock
Getting your DNA sequenced is now so cheap and easy that you don’t need to see a medical professional. A variety of online companies are offering direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests for health or recreational purposes.
Dinosaurs Thought To Have Died In Pompeii-Style Disaster Probably Drowned In Porridgy Torrent
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Bests friends for a reason. Shutterstock
The discovery of hundreds of extremely well-preserved dinosaur fossils in China in the 1990s, some in the postures they adopted at the moment of death, has kept scientists busy ever since. The finding led to comparisons with the Roman city of Pompeii, where citizens were entombed in the falling ash from the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Woof! Dogs Really Can Tell How Their Owners Are Feeling, New Study Shows
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Bests friends for a reason. Shutterstock
Can dogs tell when we are happy, sad or angry? As a dog owner, I feel confident not only that I can tell what kind of emotional state my pets are in, but also that they respond to my emotions. Yet as a hard-headed scientist, I try to take a more rational and pragmatic view. These personal observations seem more likely to result from my desire for a good relationship with my dogs.
January 12, 2016
Obama Says Biden Will Lead New Effort to Cure Cancer
In a State of the Union speech largely devoid of any lofty legislative goals President Barack Obama did introduce one aspirational goal: curing cancer. The charge will be led by Vice President Joe Biden, the president said, laying out a singular specific policy goal in a speech that he acknowledged went “easy on the traditional list of proposals for the year ahead.”
In his final State of the Union remarks, a speech delivered before a deeply divided Congress, the president mostly stuck to outlining his administration’s accomplishments during his two terms ahead of a year that seems poised to have few legislative actions to add to the list. Number one in his performance review: shoring up the economy. He pointed to the country’s strong job growth in the past two years, the auto industry’s record sales last year and the falling unemployment numbers.
He also touted the United States and global actions that led to last month’s historic climate change agreement in Paris. That summit brought together more than 190 nations to try to hold global average temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius. “Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it,” the president said, noting they would be “pretty lonely” because most people and “200 nations around the world” all “agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.”
One of the President’s most popular lines of the night dealt with how to tackle immense challenges like climate change and cancer. He likened the science and technology required to combat such massive issues to that of the 1960s space program: “Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there. We didn’t argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget. We built a space program almost overnight, and twelve years later, we were walking on the moon.”
On the new cancer initiative, he said, “Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer… Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done,” he said. The effort, President Obama noted, has more support and resources now than it has had for a decade. The White House separately sent out a few details about this effort, stressing that great advances against cancer could be achieved by increasing public and private resources to fight this disease group and breaking down silos to better share information and ensure patients have access to their own medical data and clinical trials. “The goal of this initiative is simple–to double the rate of progress. To make a decade worth of advances in five years,” the White House said, in a statement.
To kick off this effort the vice president will head to the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine on Friday to get a better grasp of the latest advances in the field. Then, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, next week Biden plans to continue the discussion about cancer advances. Also, later this month, the vice president plans to hold the first of several meetings across the cabinet and relevant agencies to discuss how to improve federal investment and further support cancer research and treatment.
During tonight’s State of the Union address, Obama did not provide any further details about exactly what this effort would look like long-term or what benchmarks would measure success. Similarly, he mentioned having ideas about “helping students learn to write computer code” and “personalizing medical treatments for patients” but did not go into further details about if he was referring to existing policies – like the Precision Medicine Initiative introduced in an earlier State of the Union – or alternative ones he hopes to introduce in the next year. Students, he said, should have affordable college opportunities and every student should have access to “hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one.”
Although the president sought to keep his speech focused on his presidency rather than the current election cycle vitriol–minus, of course, some backhanded references to several of the Republican presidential candidates–the speech did directly touch on the reality of what voters should think about for the next Congress and president. Of the four questions the president said Americans should be asking themselves–including how to achieve the best economy, safety and politics of America–the remaining question was “how do we make technology work for us, and not against us–especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change?”
To that end, he also called for a steady commitment to developing clean energy. “I’m going to push to change the way we manage our oil and gas resources so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet,” he said. Such an effort will create jobs and create an infrastructure for the future, he said, though he acknowledged, “none of this is going to happen overnight.”
The speech comes just a week after the president rolled out new executive actions for tightening gun control laws through more strenuously enforcing existing laws and expanding federal background checks on online and gun show sales. President Obama underscored his focus on this thorny topic during the speech with an empty chair in the First Lady’s box representing victims of gun violence. But he only dedicated one sentence to the issue in his speech, saying we should protect “our kids from gun violence.”
A couple of other science and health-related themes were touched on during the president’s remarks including combating the interconnected issues of prescription drug abuse and heroin use, the benefits of paid leave for new parents, and advances against HIV and malaria.
The discussion about science continues tomorrow. Viewers could get questions about climate change, energy or STEM on twitter answered on twitter using the #BigBlockofCheeseDay hashtag between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. tomorrow. During that time, agency and cabinet leadership would make themselves available to tweet back, the White House wrote.
Roman Sanitation Didn’t Stop Roaming Parasites
Welcome to Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on January 12, 2016. I’m Steve Mirsky. On this episode:
“There was surprisingly no drop in intestinal parasite infections during the Roman period compared with the previous period where you didn’t have any toilets.”
That’s Piers Mitchell. He’s in the department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the interaction between humans and parasites during evolution. As well as parasites in past civilizations and how they’ve affected human health. He’s the author of the 2015 book Sanitation, Latrines and Intestinal Parasites in Past Populations. And he’s just published a paper in the journal Parasitology titled Human parasites in the Roman World: health consequences of conquering an empire.
Evolution, parasites and ancient Rome are all favorite subjects of mine, so as soon as I saw the title of the paper I got in touch with Mitchell. I asked him to talk about the research and its counterintuitive findings. He sent me a five minute voice recording via email. I was originally planning to pull a quote or two for our shorter podcast, 60-Second Science, but his entire mini-lecture is so good I decided to just play it all for you straight thru. Here’s Piers Mitchell.
Mitchell: So the Romans were very well known for the sanitation that they developed and spread across the Roman Empire. So before the time of the Romans we don’t see toilets and things like that in Iron Age and Bronze Age Europe. But the Romans introduced these technologies where we have multi-seat public latrines with handwashing facilities and sponges to wipe yourself after you’ve been to the toilet. And they had sewers to take the feces away under the roads to be disposed of elsewhere. They also had clean drinking water from aqueducts and laws that involved taking rubbish and feces out of towns to try and make them cleaner.
So we would think that all these things would improve health of people under Roman rule, especially when it comes to those parasites that might be spread by poor sanitation and contamination of your town by feces.
So I looked at the different evidence that we can see for how this would have affected health in the past. So we looked at endoparasites, so these are parasitic worms and single cell parasites that cause dysentery, for example. And looked at all the archaeological evidence for these right across the Roman Empire compared with the evidence in the Bronze and Iron Age but before the Roman Empire. We also looked at ectoparasites, looking at how common fleas and body lice and head lice and so on were. And we looked for changes over time, because we thought that Roman baths, which would clean your skin and clean your hair regularly, might potentially cut down on the number of ectoparasites that people would have in the Roman period. And we could look at that archaeologically too.
And what I found was that there was surprisingly no drop in intestinal parasite infections during the Roman period compared with the previous period where you didn’t have any toilets. That was really surprising because modern research suggests that having toilets should cut down on these parasites. And we think that one possible explanation for this could be that the collection of the feces and rubbish from towns under Roman law was then taken out to fertilize the crops, which gave you more crops but unfortunately resulted in recontamination of the population. Because the human feces then got onto the plants that were then eaten again. So it may be that these very sanitation laws about keeping streets clean actually led to reinfection of the population. Which was obviously not quite what they had in mind.
The other thing we found was that the use of Roman baths doesn’t seem to have cut down on the prevalence of parasites on the skin and hair either. So if you compare the number of ectoparasites such as body lice and fleas they were just as common in Roman period York as it was in Viking and medieval period York in Britain. And so Vikings in the medieval period didn’t go to the baths regularly, Romans did, but we still have just as many body lice and fleas. Washing doesn’t seem to have cut down on ectoparasites during the Roman period either.
The other fascinating thing I found was that the fish tapeworm seems to become much more common across the Roman Empire compared with, in the Bronze and Iron Age before the time of the Romans we see relatively low levels of fish tapeworm. And one possibility to explain this is that the Romans were very fond of an uncooked fermented fish sauce called garum. And this was made in northern Europe and then spread across the Empire, because it was put in sealed jars which could then be traded right around the Empire. So it could be that this garum, fish sauce, was able to spread fish tapeworm from northern Europe right across the empire into areas where the fish tapeworm wasn’t previously endemic.
So it looks like this might be an example of the culinary ideas of the Romans being spread across their empire and consequently more people getting infected with parasites. So we could argue that this was a bad health consequence of conquering an empire.
So it’s not to say that toilets and drains and things were bad in any way, they certainly would have helped with smells. It would mean you wouldn’t have to pop home if you were out shopping in town, you could have used the public latrines which would have been a good idea. And similarly public baths would have made people smell less and make them cleaner. But neither of these things seem to have actually had a health benefit when it comes to infections such as parasites. And that’s a particularly unexpected finding but one that the evidence seems to pretty convincing for.
Steve:
That’s it for this episode. Get your science news at our website, www.scientificamerican.com. Where you can track down my 2013 column that was headlined Toilet Issue: Anthropologists Uncover All the Ways We've Wiped, also about ancient bathroom habits. For example, the Greeks had a saying that “three stones are enough to wipe.”
And follow us on Twitter, where you’ll get a tweet whenever a new item hits the website. Our twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American’s Science Talk, I’m Steve Mirsky, thanks for clicking on us.
Ancient 10-Meter-Long Crocodile Discovered
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Comparison among Machimosaurus skulls. (A) M. buffetauti, (B) M. mosae (C) M. hugii, (D) M. rex. Reconstruction of M. rex body based on preserved elements (E). F. Fanti et al., 2016 Cretaceous Research
Lower Cretaceous sediments from an unexplored area of Tunisia have yielded the fossilized remains of a 10-meter-long marine crocodile – the largest ocean-dwelling croc ever discovered. Researchers named the new extinct species Machimosaurus rex, and it’s described in Cretaceous Research this week.
The “Pompeii” Of Bronze Age Houses Was Just Uncovered In Britain
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The dwellings are preserved exactly as they were when they collapsed into a river. Cambridge Archaeological Unit
In the marshy fens of Cambridgeshire, archaeologists have uncovered what is being described as the “best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found" in Britain. The incredible find provides a snapshot into the everyday life of those living in the marshes around 3,000 years ago. Following a fire, the circular houses and their contents collapsed into an underlying river and became enveloped in a thick layer of silt, perfectly frozen in time.
Mark Zuckerberg Just Posted A Photograph That Sent Anti-Vaxxers Insane
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Mark Zuckerberg and daughter Max with the photograph that sent vaccine opponents apoplectic. Credit: Mark Zuckerberg
The decision by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to vaccinate their daughter Max has prompted a response from anti-vaccinators, and it's even uglier than their usual behavior. More than just an horrific insight into the worst of human nature, the reaction exposes some of the thinking that drives the movement.
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