Harper's contempt for Science and Canadian values

One of the fundamental differences between the previous Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney and the current Harper Conservatives (Reform-Alliance Party; i.e. CRAP) has been the complete abandonment of progressive environmental policies and investment in the basic sciences.

First, let us consider what Mulroney did in his two-terms that has lead some environmentalists to call him the "greenest Prime Minister" in Canadian history.

• In 1987, the Tories helped establish "The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer".  The global treaty placed a ban on the destructive CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and jeopardizing life on this planet.  
• Acid rain pollution was dramatically curtailed through cooperative legislation with the Americans.  
• A moratorium on fishing Cod, which twenty years later has yet to recover
• At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the United Nations Environment Programme was championed by Canada, and Canadians served as their leaders.

Whereas, Mulroney could be considered the high-water mark in environmental protection, the Harper government without any doubt is about as low and dirty as a clogged drainage pipe.

Plenty of people have talked of the Conservative's fealty to market based approaches, which is vaguely strange given that the current Prime Minster has never held a real job or career outside politics; his Finance Minister Jim Flahery was a motor vehicle accident and personal injury litigation lawyer (aka Ambulance chaser); and key Minsters Peter MacKay, Tony Clement, John Baird, and Jason Kenney have spent much of their adult lives as professional politicians.  So having established that none of these men has any experience in actually running anything but their mouths off, on the tax payers dime, it is less than obvious why anyone would believe that they understand what they are doing when it comes to making decisions about science funding in the public's interest.

Stephen Harper's desire to constantly control the message and limit the information that reaches the public has become legendary.  Like the Republican Party under George W. Bush, Harper has fought to manipulate the press and machinations within the government to serve his exclusive political goals.  The influence and taint of lobbyists peddling preferred laws, as it is done in Washington DC, is now the norm in his majority government.  Legislation is proudly rammed through parliament without adequate review or discussion from opposition parties or committee members input.  Through this unsightly metamorphosis into a corporate state, impediments such as empirical data, scientific facts, and international treaties to protect the environment have been removed.

Harper has pursued a global embargo on the speech of research scientists affiliated with the Government of Canada for the past few years.  For example, prominent scientists have been barred from granting interviews, providing opinions to the public on their subject of expertise, or discussing  their publications at conferences.  Environment Canada prevented  Dr. David Tarasick from "published findings about one of the largest ozone holes ever discovered above the Arctic."  Similarly, Kristi Miller was prevented from discussing her research into  a virus that might be killing British Columbia's wild sockeye salmon, despite her research being published in the journal Science.  An article in the scientific journal Nature further illustrates the problem:

Carefully researched reports intended for the public — Climate Change and Health, from Health Canada, and Climate Change Impacts, from Natural Resources Canada — were released without publicity, late on Friday afternoons, and appeared on government websites only after long delays.

The government demands that any information provided to the public must be vetted and cleared with a local propaganda officer from the Conservative party.

Science that offends the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists, the same group that makes up Harper's western base, is also edited from public disclosure.

When Scott Dallimore, a geoscientist for Natural Resources Canada in Sidney, British Columbia, reported evidence of the colossal flood that occurred in northern Canada at the end of the last ice age (Nature 464, 740–743; 2010), he was put through the message-moulding machine. As a result, Canada's taxpayers, who funded the research, were left in the dark. While the news broke elsewhere, journalists in Canada who had previously had open access to Dallimore, a gifted communicator, were left spinning their wheels while deadlines passed. The flood happened 13,000 years ago, so how can this work be construed as politically sensitive?

Recently, the Harper government changed the laws so that not-for-profit groups that engage in political criticism are penalized to prevent them for so-called abusing their registered charitable status.

The nearly paranoid and conspiratorial nature of these acts, stems from the Conservative's desire to prevent any information that may run counter to their pro-corporate or religious minded policies from reaching the public and interfering with their program.

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It is not just the message that Conservatives loath; it is the scientists that accumulate all these facts that make Conservative-backers so angry with the fact-based world.  Over the past year, the Harper government has engaged in a systematic withdrawal of funding for Environment Canada projects and the scientists involved in those research projects.  A student researcher at the University of  Toronto discusses his perspective:

Over the past several months we have seen major cuts to Environment Canada that are leaving it without any real scientific or research power. We have seen many prominent scientific jobs cut, research funding slashed, and our ability to effectively do environmental assessment and management largely neutralized.

Given that public funding is the main source of revenue for environmental sciences at Canadian universities, which has now evaporated, researchers are packing up and leaving Canada en mass.

In 2011-12 Environment Canada had its budget cut by 20% to 854 million dollars.   Eleven percent of the department personnel was cut last year, with a total of 776 employees told that their jobs may be terminated.  Those affected include engineers, meteorologists, scientists, chemists, and biologists. Given the extent of previous cuts imposed by previous budgets, the department is said to be barely functioning.  Treasury Board Minister, Tony Clement (aka Mr. hundred thousand dollar Gazebo),  facetiously told reporters that “Environment Canada is open for business, they’re doing their job, and they want to do it more efficiently.”

Canada was a pioneer in ozone monitoring technologies, which "led to the discovery that the world's ozone layer was dangerously thinning in the 1970s, which in turn led to the successful Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances."  The internationally renowned ozone monitoring network, has about one-third of the ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic region. The data produced by this network is heavily relied on by scientists around the world.  A single person was running the entire archives, until the conservatives closed down the The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka, Nunavut.

Not convinced at stopping the flow of information, eliminating the funding of  researchers, and closing down research stations, the conservatives have decided to destroy Arctic ice core bores that provide evidence of the atmospheric gaseous concentrations for thousands of years.  Mark Twickler, director of the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colo said, “These ice cores are so valuable that the international community, including the U.S., will do whatever we have to to preserve these remarkable archives of past climate.”

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is undergoing a similar budget slashing process. Budget cuts have lead to the closing of the Experimental Lakes Area. The program used a region of 58 freshwater lakes near Kenora, in western Ontario, where scientists conducted experiments on the effects of pollution.

The Environmental Lakes Area program was launched in 1968 and led to important discoveries about the effects of pollutants such as phosphates in household detergents and mercury on bodies of fresh water, prompting tighter regulation in Canada and the U.S.

Researchers from across the world are claiming disbelief at the action.  Harvard University aquatic sciences professor Elsie Sunderland said:

[she] was pretty shocked... This is one of the foremost research projects and places to do research in the world. To have it shut down is just appalling. It's just embarrassing. 

Cynthia Gilmour, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, said  she "was stunned".  Jim Elser an aquatic ecologist at Arizona State University said in an article in the journal Nature,  titled "Canada's renowned freshwater research site to close," that it was "completely shocking".  Elser said it was equivallent to the "U.S. government shutting down Los Alamos — its most important nuclear-physics site — or taking the world's best telescope and turning it off."

In a separate incident, 625 prominent scientists have written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and warned him not to "gut fish-habitat protections they say would put species at risk and damage Canada’s international standing."  The legislation being implemented as part of the Fisheries Act in Bill C-38, the omnibus budget bill, would eliminate components of federal law that bans activity that results in "harmful" alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat.  The new law consists of a  prohibition against activity that results in "serious" harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or aboriginal fishery, or any fish that supports one of those three fisheries.

David Schindler, ecology professor at the University of Alberta said the “pro-development” Conservative government was determined to abrogate long standing environmental protections.  Others are equally pessimistic of Harper's infringement on established environmental protections and resource management:

Nick Dulvy, a Simon Fraser University professor who worked formerly as a fisheries scientist in the British government, said the two moves add to his growing alarm about the Harper government's "misuse" of science.

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Hannah McKinnon of the Climate Action Network Canada (CAN Canada), an environmental NGO, made the comparison between funding essential scientific research that monitors the health of the nation versus providing 2-billion dollars to build ships for the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard and another 29 billion dollars allocated in a non-competitive and rigged bid for 65 F-35 fighter jets that don't even meet the Department of Defense's own minimal specifications.  The government can find billions of dollars to spend on pet projects, fighting Middle Eastern wars, and providing billions in subsidies to petrochemical companies -some of which are the most profitable in the world- yet it can't find the funds to monitor the environment or maintain reasonable scientific competency.

John Bennett, the executive director of Sierra Club Canada, puts it more bluntly, “It will give the polluters what they want, a toothless Environment Canada with no scientific or enforcement capability."

Feasting on Ecocide!

Over the past decade, countries across the world have been discussing the profound damage that has been occurring through deep-sea fishing. The Pew Environmental Group has been tracking the situation:

Since 2004, the international community, through the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly, has called on fishing countries and regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) to urgently act to protect deep-sea life. Beginning in 2006, U.N. resolutions that outlined a plan to safeguard this fragile biodiversity passed. Many governments supported an outright moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling, but countries operating deep-sea vessels instead promised to take action to make fisheries more sustainable and protect vulnerable marine ecosystems. Ultimately, they agreed to conduct a formal assessment after a few years to determine how well the resolutions had been implemented.

Preliminary findings released in June 2011 by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), "highlight serious failures by countries and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) in efforts to protect vulnerable deep-sea biodiversity and high seas fish species."

Research conducted by scientists and published in the journal Marine Policy are recommending a complete halt to all deep sea fishing.  Instead of permitting industrial fleets from disrupting these extremely delicate aquatic ecosystems, scientists are further recommending that fishing be confined to more productive coastal fisheries nearer to consumers.

The following summary from Eurekalert outlines the problem:

Life is mostly sparse in the oceans' cold depths, far from the sunlight that fuels photosynthesis. Food is scarce and life processes happen at a slower pace than near the sea surface. Some deep-sea fishes live more than a century; some deep-sea corals can live more than 4,000 years. When bottom trawlers rip life from the depths, animals adapted to life in deep-sea time can't repopulate on human time scales. Powerful fishing technologies are overwhelming them. 

"The deep sea is the world's worst place to catch fish" says marine ecologist Dr. Elliott Norse, the study's lead author and President of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Washington USA. "Deep-sea fishes are especially vulnerable because they can't repopulate quickly after being overfished." 

The deep sea provides less than 1% of the world's seafood. But fishing there, especially bottom trawling, causes profound, lasting damage to fishes and life on the seafloor, such as deep-sea corals, these experts say. 

Since the 1970s, when coastal fisheries were overexploited, commercial fishing fleets have moved further offshore and into deeper waters. Some now fish more than a mile deep. 

"Because these fish grow slowly and live a long time, they can only sustain a very low rate of fishing," says author Dr. Selina Heppell, a marine fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University. "On the high seas, it is impossible to control or even monitor the amount of fishing that is occurring. The effects on local populations can be devastating."

The Washington Post has a good article discussing the topic and revealing the moral cowardice of the Europeans in reigning in their colleagues in Portugal, Spain, France, and Denmark from destroying these ecosystems.

Chart of the day: increased incidence of natural disasters

(h/t The Big Picture)

The chart is provided by Re Munich and it indicates the growth of natural disasters over a period covering 1980-2011.  Insurance companies have an inherent self-interest in understanding the dynamics of disruptive natural events and how those events will have an impact on their business.  The data presented in the above graph is unequivocal in showing that climate change related events are rapidly increasing.  The scientifically illiterate right wing, uneducated masses, and corporate naysayers affiliated with the petrochemical industry can all continue to spout rubbish, but the facts speak for themselves. Consider that earthquakes and other geophysical events have stayed constant during the 30 year period, while storms, floods, and extreme temperature events have all increased geometrically over the same period.  This isn't God flushing the toilet on humanity; this is humanity self-destructing.

It appears from this graph, that we are looking at a doubling time of 15 years.  Under this time scale, things will become extremely difficult for most of this planet shortly.

We have passed the point of no return. What people should learn to accept is that we as a civilization and species have collectively failed to organize ourself to rectify a problem that  twenty years ago we all understood, but lacked the courage to tackle.  By kicking the problem down the road and listening to the greedy or stupid, we have condemned ourselves to a world that will nominally have substantial levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will disrupt agricultural production; increase droughts, fires, mass population movements, cause mass extinctions of other species; encourage conflict and warfare over resource scarcity; and eliminate possibly billions of humans.

Texas sized Climate Change!

Reports from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. indicate that the heat waves encountered in the USA during the months of June, July, and August, represent the second warmest summer.

The press release indicates the following:

• Excessive heat in six states -- Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana -- resulted in their warmest August on record. This year ranked in the top ten warmest August for five other states: Florida (3rd), Georgia (4th), Utah (5th), Wyoming (8th), and South Carolina (9th).The Southwest and South also had their warmest August on record.
• Only nine of the lower 48 states experienced August temperatures near average, and no state had August average temperatures below average.
• An analysis of Texas statewide tree-ring records dating back to 1550 indicates that the summer 2011 drought in Texas is matched by only one summer (1789), indicating that the summer 2011 drought appears to be unusual even in the context of the multi-century tree-ring record.
• Texas had its driest summer on record, with a statewide average of 2.44 inches of rain. This is 5.29 inches below the long-term average, and 1.04 inches less than the previous driest summer in 1956. New Mexico had its second driest summer and Oklahoma its third driest summer. New Jersey and California had their wettest summers on record with 22.50 inches and 1.93 inches, respectively.
• Based on NOAA's Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index, the contiguous U.S. temperature-related energy demand was 22.3 percent above average during summer. This is the largest such value during the index's period of record, which dates to 1895.

Under blood red skies...

Photograph of  Puyehue volcano, near Osorno in southern Chile.

Courtesy of NewScientist.

On the Banality of Evil: A Psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering

Scientific American Mind has an interesting article on the post-war psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering; Hitler's deputy and president of the (Nazi) Reichstag.

The article summarizes the work of American psychiatrist Dr. David Kelley, who spent extensive time interviewing and evaluating Hermann Goering and other high-ranking members of the defeated Nazi government.  His analysis ran contrary to the allies own propaganda, which stated that Nazi's were "madmen" and insane.

[Kelley] believed that Goering and his cohorts were commonplace people and that their personalities "could be duplicated in any country of the world today"... In other words, the Holocaust and the war's other heinous crimes were the products of healthy minds.

The implications are not trivial.  For example, many of the events that have occurred as a result of America's own war against global terrorism can also be explained, not as the act of mentally deranged "bad apples," but of people seduced by their own power and thus willing to erase the boundaries of accepted behavior and engage in barbarism.  The obscenities employed in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, at black-site torture centers across the world, and even in America's own domestic prisons, are examples where seemingly normal people can deviate from established rules of conduct and pursue grotesque and monstrous criminality in the name of the state and ideology.

Flow Chart of human hookups, first-dates, and relationships

I'm not sure how accurate any of this data actually is, but it's interesting just to think about in the idle spaces of own existence.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e2013489aeda81970c-popup

(h/t to Andrew Sullivan's the Daily Dish)

Things I found interesting:

1. 5.4% of people die without ever getting married.
2. 56% of people claim to be unhappy with their sex lives (Forget viagra and other boner drugs!  I see an opening here for subscription based tantric sex lessons offered at the local Learning Annex!)
3. Largest reason for breakups is a loss of interest (that seems accurate based on my own experiences)
4. 22% of people worldwide have engaged in infidelity (again, based on hereditary disease profiles I've reviewed that seemed entirely correct)

Possible Causes of Honeybee Colony Collapse Found

US scientists associated with the US Army and the University of Montana, have ascertained a possible cause for the annual decline in honeybee colonies in the USA.

To contextualize, the phenomenon is not unique to the United States and has been found to be affecting bee populations across the globe for a number of years.   In 2004, apiarists started to discover that large portions of their colonies were either dying or not returning to their hives.  Substantial losses year-over-year both in North America and Europe, have lead to a concerted global effort to ascertain the causative agents behind this situation.  Francis Ratnieks, a biologist at University of Sussex in Brighton, has stated in Wired magazine that there is no single rational at the global level, why bee populations are in decline.  He elaborates that honeybees are "probably dying for all kinds of different reasons from loss of their foraging grounds to increased exposure to global pathogens."  Pesticide usage, monoculture agricultural practices, urban sprawl, and climate change are also a few of the other causes that investigators have looked at to understand why bees are in decline.

The NY Times is reporting that American scientists, utilizing military research tools, have identified a fungus and virus pair that is present in 100% of all colony collapse cases evaluated in their labs.  Their findings suggest that "both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised."

The article reports on the host-parasite interaction:

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

The mechanisms that the fungus-virus pair is utilizing to undermining the bee populations is yet to be determined.

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

Further research into this phenomenon is necessary to understand a means of preventing future outbreaks.  However, we also know as in a case study in Britain where changes have been made to enhance the natural environment of bumblebees, such as "putting in pollen and nectar-rich flower margins to fields, growing red clover hay meadows and rotating the grazing of animals on land," that immediate improvements in the health of local bees could be achieved.

The Dismal Science Redefined

Current economic theory is less a science than an ideology peculiar to a certain period of history, which may well be nearing an end...

[Economists are] the jilted lovers of the science world – the more rigidly they approach their subject, the more it mocks them with spurious and headstrong behaviour.

Since this blog started, I've been constantly commenting on the dearth of empirical evidence that lies behind many of the attributed economic theories of our time and the persistent irrationality, if not complete fraud, of proponents of modern economics.  Many noted persons who are economists, like Paul Krugman and J. Brad DeLong, have likewise stated how the field has become a self-serving entity, that is in many cases polluted beyond the point of usefulness.  The above quotes, culled from a Globe and Mail newspaper opinion piece by Brian Milner titled "Economists and their fairy tale world of prognostication," is another indictment of the dismal science's ability to actually be a science.  The central basis of any science is its ability to factually explain natural phenomenon, testability of theories, reproducibility of experiments, and its ability to predict future events.  Economics, or at least that set of dogma pedalled in the MSM, doesn't pass any of the above criteria. 

If economists want their profession be taken seriously, then they should start actually calling out those on their side who have perennially gotten it wrong and banish them.

The entire fable of sustainable capitalism is disintegrating all around us like the dreamscape in the movie Inception.  The communists of China, through their mercantile and corrupt practices, are acquiring natural resources across the globe and buying friends everywhere.  The new globalization that peaked in the last decade is slowly devolving.  The financial system that imploded in 2008, has only been patched together with band-aid remedies and awaits further paralysis in the near future.  China, Europe, and America are all betting against the odds, that growth will magically return and the masses will defer sharpening their pitchforks until another day.

Climate Change may be Causative Agent in Bee Decline

Research conducted by scientists at the University of Toronto indicate that declines in bee population may be in part due to incongruencies that have emerged due to climate change.  Temporal mismatches arise between when the flowers are accessible and open to pollinators and when bees emerge from hibernation.  The seventeen year study indicates a "progressive decline in pollination over the years."

The research and article is summerized below from EurekAlert!

TORONTO, ON - Widespread reports of a decline in the population of bees and other flower-visiting animals have aroused fear and speculation that pollination is also likely on the decline. A recent University of Toronto study provides the first long-term evidence of a downward trend in pollination, while also pointing to climate change as a possible contributor.

"Bee numbers may have declined at our research site, but we suspect that a climate-driven mismatch between the times when flowers open and when bees emerge from hibernation is a more important factor," says James Thomson, a scientist with U of T's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Thomson's 17-year examination of the wild lily in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado is one of the longest-term studies of pollination ever done. It reveals a progressive decline in pollination over the years, with particularly noteworthy pollination deficits early in the season. The study will be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences on September 6.

Three times each year, Thomson compared the fruiting rate of unmanipulated flowers to that of flowers that are supplementally pollinated by hand. "Early in the year, when bumble bee queens are still hibernating, the fruiting rates are especially low," he says. "This is sobering because it suggests that pollination is vulnerable even in a relatively pristine environment that is free of pesticides and human disturbance but still subject to climate change."

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Thomson began his long-term studies in the late 1980s after purchasing a remote plot of land and building a log cabin in the middle of a meadow full of glacier lilies. His work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The Coming Environmental Collapse

The United Nation's Biodiversity Chief, Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf, issued a unequivocal do-or-die statement to the governments of the world, regarding the implementation of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.  According to the UN's website, the convention's purpose is to achieve the following:

The Convention on Biological Diversity was inspired by the world community's growing commitment to sustainable development. It represents a dramatic step forward in the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

To date however, not a single signatory has met its target to protect nature.  Planetary biodiversity is not an esoteric subject or a triviality to be dispensed with lightly.  Rather, it is a vital ecological principle that defines biosphere stability and hence the survival of the human species.  The web of life is an extraordinary complex and dynamic set of systems, which cycles nutrients and minerals, stabilizes global climate levels, and controls an enormous number of biological systems necessary for sustaining life from the Antarctic to the rainforests to the grain fields of the Great Plains in North America.  As this blog has been discussing for the past year (here, here, here, & here), the destruction of the biological commons; liquidation of forests; consuming all the ocean's fish; and toxification of the air, land, and sea with human waste and pollution will result in a world which is more fragile and susceptible to ecological collapse; i.e. human extinction.

The Guardian UK newspaper outlines the argument.  In the article, Djoghlaf warns countries, "It would be very short-sighted to cut biodiversity spending. You may well save a few pounds now but you will lose billions later. Biodiversity is your natural asset. The more you lose it, the more you lose your cultural assets too."   His warnings, made to the entire world community, implies that unless substantial policy changes are made and improvements at conserving biodiversity and managing ecosystem stability are achieved, many nations and their citizens will cease to exist in the future.

UCLA scientist Jared Diamond likewise has outlined in his book Collapse how human civilizations over the millenia have failed due to human caused environmental degradation.  Overpopulation, resource scarcity, misuse and abuse of natural resources, water management failures...etc. are all areas that have resulted in the decline and eventual demise of many societies throughout history.  Today, all nations are confronted with some, if not all, of these issues.  Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem instability is therefore a direct result of societies and humankind not addressing the individual and unique issues that ultimately are within their own control and perpetuating what historian Arnold Toynbee described as the collective suicide on the part of societies, when they fail to adapt to challenges of their time.

Pancreatic cancers use fructose, common in the Western diet, to fuel their growth

Pancreatic cancers use fructose, common in the Western diet, to fuel their growth

According to UCLA researchers everything gives you cancer can now be officially extended to fructose. The research examined the metabolic differences of pancreatic cancer cells when given glucose or fructose as monomeric carbohydrate sources. Conventional biochemistry would imply that there should not be a significant difference between the isomers. However, upon analysis it was found "that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation. They have major significance for cancer patients, given dietary refined fructose consumption."

Pancreatic cancers use the sugar fructose, very common in the Western diet, to activate a key cellular pathway that drives cell division, helping the cancer to grow more quickly, a study by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found.

Although it's widely known that cancers use glucose, a simple sugar, to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between fructose and cancer proliferation, said Dr. Anthony Heaney, an associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and senior author of the study.

"The bottom line is the modern diet contains a lot of refined sugar including fructose and it's a hidden danger implicated in a lot of modern diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and fatty liver," said Heaney, who also serves as director of the Pituitary Tumor and Neuroendocrine Program at UCLA. "In this study, we show that cancers can use fructose just as readily as glucose to fuel their growth."

The study appeared in the Aug. 1 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Research.

The source of fructose in the Western diet is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a corn-based sweetener that has been on the market since about 1970. HFCS accounts for more than 40 percent of the caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages, and it is the sole sweetener used in American soft drinks.

Between 1970 and 1990, the consumption of HFCS in the U.S. has increased over 1,000 percent, according to an article in the April 2004 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Food companies use HFCS - a mixture of fructose and glucose - because it's inexpensive, easy to transport and keeps foods moist. And because it is so sweet, it's cost effective for companies to use small quantities of HCFS in place of more expensive sweeteners or flavorings.

In his study, Heaney and his team took pancreatic tumors from patients and cultured and grew the malignant cells in Petri dishes. They then added glucose to one set of cells and fructose to another. Using mass spectrometry, they were able to follow the carbon-labeled sugars in the cells to determine what exactly they were being used for and how.

Heaney found that the pancreatic cancer cells could easily distinguish between glucose and fructose even though they are very similar structurally, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the cancer cells metabolized the sugars in very different ways. In the case of fructose, the pancreatic cancer cells used the sugar in the transketolase-driven non-oxidative pentose phosphate pathway to generate nucleic acids, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, which the cancer cells need to divide and proliferate.

"Traditionally, glucose and fructose have been considered as interchangeable monosaccharide substrates that are similarly metabolized, and little attention has been given to sugars other than glucose," the study states. "However, fructose intake has increased dramatically in recent decades and cellular uptake of glucose and fructose uses distinct transporters … These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation. They have major significance for cancer patients, given dietary refined fructose consumption."

As in anti-smoking campaigns, a federal effort should be launched to reduce refined fructose intake, Heaney said.

"I think this paper has a lot of public health implications," Heaney said. "Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of HFCS in our diets."  Heaney said that while this study was done in pancreatic cancer, these finding may not be unique to that cancer type.

Going forward, Heaney and his team are exploring whether it's possible to block the uptake of fructose in the cancer cells with a small molecule, taking away one of the fuels they need to grow. The work is being done in cell lines and in mice, Heaney said.

Screw the Pandas! It's Insects, Fungi, & Phytoplankton we Should Care About

Last week an important article relating to the profound decline in phytoplankton levels across the planet's oceans was released in Nature and briefly discussed on this blog.

The implication that marine ecosystems across the globe may be on the verge of collapse has elicited little public antipathy or official governmental concern.  Instead, the world continues to lumber onwards toward environmental armageddon, with the same willful ignorance that has dominated our species for millennia.  Few people wish to see the great pandas of China to go extinct, yet the Panda's overall necessity to the survival of humanity on the planet is zero.  That however, cannot be said of scores of plants, animals, and microscopic microorganisms that are essential to the maintenance and survivability of ecosystems everywhere. 

For the past two decades, biologists have been sending warnings to the rest of humanity that anthropogenic activities are precipitating a sixth massive extinction of life across the planet.  E.O. Wilson, for example, estimated in 1993 that the Earth is losing approximately thirty thousand species per year.   Human population expansion through the growth of civilization and industrialization, have reduced global biodiversity and species fitness to levels where our own existence has become imperilled.

In addition to marine phytoplankton, there are numerous species that are in decline, which are necessary for our civilization.  Pollinators, such as honeybees, have been in rapid decline over the past decade.  A third of everything humans consume and 90% of commercial crops are dependant upon honeybee pollination.  No single causative agent has been found to explain the dramatic and unsustainable decreases of these essential insects.  Although, pollution, pesticides, invasive foreign parasites and pathogens, and natural habitat decline, have all been cited as potential sources.

In the oceans, coral reefs are also being destroyed by pollution, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction.  Large ocean fish -like tuna, salmon, and swordfish- populations have either collapsed are on the verge of doing so.  Whales, dolphins, ocean faring birds like albatrosses, and other predatory fish are found to be emaciated and dying from starvation across the globe.  Entire swaths of the ocean are no longer capable of sustaining any life and have become dead zones, which are spreading rapidly.

Joining the endangered list are saprophytic organisms, such as beetles, fungi, and bacteria that decompose dead organic matter and facilitate in the cycling of nutrients.  In Europe, for example, research has estimated that 24% saprophilx beetles are under threat.

Thousands of other species, some of which we are not even aware of, are being decimated.  The survival of these species is inexorably linked to our own species.  If we as a collective cannot understand this or demand to advocate selfishness in the face of catastrophe, then there is no need to for further examination or discussion, because we will have succumb to the logic of mass suicide.

Phytoplankton Levels in Oceans Crashed during the 20th Century

According to EurkeAlert!  a new study conducted by researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada, have found that phytoplankton, unicellular organisms that form the basis of the marine food chain, have been declining globally at dramatic rates over the 20th century.

Using an unprecedented collection of historical and recent oceanographic data, a team from Canada's Dalhousie University documented phytoplankton declines of about 1% of the global average per year. This trend is particularly well documented in the Northern Hemisphere and after 1950, and would translate into a decline of approximately 40% since 1950. The scientists found that long-term phytoplankton declines were negatively correlated with rising sea surface temperatures and changing oceanographic conditions.

Lead author of the study, Daniel Boyle, told CBC News, "We should be very concerned … it's extremely disturbing."

Phytoplankton represent a vast array of aquatic plants that live in close proximity to the ocean's surface.  Through photosynthetic activity, these organisms "produce about half the world's oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."  In addition to forming the basis of marine food chains, phytoplankton are an important component of the carbon cycle and therefore are vital to the stability of the global climate.

The Christian Science Monitor provides a more detailed explanation of the methodology, which entailed three years of combining satellite based data from 1979 and physical measurements as far back as 1899.

After carving up the marine map into 10 regions, the team found a lot of year-to-year variation in phytoplankton populations, as well as regional variations in abundance. But the century-long decline was evident in 8 of 10 ocean regions and was strong enough to offset gains in two others centered in the Indian Ocean.

The overall decline in phytoplankton populations is directly correlated to increases in ocean temperatures.  As temperatures increase, thermal stratification occurs, which prevents nutrients cycling to upper surface levels and diminishes phytoplankton growth.  The findings therefore, "contribute to a growing body of scientific evidence indicating that global warming is altering the fundamentals of marine ecosystems."   Anthony Richardson of the University of Queensland in Australia explains:

The ocean absorbs 40% of the CO₂ humans emit. Phytoplankton, in turn, convert that CO₂ into oxygen or die and bury it at the bottom of the ocean. If the phytoplankton are disappearing, Richardson says, "the ocean as a carbon sink is declining, and what that means is ultimately more CO₂ will stay in the atmosphere instead of being dissolved in the ocean." That will translate into a warmer world, which will wipe out even more phytoplankton.

Human based activities including over-fishing, pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change induced acidification of the oceans, and the creation of permanent dead zones in coastal areas across the planet point to the obvious and undeniable fact that the planet's oceans are in very poor health.   When aquatic ecosystems across the globe collapse, so will terrestrial life, which is inexorability connected to the oceans through the web of life.

Brad DeLong on the Hollowness of Economics

One of the embarrassing dirty little secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as economic theory properly so-called. There is simply no set of foundational bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate situations in the real world. Biologists know that every cell runs off instructions for protein synthesis encoded in its DNA. Chemists start with what the Heisenberg and Pauli principles plus the three-dimensionality of space tell us about stable electron configurations. Physicists start with the four fundamental forces of nature. Economists have none of that. The "economic principles" underpinning their theories are a fraud--not bedrock truths but mere knobs twiddled and tunes so that th right conclusions come out of the analysis.

- Brad DeLong, "Jean-Claude Trichet Rejects the Counsels of History"

Ontological Deviations on MS (Mad Scientist) Syndrome

American Idiots: Deep South Edition

One of the great paradoxes of America is that although more Americans have won Nobel prizes in the fields of science and medicine than any other nationality, and given the fact that the nation has the best universities and some of the greatest research and development centers in the world, Americans as a whole remain woefully ignorant, if not completely hostile, to basic scientific knowledge and rationality.

Over the past twenty years repeated surveys have found that as much as 95% of the American population is scientifically illiterate.  A recent study conducted by the California Academy of Sciences found that 47% of Americans did not know how long it takes Earth to revolve around the sun, and 41% believed that dinosaurs and early humans coexisted.  Another recent poll done by the Pew Research Foundation, found that only 52% of Americans understood the basis of stem cells in relation to normal differentiated cells and a mere 46% knew that atoms are larger than electrons.  As described in the Boston Globe, "On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming."

So it should come as no shock to discover that only a mere third of the population "believe" in the theory of biological evolution.  Worst, more than 50% of the population "believe" in literal creationism.  It is this latter group of simians that I wish to highlight.  In the state of Alabama, a state that is ranked as having the largest percentage of obese citizens and least educated persons in the country, the local Republicans managed to achieve a new intellectual low through a primary election campaign commercial.  According the online political news-blog TPM,

[An Alabama] state PAC recently went on the air with an ad attacking one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates for supporting the teaching of evolution in schools and for saying that parts of the Bible aren't true.

The candidate, Bradley Byrne, responded with a lengthy press release vehemently defending his belief in creationism and the infallible truth of the Bible.

The aggrieved Republican pol went on to further dismiss every piece of scientific analysis in the past 4,000 years -from the ancient Babylonians who studied astronomy to 19th C. scholars who developed theories of electromagnetism and nuclear chemistry to modern 21st C. molecular biologists- by making the ludicrous claim of "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true ..."

All these dunces and like-minded inbred yahoos south of the Mason-Dixon line are a burden to the rest of humanity.  They are idiots, who are morally debased, scientifically illiterate, and lacking in any common sense.  Just watch the following clip as evidence.

Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards

According to an article published in Nature Neuroscience (14 March, 2010) and described in Eurekalert!:

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain's reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.

"This study underscores the importance of neurological research as it relates to behavior," Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said. "The findings may help us find new ways to intervene before a personality trait becomes antisocial behavior."

"Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences," Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. "We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse."

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack, fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.

There is a reason why we forget

"Memories were meant to fade, Lenny. They're designed that way for a reason." Mace, Strange Days (1995).

***

A recent publication in the Journal Cell (free article available online) elaborates how researchers at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory discovered a protein that regulates forgetting of short-term memories.  In general, short-term memory refers to the capacity for holding a small amount of information in an animal's neural network (i.e. mind) in an active, readily available state for a short period of time.  The researchers "discovered that three kinds of forgetting – all involving the erasure of short-term memory – are regulated within neurons by the activity of a protein called Rac."  The research was conducted on Drosophila melangaster (fruit fly) both of the wild type (normal) and genetically engineered variety (via standard transposon mutagenesis) to evaluate short-term memory retention with respect to modulation of the Rac protein.

Naturally occurring Rac activation within neurons located in a fruit fly organ called the mushroom body was linked experimentally with three distinct memory-erasure tasks by CSHL Professor Yi Zhong, Ph.D., and colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing. One kind of erasure is associated with gradual short-term memory loss (previously considered "passive"); another entails an acute, rapid removal of short-term memory (e.g., "reversal learning"); a third involves a kind of erasure associated with new information that interferes with an existing short-term memory ("interference").

In all three kinds of erasure, the team has found, the process of forgetting is mediated by a mechanism dependent upon the activity level of Rac, a protein that belongs to the Rho family of GTPases. These are a type of protein known to act, among other things, as regulators of the cytoskeleton, the superstructure of cells. Importantly, Zhong and colleagues propose that Rac's role in erasing memory is directly related to its function as a cytoskeleton remodeling agent.

In genetically modified flies, the team elevated Rac activity in mushroom body neurons, which are the seat of olfactory-based memories in the fly. Elevated Rac activity had the effect of accelerating the decay of short-term memories. The process worked in the other direction, too. By inhibiting the activity of Rac they observed that short-term memories decayed more slowly than normal, lasting more than a full day rather than vanishing within three hours, as they do, on average, when Rac is not blocked.

The scientists reported that the Rac-dependent forgetting mechanism in flies did not affect mechanisms involved in the formation of new memories, specifically a pathway associated with the gene Rutabaga that is mediated by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.

"The molecular basis of short-term memory really has been overlooked by the neuroscience community," says Zhong, a CSHL professor. "It has been widely assumed that such memory is degraded through passive cellular processes. Our experiments challenge the notion by providing evidence of a dedicated mechanism for removing several kinds of short-term memories."

The active forgetting mechanism that Zhong and colleagues have uncovered has potentially adaptive benefits for an organism, they speculate. "The Rac-mediated mechanism makes possible a forgetting strategy that can respond to environmental information," Zhong explains. "For instance, it could be advantageous to forget a memory in disuse that is no longer of biological significance, or a memory inconsistent with current circumstances."

"Forgetting Is Regulated through Rac Activity in Drosophila" appears online ahead of print in Cell February 19. The authors are: Yichun Shuai, Binyan Lu, Ying Hu, Lianzhang Wang, Kan Sun and Yi Zhong. The paper is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2009.12.044

Palin versus Gore on Climate Change

I have made no attempt to deny over the past year my utter contempt for Sarah Palin, otherwise to be spoken of as Caribou Barbie, the Wasilla Whack-Job, or the grand priestess of American theo-fascist buffoonery. Until now, I had decided to ignore writing about her and the zombie masses that have flocked to her media-manufactured book tour out of sheer disdain. However, the Washington Post, in an attempt to completely repudiate itself as a newspaper, has decided to publish today (9 Dec. 2009) an op-ed written (or purportedly so) by Caribou Barbie, which lambastes scientists as opportunists and frauds, scientific debate as politicized drivel, and climate change mitigation as a massive exercise in liberal taxation and socialism.

I want to remind people, exactly what Sarah Palin believes in. First, she is a bigot who stated to her father, upon returning from a brief stint at Hawaii Pacific University, that she was "uncomfortable" around Asians and Pacific Islanders. “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” She makes the claim in her pseudo-biography/ manifesto that she had a great deal of "affection" for her gay roommate from college (which no one can find), but opposes all rights for gay couples, opposes allowing gays to serve openly in the military, opposes gay-inclusive hate crimes legislation, and opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Second, she has no background and zero credentials to discuss any subject on science. Her entire history is one that dismisses empirical fact and core scientific knowledge for superstition, innuendo, and demonstrably false lies whenever it serves her personal or political needs. Palin is an evangelical Christian that believes in creationism, thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and proposes that fundamentalist dogma should be taught in every public school; she is an adherent of end-of-times theology, which involves the conversion of the believers of Judaism to Christianity and the rapture; she has made proclamations for the removal of the constitutional separation of church-and-state; and she is against cell stem research or any scientific research that she arbitrarily dislikes. With respect to climate change, she has repeatedly clung to the odious supposition, without providing any corroborating evidence, that there is no man-made (i.e. anthropogenic) element to current atmospheric or climate changes.

In the WaPo op-ed, she specifically calls the stolen emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, proof that, "Leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Unwilling to address the science itself or the overwhelming consensus generated by scientists and climate researchers across the planet for more than 20-years, she states that, "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

This woman is an absolute ignoramus and demagogue, who will lie and distort any fact to empower herself and the theo-fascists in the Republican Party that have surrounded her.

In response to this exhibition of white-trash duncery and recycled claptrap, Al Gore has been asked on repeated occasions to address her complaints about the entire Climate change debate and the current United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen (COP15). He states the obvious:

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths [sic] in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

Reasonable people can argue and dispute matters of opinion, but facts as to whether humans have injected extraordinary levels of greenhouse-effect producing gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not subject to debate; it is a fact. There is no dispute that ocean levels are rising, whether the oceans are becoming acidified due to excess C02 in the atmosphere placed there by man, or even if this past decade and the decade of the 1990's have been the warmest in recorded human history. All these statements are facts that anyone can independently verify.

The twin forces of globalization and human tribalism have locked us all into a fearful downward spiral and there appears little hope that the majority of the human species is equipped to adjust to a low carbon economy, much less understand the dire situation we have created.