Category Archives: Science

Science

Steve Jobs’ death used as example by natural health advocates

Leave a comment

By now most people will have read all manner of eulogies about the co-founder of Apple, but you’ve probably haven’t read anything like this ridiculous editorial. Natural health nuts all around the world who decry conventional, evidence-based medicine and claim that cancer can be cured simply using vitamins and health supplements are pointing to Jobs’ death as proof that chemotherapy and radiotherapy doesn’t work. The article also goes on to a weird tangent on how Jobs was a once in a lifetime creative talent who was sadly abused by the capitalistic forces of society.

The irony of this particular editorial is that Jobs seemed to actually favor alternative health remedies, for the all good it did him. As his bio on Wikipedia makes clear, Jobs is pretty much the living embodiment of the counterculture, pot-smoking, hippie demography. So much so that he saved money from his first job to go on a pilgrimage to India and came back as a Buddhist with a shaved head. In short, he’s exactly the type of person who would read a website like Natural News and be skeptical of evidence-based medicine. According to this Fortune article from 2008, when Jobs first learned of his cancer, he resisted treating it with conventional methods and chose instead to go on a special diet and explored alternative treatments.

It was only nine months after his cancer was first diagnosed, following pressure from his company staff and investors worried about his health and after learning that his tumor had grown despite the alternative medicine he was using, that Jobs agreed to undergo the surgical procedure his doctors had recommended. At that time the surgery was considered a complete success but even back in 2008, it was pointed out that by delaying the procedure for so long, Jobs had dramatically increased his chances of his cancer recurring. It is arguable that things might be different today if Jobs had chosen to heed his doctors advice immediately.

On a personal note, I knew a colleague while working in the Solomon Islands who was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. Being a Johor native, he underwent treatment in Singapore but was eager to come back to work. A short time after he arrived back in the Solomon Islands, some symptoms recurred. Instead of flying back to Malaysia immediately, he listened to some of the local people and decided to have a local traditional medicine man treat him in a remote village. Most of the staff of the company opposed this as we were worried about him and it was difficult to stay in contact with him. According to his account, the treatment consisted of various oils and using hands to press the fluid out of his developing tumor. He stayed at the village for more than six months. Eventually, his condition deteriorated until he was forced to fly back and he was immediately hospitalized in Singapore. He died less than two months later. I remember his case keenly because he was the exact same age as me and died in his late twenties.

 

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Sep ’11)

Leave a comment

Only three articles this month as I’ve had very little to browse. Note to friends: I’ve since resigned from my job in Seremban as it was a little too busy for my schedule and wasn’t really what I wanted anyway. This means that Ill probably have a bit more time for my blog from now on.

  • The biggest science news in September is of course the announcement that scientists at CERN seem to have observed neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. The particle accelerator in Switzerland sent a stream of neutrinos that traveled through to planet to the San Grasso facility in central Italy. However, the neutrinos arrived some 60 nanoseconds earlier than it would take light to travel the same distance, prompting a lot of excitement among the scientific community. If it is validated, this finding would overthrow Einstein’s theory of special relativity and the entire foundation of theoretical physics. The best working theory at the moment is that some variant of superstring theory is true and the neutrinos are taking a shortcut through one of the extra curled-up dimensions postulated in the theory. Most scientists are still wary as the discrepancy might more plausibly be explained as a measurement error but it is telling that a less publicized experiment known as MINOS in the US noticed unusually fast neutrinos back in 2007.
  • Science-fiction writers have long played with the idea of inorganic life but Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow is making actual cell-like structures made of metallic molecules. Rather than using carbon-based building blocks, his team uses “polyoxometalates” made of metal atoms such as tungsten. They are able to get their molecules to self-assemble into cell-like spheres in a solution and get their surfaces to behave like cell membranes. Unfortunately, he still doesn’t have an analogue of DNA yet, which is arguably the true key to a life form that is able to self-replicate, but this is a decent theoretical framework to start imagining how inorganic life might evolve in a vastly different environment from ours.
  • The Economist has an article on moral philosophy, in particular on research on the psychology of the kind of people who would actually adhere to a fully utilitarian set of values. A famous utilitarian thought experiment is the runaway train which if it continues on its present course will kill several people. However, if someone were to divert the train to a side track these people would be saved but one person would die. If you were the person who had the switch in your hand, would you pull it and sacrifice one person to save many? It turns out most people, ninety percent of them in fact, would choose not to intervene at all and allow fate to take its course but this is not the utilitarian response. So two researchers had the idea of taking a bunch of undergraduates and quizzing them about a variety of situations to find those who would choose the utilitarian response. Then they correlated this with a standard personality test. It turns out that the people who leaned towards utilitarianism tended to have psychopathic tendencies, which when you think about it makes perfect sense.
Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Aug ’11)

Leave a comment

Four articles for the month of August 2011. While I’m going to try to continue with this as a regular feature, I’ve decided to be briefer and to summarize less, since readers can always go read the original text anyway. So here goes.

  • MedicalXpress has an exciting story about a new broad spectrum viral therapy that can seemingly target any sort of virus. The treatment works by identifying cells that have been infected by viruses by detecting the presence of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) and instructing such cells to commit suicide. Many people are expressing skepticism about the broadness of the claims being made or that it would safe to assume that all cells that contain dsRNA may be destroyed without harm. But if this checks out, it will be huge.
  • Like some people, I’m very adverse to spoilers of any kind for any media I intend to read or watch for myself. But the psychology department of the University of California at San Diego begs to differ. According to their study which involved asking participants to read one of twelve short stories, around half of which were prefaced by a spoiler paragraph, including the spoilers seemed to increase the entertainment value of the story. This was true even for genres like mysteries and ironic-twist stories. The authors suggest that this isn’t as unintuitive as one might expect as this nicely explains why people like to reread a favorite book or rewatch a favorite film.
  • The Economist covers new evidence to support a theory of why some traditional societies are patriarchal and others matriarchal. The key lies in whether or not each society developed and adopted the plough as part of its traditional farming practices. It explains that before the advent of the plough, women were in charge of farming while men fought or hunted. But the plough, while improving yields, required greater physical strength that only men possessed. Such societies subsequently became more dominated by men. The researchers involved found that whether or not the ancestors of an ethnic group used the plough is a good predictor of attitudes about women in the workplace or about women as leaders in society.
  • Lastly, Wired has an article about the discovery of a planet that appears to be composed almost entirely of diamond-like crystals. The planet has an unusually high mass to volume ratio and orbits so close to its parent star that a single revolution just takes two hours. Furthermore, it’s parent star is itself a pulsar that rotates at more then 10,000 times per minute. Now that would make for an interesting star system for a spaceship to explore.
Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’11)

Leave a comment

For the curious, I’ve recently moved to Seremban and have taken up a new job. This has left me with far less free time than I had previously, so I will no longer be able to update this blog regularly. Nevertheless, I shall try my best. So here is my belated round up of three of the most interesting science related articles I came across in July. Two of the articles in this entry deal wit optics, though in very different ways. The last article is a psychological study on the values championed in television shows.

The first article is from New Scientist and covers a new range of devices that might be called social x-ray specs. It’s basically a pair of spectacles that come with a built-in camera that tracks whatever the wearer is looking at. This data is then fed into computer about the size of a deck of cards and the results displayed to the wearer inside the spectacles itself. What’s interesting about the device is what it looks for. As everyone knows, when engaged in any sort of social interaction with other people, humans will inevitably give out all sorts of unconscious physical responses to their interlocutor. Think of examples such as subtly nodding your head, arching your brow or pursing your lips.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’11) →

News & Politics, Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ’11)

Leave a comment

Just to prove that this blog isn’t quite dead yet, here are a couple of articles for last month. The first of these is a popular story that has been passing around the net a lot recently. It’s about a scientist’s efforts to make meat fit for human consumption from human feces. The other one is a detailed look by Babbage of The Economist at how Bitcoin works. It’s a new virtual currency that been attracted the attention of economists around the world.

The first article is from Digital Trends and introduces us to Mitsuyuki Ikeda of Japan who has managed to develop steaks that are made from proteins that come from human excrement. Many commentators described the process as eating shit but that isn’t really correct. What the scientists have done instead is to use sewage mud as a base on which to grow bacteria. These bacteria turn out to have high protein content, which can be extracted and processed into an artificial steak. It supposedly tastes like beef.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ’11) →

Fun, Religion, Science, Science Fiction

Interesting links

4 Comments

I’m leaving on holiday to Taiwan soon and will be leaving my job after that. This means that this blog will probably be updated only intermittently while I’m a in transition phase. In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.

  • As everyone knows by now, the Rapture did not in fact arrive on schedule. Or perhaps it did but no one, including the folks from Family Radio International who so hyped up the event, was judged worthy. The station’s owner and preacher Harold Camping has since come out with a statement claiming that he’d made a mistake. May 21st was merely the spiritual Judgment Day during which God evaluated everyone’s souls. But the judgment will actually be executed only on October 21st, five months from now, triggering the end of the world.
  • Thankfully Malaysian high schools are nothing like the hellholes that public US high schools seem to be but thanks to American shows and movies, we have a decent idea of what they’re like. One aspect of the US high school experience is how students are segregated into different groups that are organized into a hierarchy that revolves around popularity. This extended essay examines why nerds in school, who are consistently found to be smarter than their peers, are consistently among the least popular students and comes up with some interesting insights.
  • Many vegetarians don’t eat meat because of the perceived moral issues involved in killing an animal for food. What if meat no longer had to obtained by butchering animals? What if you could simply grow the meat in a test-tube? This article looks at how meat could be grown by immersing stem cell samples in nutrient-filled petri dishes, and then moving them into scaffolding platforms to get them to grow into muscle tissue. If this gets off the ground, not only will it dispense with the moral issue of eating animals, it will also be a far cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to farm the meat that we so crave.
  • When I mentioned on QT3 that Ted Chiang had never published a novel, a fellow fan was quick to correct me. Actually, it’s more like a novella than a novel, but you can judge for yourself since The Lifecycle of Software Objects is now freely available to be read online. To be honest I find it to be the weakest of Chiang’s works I’ve read and it’s really more of an essay presenting many different insights and ideas about conscious software as pets and children than a novel. The central thesis is that you can’t create an artificial intelligence by writing an algorithm and running it iteratively until it reaches sentience. Instead, you need to nurture it just as you would a pet or a child, patiently teaching it and allowing it to have a variety of different life experiences to enable it to grow.
  • Finally, just for Malaysians, here is a link to the latest report on house price indices for Malaysia, updated for the first quarter of 2011. Some very tentative conclusions are that overall house prices in Malaysia are still increasing and especially prices for terrace houses in the Klang Valley are still holding up. But prices for high-rises in the Klang Valley is stagnant and has dropped for Malaysia as a whole. Condo prices in Penang in particular seem to be dropped significantly and the index has dropped to 2009 levels. This is especially illuminating since I’ve heard many people complain about very low occupation rates for condos in Penang despite the high prices. As always, a single quarter’s worth of data is not proof of a developing trend and should be taken with the usual grain of salt.
Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Apr ’11)

2 Comments

Three articles this month and all of them are from the softer side of science. One is about how doctors choose treatments for patients. The next one is a groundbreaking new study on the origins of language. The last one is a study confirming the widespread hunch that more education leads to less religion.

The first article covers a recent survey by researchers from Duke University which asked doctors how they would choose treatments for themselves and compared the results against what the doctors would choose for other patients. The survey found that when choosing treatments for other people, doctors tried to minimize the risk of death as much as possible, even if the treatment involved the risk of long-term complications. When it came to themselves however, doctors were much more willing to risk death if it meant avoiding medications with side-effects.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Apr ’11) →