Newsworthy Science

Aug. 11, 1989 Phone Fixation

Once High-Tech Toys, Cellular Telephones Are Becoming Staples
Cars, Golf Courses, Even Yosemite Can Be Offices, But at a Cost to Serenity

Why Makers’ Stocks Are Hot

It’s a typical morning on the Santa Monica freeway. Bumper-to-bumper traffic grinds to a halt. Barbara Stewart, busy president of an advertising agency, is trapped in her 1988 silver Dodge Ram van. Is she frantic?

Quite the contrary. Cellular phone in hand, Ms. Stewart talks with a client 90 miles away about a new ad campaign. She hangs up, revises the ad layout, then zaps him a copy over her van’s portable facsimile machine, linked to the cellular phone. During the two hours it takes her to creep from Irvine to downtown Los Angeles, the car phone rings steadily: A client calls to change the publication date of an ad; a prospective customer asks about fees; Ms. Stewart’s office faxes an ad layout and a brochure for her approval.

“One day, I got 20 phone calls and seven faxes,” exclaims Ms. Stewart, the president of Hubbert-Stewart Advertising. “I’m seriously thinking about installing another telephone in my van.”

Once a high-tech plaything, the cellular telephone is fast becoming a fixture of American life. Sales agents and deal makers adore them. Lawyers and engineers relish the mobility they bestow. Hard-charging supervisors use them to keep staffs even busier. Police praise their versatility, especially for drug busts. Not since the telephone itself has an advance in phone technology promised so profound an impact on how people work and lead their lives, in sometimes unexpected and not always positive ways.

For all their advantages, cellular phones create the prospect of perpetual intrusion. They seem to be nearly everywhere now, yet they’re still proliferating. Users are finding it more difficult to disconnect themselves, even briefly, from the workplace. And since these phones don’t come with receptionists or secretaries, cellular calls can’t be screened.
 
Faxpunk is my favorite genre
 
There is a new paper out about quitting smoking, including looking at the coccurrence of relapses and the use of alternatives such as "noncigarette tobacco products" (I am not sure switching to cigars really counts as quitting) and most newsworthy e-cigarettes. The paper says:

Controlled for potential confounders, switching to any tobacco product was associated with higher relapse rate than being tobacco free (adjusted risk difference, 8.5%; 95%CI, 0.3%-16.6%). Estimates for those who switched to e-cigarettes, whether daily or not, were not significant. While individuals who switched from cigarettes to e-cigarettes were more likely
to relapse, they appeared more likely to requit and be abstinent for 3 months at follow-up 2 (17.0%; 95%CI, 2.4%-21.6%vs 10.4%; 95%CI, 8.0%-12.9%).
This is reported as (eg. CNN):

Using e-cigarettes and other tobacco products to keep from relapsing to cigarettes doesn't appear to be effective
That does not seem to be a very accurate representation of the study to me. A) This is about correlation not causation. They note that the use of e-cigarettes are not evenly distributed across the population demographics, and while they attempt to control for these, they acknowledge that this is weak:

The PATH study questionnaire includes standard questions on sociodemographics including asking participants to choose all that apply from 4 categories of Latinx or Spanish ethnic origin and 14 categories of race. As it is not the goal of this article to provide estimates for each race or ethnicity, and because the distribution of 378 participants across 4 ethnic categories and 14 categories of race resulted in small sample sizes, we used the racial category with the largest sample, non-Hispanic White.

Rates of switching to e-cigarettes were highest for those who were in the top tertile of tobacco dependence (31.3%; 95%CI, 25.0%-37.7%), were non-Hispanic White (26.4%; 95%CI, 22.3%-30.4%), and had higher incomes (annual income $35 000, 27.5%; 95%CI, 22.5%-32.4%vs <$35 000, 19.3%; 95%CI, 16.3%-22.3%).​
 
I just heard a New Scientist talk on friendship and here is a summary report based on the talk. It was very interesting and focused on how the brain is involved.
 

Attachments

I found this piece from Science News really interesting, https://www.science.org/content/art...-elephants-lose-their-tusks-through-evolution
Mozambique’s civil war from 1977 to 1992 had a grim outcome for elephants: During that time, some 90% were killed for the ivory in their tusks, which were sold to finance the war. Now, researchers report this intense hunting dramatically altered a major elephant population there, favoring female elephants born without tusks. Although the adaptation comes with a price—an associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before they’re born—the emerging trait may have helped save the population.
 
That's not even poop pills. These were isolated bacteria. Probably not very tasty, but you can grow these in the lab, no human parts in there, nothing dangerous.
(this would be still amazing if it was poop pills)
 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893921002167?via=ihub
No time to die: An in-depth analysis of James Bond's exposure to infectious agents

Global travelers, whether tourists or secret agents, are exposed to a smörgåsbord of infectious agents. We hypothesized that agents pre-occupied with espionage and counterterrorism may, at their peril, fail to correctly prioritize travel medicine. To examine our hypothesis, we examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond's sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3). Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens. We hypothesize that his foolhardy courage, sometimes purposefully eliciting life-threatening situations, might even be a consequence of Toxoplasmosis. Bond's approach to vector-borne diseases and neglected tropical diseases is erratic, sometimes following travel advice to the letter, but more often dwelling on the side of complete ignorance. Given the limited time Bond receives to prepare for missions, we urgently ask his employer MI6 to take its responsibility seriously. We only live once.

[...]
Funding
There was no specific funding for this project. Given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.

CRediT authorship contribution statement
Wouter Graumans and Teun Bousema conceived the idea; together with Will J.R. Stone they wasted their evening hours examining the films. All three authors analyzed data and wrote the initial draft; Will J. R. Stone designed the graphic. All listed authors meet authorship criteria, agree that there is no intellectual content whatsoever and endorsed the final version of the manuscript.
 
Wind farms don’t work in the dark, says Nationals MP
The Nationals were pretty pleased with themselves last week when Resources Minister and newly promoted Cabinet member Keith Pitt declared that solar doesn’t generate in the dark.

Now, a Nationals MP has extended the analogy, this time to wind. “What Keith Pitt says is perfectly true,” the Nationals MP for Mallee Anne Webster said. “They don’t work in the dark, and neither do our wind farms.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-farms-dont-work-in-the-dark-says-nationals-mp/

Australian science, leading the world out of the climate apocalypse!
 
My new favourite article from my favourite science article thingummy, because it agrees with what
I have suspected for a long time. :)

The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does
Neuroscientists have tried to map various categories of mental function to specific regions of the
brain, but recent work has shown that the definitions and boundaries of those regions are complex
and context-dependent.


My favourite quote from the article...

When we wonder how the brain works, he explained, we want it to mean: What’s happening in my brain
when I fall in love? Or when I’m excited? If we move too far away from our subjective experience
and familiar cognitive concepts, he worries that what we learn about the brain might be like “42”
in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the correct answer, but not to the question we had in mind.
“Now, are we willing to live with that?” Krakauer asked.


https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/
 
Hot off the press!
And with a reference to Borges for the fanbois! :)

Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles?

“It’s a very confusing story. I call it the Garden of Forking Paths,” said Carlos Argüelles-Delgado,
a neutrino physicist at Harvard University. In Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story of that title,
time branches into an infinite number of possible futures. With neutrinos, contradictory results
have sent theorists down a variety of paths, unsure which data to trust and which might be leading
them astray.


https://www.quantamagazine.org/neut...ility-of-multiple-missing-particles-20211028/
 
Hot off the press!
And with a reference to Borges for the fanbois! :)

Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles?

“It’s a very confusing story. I call it the Garden of Forking Paths,” said Carlos Argüelles-Delgado,
a neutrino physicist at Harvard University. In Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story of that title,
time branches into an infinite number of possible futures. With neutrinos, contradictory results
have sent theorists down a variety of paths, unsure which data to trust and which might be leading
them astray.


https://www.quantamagazine.org/neut...ility-of-multiple-missing-particles-20211028/

I had to read that story again - it was never one of my favorites :o
In the story, the garden of forking paths is a book that (according to one scholar of it) cryptically promotes the idea that time branches out, with all possible futures coexisting. So the idea in that interpretation is that time itself is distinct from what it allows to exist, and that the position is what's inherently important, not what is located there. Stuff change, (eg) die or don't die, or die later, but the positions that hold this as data appear to exist in all futures in the same way.
If anything, this scheme reminds me of the "prime immobile mover", or similar ideas about one quality (time, eidos, other) being of fundamentally different essence from anything else. But in most ancient greek philosophy there is no such qualitative difference; every trait seems to be on equal standing, so other schemata are devised to allow for a type of precedence (for example, the archetypes in Plato are directly tied to some objective true observer, such as a deity or over-being).
How would something like time, or even "location" of a probable outcome that hosts all other probable outcomes, be of different quality than any other trait? And if it was, wouldn't that more likely be due to the (not objective/tied to truth/superior) observer of the event, who in our case is merely man?
 
I'd love to see it. I think I will holiday in Iceland or the Nordics one year soon.
 
Sandia applies for patent to clean coal ash, mine rare-earth metals

Domestic source of elements important for commerce and national security

Copyright © 2021 Albuquerque Journal
BY RYAN BOETEL

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories are using limes for a lot more than spritzing up gin and tonics. The lab has applied for a patent on a new method of extracting rare-earth metals from coal ash using water, carbon dioxide, high pressure and citric acid from limes.

The process, if widely developed, would serve two purposes, said Guangping Xu, a senior technical staff member at Sandia whose research led to the pending patent. First, it’s a new way to clean up the residue left from burning coal, which is plentiful. Xu said there is estimated to be 3 billion tons of coal ash spread across the country, and the U.S. will produce about 100 million additional tons of it a year. Secondly, the extraction of rare-earth metals, or elements, is a national security issue because the vast majority of those valuable metals used in America are imported from China.

Xu said those 17 elements — which include cerium, promethium and thulium — are needed for their magnetic, conductive and florescent properties. They are used in making anything from electronics and communication equipment to wind turbines, he said. A Sandia document on the patent application said in 2019 the country imported about $160 million of those metals. “They make a lot of the products you buy and depend on everyday better,” said Mark Rigali, a principal member of technical staff at Sandia involved in the research. “Better colors in your LED TV, and they have a large variety of military applications in many weapons systems, so they are very important to national security.” Sandia scientists have been working on the project for about two years, and the lab applied last year for the patent that is still pending. The research
was funded in part through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program.

Xu said if the research results ultimately lead to a product, he envisions a receptacle of sorts where coal can be loaded and mixed with water and citric acid. Then, when carbon dioxide and high pressure are added, the ingredients mix together and form a slurry, from which the heavy metals can be extracted.



The process leads to cleaner coal, either before combustion or after, Xu said. He said similar methods that exist today to extract the elements from coal ash use industrial solvents that become hazardous waste, as opposed to their method that uses an environmentally benign acid found in limes. It’s also believed that the Sandia method will be more efficient at separating and removing the metals, Xu said.

That, the researchers said, allows the coal industry to recoup some of its cost for remediation. “You need a way to clean your coal ash,” Xu said. “With our method, you can clean your coal ash and at the same time be mining rare-earth metals.” Even though the country is trying to transition away from coal power to more renewable sources of energy, Xu said that coal will still be a source of electricity on the country’s power grids for years to come. “Even though we want to transition to clean energy, it’s not very easy,” he said. “You still need a lot of energy and renewables are only a small part. You still need electricity from other sources,” he said. “Our process makes coal cleaner.”


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Guangping Xu, a senior technical staff member at Sandia National Laboratories, adds coal ash to a citric acid mixture. Sandia recently applied for a patent for a new method of extracting heavy metals from coal ash. REBECCA LYNNE GUSTAF/ SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES
 
Xu said that coal will still be a source of electricity on the country’s power grids for years to come. “Even though we want to transition to clean energy, it’s not very easy,” he said. “You still need a lot of energy and renewables are only a small part. You still need electricity from other sources,” he said. “Our process makes coal cleaner."

Reuse of what is currently waste has to be part of our world going forward (I think phytomining could be the future), but this is dangerous thinking. You are not making coal cleaner. Coal is by far the worst way to get electricity, much of the world has moved to gas and that is really not enough. Renewables have to be a lot more than a small part.
 
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