Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

Those wacky cats over at MIT have created High-Tech Spacesuits for "Extreme Exploring"

Newman said Bio-Suit relies on advances in fabrication and application of open cell foam, smart materials like advanced “muscle wire” technologies, and electrospinlacing. “All of these have seen vast improvements in the last few years,” she said.
...
Lightweight and easy to don and doff, the bio-suit layer would be custom fitted to each astronaut — made possible by a laser scanning/electrospinlacing process. That method stems from work at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass. where researchers there are tapping into science and technology for 21st century combat uniforms, as well as police officer garb able to thwart chemical or biological agents.

Now, the technology aspect of this is pretty cool, but is it just me, or do these suits look a little goofy? Like a futuristic cyclist or a luge rider.


Think that zipper is down far enough?

I knew it all along! Scientists have just discovered that Booze Boosts Brainpower!

They did a study of 12,000 older women and: "They found that the women who had the equivalent of one drink a day had a 23% lower risk of becoming mentally impaired during the two-year period, compared with non-drinkers."

Of course, the study was with women between 70 and 81, but I'm confident that the results can be applied more widely. I know from experience. After all, I always feel smarter after a few drinks.

Remember the gossiping prairie dogs? Well apparently Rats might be Multilingual.

Spanish researchers found that rats were able to use rhythm and intonation speech cues to distinguish between spoken Dutch and Japanese. This makes rats only the third type of mammal — along with humans and Tamarin monkeys — who have been shown to possess the ability to recognize different speech patterns.

Thanks to Dave Barry's Blog for alerting me to this ground-breakirng discovery.

A commentator on NPR this morning thinks so. In the wake of the recent recall of certain arthritis pain relievers (they showed a slight increase in heart attack risk) there are a lot of people who feel that they would be willing to accept that risk in order to reap the benefits of the pain relief. The commentator thinks that the FDA should not have to pull these drugs off the market, but rather that patients and doctors should have the right to make their own informed decision.

On the one hand, he does have a legitimate point. Every possible medication is going to have side effects, and ultimately, the decision to take or to prescribe any given medication is going to be based on an analysis of the net loss or gain, weighing the side effects against the primary benefit. I'll concede that perhaps some of these standards maybe should be given a look from time to time, to continually reevaluate if they are still doing what they should be, but I depart completely with the commentator's larger point, that it should be completely the individual doctor or patient's decision.

The problem is simple: Without the massive clinical trials currently required by the FDA, we would not have the information required for patients and doctors to make these decisions. I'm sure the commentator would suggest that we could relax the FDA rules and still do these studies, but I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't work out that way.

Look at the AIDS debate, for example. A lot of the current AIDS drugs were rushed through FDA approval without all the normal testing requirements due to political pressure. People said, understandably enough, "I don't want to wait five years for the drug to be approved the normal way. I'll be dead by then." While I can sympathize with their desperation, fast-tracking drugs this way confuses the issue. Are the drugs actually effective or not? Are they actually doing more harm than good? Are they doing any good at all? We only have very sketchy data, primarily anecdotal statistics obtained outside of any controlled study.

If the FDA no longer has authority to reject drugs that do not show enough net benefit, then there is no longer any incentive for pharmaceutical companies to perform and document the results of expensive studies. These studies will no longer have to meet any rigorous standards for approval, because they can simply release the drug with a warning label. Further, if there is no ultimate requirement that a given pharmaceutical demonstrate a notable benefit compared to rare or minor side-effects, what incentive will pharmaceutical companies have to continue pushing for a more effective medication? If they are allowed to sell the one that causes increased risk of heart attacks, or the one that might cause breast cancer, how hard are they going to work to find one that doesn't?

Now, I'm not saying new research would dry up, or that the local pharmacy would suddenly turn into a traveling snake-oil tent. I'm just saying that removing the teeth of the FDA is only going to make the already confusing drug marketplace into an incomprehensible bazaar where you are beset on all sides by products that may or may not actually do anything good for you. That's not a more-informed decision. It's less-informed.

I've been continuing to look into the controversy related to HIV and AIDS. I asked a couple of questions on Dean Esmay's blog. It was suggested by Dr. Bialy, (the author of Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg) that I look into the references do more research. Totally fair, given that the answers would likely be long and detailed. Anyway, I posted what I have found so far here. The post discusses a couple of points. First, the reported number of health care workers who have gotten AIDS as the result of accidental HIV exposure. The second point relates to the question of whether chimpanzees infected with HIV have ever developed AIDS.

Also, I found a World Health Organization report on the accuracy of HIV tests. In it, they say this on Page 3:

“When a single screening assay is used for testing in a population with a very low prevalence of HIV infection, the probability that a person is infected when a positive test result is obtained (i.e., the positive predictive value) is very low, since the majority of people with positive results are not infected. This problem occurs even when a test with high specificity is used. Accuracy can be improved if a second supplemental test is used to retest all those samples found positive by the first test...SNIP... The most commonly used confirmatory test was the Western blot (WB). However, its use has proven to be very expensive and can, under some conditions, produce a relatively large number of indeterminate results.”

Now, to be fair, they go on to discuss the advances that have been made to improve accuracy, and they test samples and new samples repeatedly before they make a diagnosis. I only point this out to demonstrate that the available tests are far from ideal, and therefore in some situations, they may not be interpreted properly. The odds of false negatives is pretty low, but the odds of false positives could be quite high if the tests are not used correctly. Also, these are the tests being used today, right now. How reliable (on a large statistical basis) are the tests done on people 20 years ago, for the purpose of all that study done back then? *shrug* I dunno. That's why I'm still looking into it.

Of course, not all scientific dissent must be taken seriously. Take this, for example: Scientist Says That Prairie Dogs May Have Their Own Language

A selection:

‘‘So far, I think we are showing the most sophisticated communication system that anyone has shown in animals,'' Slobodchikoff said.

Slobodchikoff has spent the last two decades studying prairie dogs and their calls, mostly in Arizona, but also in New Mexico and Colorado.

Prairie dog chatter is variously described by observers as a series of yips, high-pitched barks or eeks. And most scientists think prairie dogs simply make sounds that reflect their inner condition. That means all they're saying are things like ‘‘ouch'' or ‘‘hungry'' or ‘‘eek.''

But Slobodchikoff believes prairie dogs are communicating detailed information to one another about what animals are showing up in their colonies, and maybe even gossiping.

If you didn't see it, I posted yesterday about my discovery that the HIV-causes-AIDS debate is not as clear-cut as I thought it was.

Today, I found this story over at Google News.

People with duplicate copies of an immune system gene are less susceptible to HIV, the cause of AIDS, according to a study appearing in the Jan. 7 edition of Science magazine...SNIP...In tests on different population groups, African-Americans had four copies of the CCL3L1 gene, compared with two and three in European-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. Each additional CCL3L1 copy lowered the risk of acquiring HIV by between 4.5 and 10.5 percent. Moreover, people who had below-average copy numbers of the gene had a 39 to 260 percent higher risk of getting the disease or having AIDS progress rapidly, researchers found.

This, to me, is yet another factor that seems to make the conventional explanations for the African AIDS epidemic a little harder to swallow. African-Americans, (and by extension, I would assume Africans,) are potentially 20% less likely to be infected when exposed, compared to other ethnic groups. Obviously, it's not the only factor involved, but why would the fastest-spreading epidemic be found in the population that is least susceptible to infection?

Once again, let me make it clear that I am not asserting one position or the other. I am still researching the issue, but all I'm trying to say here is that apparently there are still unanswered questions, but the people asking them are getting shouted down because the implications of HIV not actually being the cause of AIDS are so vast . Literally billions of dollars and millions of lives are at stake. Surely we can afford to at least investigate some of these alternative hypotheses?

UPDATE!
I noticed that a lot of other reports of this same story are not mentioning the racial aspect at all, but then this report said this:

...it was not the absolute number of extra copies of the gene that mattered, Ahuja's team found. Instead, it was whether a person had more copies than average for his or her ethnic group.

This could explain the question I asked above, but I would have to read the actual report to be sure.

Well, I was doing a bit of research on global warming and scientific dissent in general, and I happened across this post on this blog. The author, Dean Esmay, has been putting up a series of posts about a scientist by the name of Dr. Peter Duesberg who, among others, is suggesting that HIV is not actually the cause of AIDS.

You heard me.

Now my first thought here was, uh... what? I thought this was a done deal, an answered question. It had not even entered my mind to doubt the connection. So of course, my first reaction was to doubt the doubter. After all, there are all sorts of skeptics out there who doubt all sorts of things or believe other things, all contrary to the available scientific evidence. I felt confident that this guy was one of those people, who take tiny statistical anomalies or minor unanswered questions and blow them all out of proportion to draw an illegitimate conclusion.

So color me surprised when I discover that Doctor Duesburg is the guy who first identified the existence of retroviruses! He's no lone nutjob with a doctorate in paranormal studies from Front Range Community College. He has a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in Germany and is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at U of C Berkely. One of his most vocal supporters, Dr. Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the invention of PCR or Polymerase Chain Reaction, the technique at the base of one of the most common HIV tests.

More on this here, (it's a long post, but it has lots of links in it)

Anyhow, what they are asserting is basically this. Back in the 80s, when the AIDS panic was in full swing, people were desperate (and rightfully so) to find the cause. Two different researchers discovered a virus (which came to be known as HIV) and said that it might be the cause of AIDS. This story, along with others, is detailed in the hallmark AIDS book, And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts. The thing is, neither of them really had hard data to back up their idea, but people were so desperate for a cause that they seized on it and trumpeted it as a triumph of science. Pretty soon, anyone who was skeptical of the connection was shouted down. (Now there is no doubt that some of the skeptics were really more interested in the politics of the issue, but by no means all of them.) Some studies were done to suggest a correlation between HIV and AIDS, but the reviews of the data since then have showed those experiments to be sloppy and not properly double-blinded. (Note that that does not necessarily make them wrong in their conclusions, it only means that the study results are not as reliable as might be ideal.) There have been almost no new studies on the connection between HIV and AIDS since then. The causal relationship is simply accepted as fact.

Did you know that the diagnostic criteria for AIDS is not the same as it used to be? In the 80s, people, mostly, though not universally homosexuals and drug-users presented with a number of specific symptoms that, collectively, came to be known as AIDS. The studies suggested a very strong correlation that people with AIDS were infected with HIV, healthy people in identified risk groups sometimes had HIV, sometimes did not, and healthy people not in risk groups almost never had it. All that suggests that the two are connected at least. Though these are the tests that were not properly double-blinded, and even many who still strongly defend HIV as the cause of AIDS will concede that these studies were flawed. I did not know any of that.

Did you know the HIV virus has never been isolated in culture? Did you know that the package inserts for pretty much every test used to diagnose HIV have statements like: “

Indicates possible infection by virus. Viremia may be present. Positive results are not diagnostic of AIDS. Biologic false positives still possible in some select cases…Follow up testing may be advised if clinical findings are discordant with test results."

(emphasis mine)This is for the so-called "Western Blot" test, I got the quote from the site of a woman named Kim Bannon has filed a lawsuit alleging that currently available HIV tests are unreliable. I didn't know any of this.

Did you know that modern diagnostic standards for AIDS are very different from those original symptoms presented in the 80s? Basically, there is a whole laundry list of symptoms and conditions that, in the presence of HIV are considered AIDS, but in the absence of HIV are not considered AIDS. These conditions include things like cervical cancer, tuberculosis, and herpes. Basically, if you get tuberculosis, and you are HIV positive, then you have AIDS and the HIV gave it to you. If you are not HIV positive, then you do not have AIDS, you have tuberculosis. Bit of circular reasoning there. (Which again, does not mean it is wrong, only that it requires outside confirmation, which heretofore has only sketchy data from 20 years ago to support it. And even that data refers to a specific set of symptoms that did not include the laundry list used today.) And how to explain the hundreds (if not thousands) of people who have been living HIV positive with no symptoms for going on 23 years, despite never taking any AIDS drugs? Nobody seems to be studying them.

Did you know that with African cases, a HIV test is not even required to test for AIDS? And that the other symptoms required for diagnosis are identical to the symptoms of malaria and malnutrition? Did you know that at the same time as this supposed wildfire outbreak of HIV in Africa, (which again, is not actually being tested for, only estimated,) cases of syphilis and gonorrhea are going down? It could very well be that many of these cases are not actually HIV/AIDS at all, but actually malaria or malnutrition. Few are particularly inclined to dispute that diagnosis, because AIDS brings in far more aid money than does malaria.

I'm sorry for not including direct links or references for all this data, but there's just so much of it. I'll include a longer list of links where I got all this from at the end. I'm really not trying to assert anything just at the moment except that apparently the question is not as satisfactorily resolved as I thought it was. HIV might cause AIDS after all. It just seems that the scientific evidence used to support that conclusion isn't as solid as everyone seems to think it is.

Why is this so important? Well, for starters, all the billions of dollars currently being used on AIDS research might be barking up the wrong tree. Second, HIV might not always lead to AIDS. Maybe it requires some other factor in order to develop into full-blown AIDS. Maybe HIV is actually only another symptom, and not the cause at all. But think of the implications? A lot of AIDS medications have some really nasty side-effects. Some of them are incredibly toxic and may actually doing more harm than good. If HIV is not the cause of AIDS, then these drugs may be doing all the harm without any good at all? Did you know that there are parents who have their HIV positive children taken away from them if they dare to say they don't want their kids to take AZT, a chemotherapy drug that was banned from use on terminal cancer patients because it is too toxic?

Most AIDS drugs are fast-tracked through FDA approval, bypassing many of the studies required to prove efficacy in other drugs. Political pressure forces their hand. "What do you mean it will take five years to approve it? I might be dead by then!" Now I can certainly understand that people are desperate for a cure, but we have to be really careful not to give them snake-oil that may actually make them more sick. The implications of this are HUGE!!!

Let me again state that I'm not trying to make the case that HIV does not cause AIDS. For all I know, it does. It's just that, apparently, there are some legitimate questions that have not been satisfactorily explained, and that anybody who asks them or wants to study them gets ridiculed or even blackballed. Check out some of these links and research it for yourself. I know I will continue to do so.

-The first post I found - This link is to Dean Esmay's blog. There are a number of other posts on the subject, with some really amazing discussions in the comments, and tons of links and scientific detail.

-Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg - A book about Dr Duesberg and his theories, including the history of his consistent suppression by the mainstream scientific community. I haven't read this book, but I'm planning to. By the way, the author of this book, Harvey Bialy, is himself a doctor of molecular biology and the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, and he also participates in the conversations taking place on Dean Esmay's blog.

-What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong? another book about this controversy

-Inventing the AIDS Virus A book by Duesberg himself.

-The Durban Declaration A document drafted by a number of scientists asserting that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

- The Durban Declaration is not Accepted by All - A response to the declaration by skeptics

- Virus Myth - A website devoted to discussion of the so-called "myth" of HIV causing AIDS.

- Peter Duesberg's Site

- Encyclopedia entry on the Duesberg Hypothesis - A helpful summary with more links.

- National Institute of Health on HIV and AIDS - Also has lots of links, supporting the HIV as the cause of AIDS hypothesis

As I said, I do not have the answer here. I have only just recently been alerted to the existence of the question. I am, however, going to continue researching.

They may not have been big enough to carry a hobbit from Mount Doom to Rivendell, but the concept of giant eagles apparently has some basis in fact.

Weighing between 20 and 30 pounds, the enormous Haast's Eagle dominated its environment. It was 30 to 40 per cent heavier than the largest living bird of prey around today, the Harpy Eagle of Central and South America.

Just to put that in context, the average weight of a bald eagle is 10 to 14 pounds, so this thing was probably more than double the size, since it would need a more-than-proportionally larger wingspan to carry double the weight. Betcha that thing could carry a coconut. Then again, they were probably non-migratory.