Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?

For Halloween, Scientific American featured parasites that "control" their hosts. This picture shows a wasp "enslaving" a cockroach.

In a well-documented example of external parasite control, an emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa) enslaves a much larger cockroach (Periplaneta americana). The wasp injects a neurotoxin into the cockroach's brain. This toxin kills off the roach's ability to control its own movement but doesn't paralyze it entirely. The wasp is then able to grasp the roach's antenna and lead it into a nest before laying an egg in the live cockroach's body.

Permanently incapacitated, the cockroach is unable to escape and is eaten from the inside by the growing wasp larva.

"Laboratory rules prevent the scientists eating the fruits of their labour"

From Times Online

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.

The result was sticky muscle tissue that requires exercise, like human muscles, to turn it into a tougher steak-like consistency.

“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals,” said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research.

Post and his colleagues have so far managed to develop a soggy form of pork and are seeking to improve its texture. “What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” Post said.

“We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”

At present there is a question mark over the taste as laboratory rules prevent the scientists eating the fruits of their labour.

The Dutch experiments follow the creation of “fish fillets” derived from goldfish muscle cells in New York and pave the way for laboratory-grown chicken, beef and lamb.

The project, which is backed by a sausage manufacturer and has received £2m from the Dutch government, is seeking additional public funds to improve the technology.

Global meat and dairy product consumption is expected to double by 2050, according to the United Nations. This could have an unprecedented impact on climate change because the warming effect on the atmosphere of methane, a digestive by-product from farm animals, is 23 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. The UN has attributed 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases to livestock.

The Vegetarian Society reacted cautiously yesterday, saying: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.” Peta, the animal rights group, said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”

Evolution produces immunity to mad-cow disease

Fromm BBC: "Villagers suffering from a major epidemic of Kuru, a fatal CJD-like brain disease, seem to have developed a strong genetic resistance to the condition.

The infection, which is associated with mortuary feasts, where mainly women and children consume the remains of respected relatives, devastated populations in the remote eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. Things go so bad that in some villages there were no women of child-bearing age left alive and the practice was banned in the late 1950's and quickly died out.

But it seems that natural selection was already developing a response of its own. Scientists working on the new variant of CJD associated with eating meat from cattle infected with BSE have found that people living around the Purosa valley in Papua New Guinea, where Kuru was most rife, have a unique genetic variation that seems to offer high, or even complete, protection against the disease.

The scientists from the MRC's Prion Unit studied over 3,000 people from the area, including 709 who had participated in cannibalistic mortuary feasts, 152 of whom subsequently died. They discovered that many of the survivors, and their children, seemed to have a unique variation in the prion protein gene G127V. …

Professor John Collinge, director of the unit, said it was a fascinating example of Darwinian selection at work. 'This community has developed its own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic. The fact that it has happened in decades is remarkable'.

The discovery is exciting because it could help scientists to understand the genetic mechanisms that underpin the development of CJD in people and even BSE in animals.

But it's also important because many of those same genetic mechanisms play a vital role in the development of other debilitating brain conditions including Alzheimers and Parkinson's disease.

In could be that the cannibalism in Papua New Guinea holds the key to cures for a wide range of degenerative brain disorders.

Tom Friedman on being a clean-energy hawk

Tom Friedman frequently writes about clean energy. Here he argues that

the best way to launch E.T. [energy technology] is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

Most of the column is about why it's in our financial and political interests to invest in clean energy.

What happens [otherwise] is that the price of oil goes through the roof … The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia … get richer.

I tend to agree with Friedman. But making his case an economic one requires that he justify interfering with the markets. If it's so obvious that developing clean energy is a financial win, why isn't the free market already doing it? Are the people who want to make money so dumb that they don't see what he sees? Why do we need a carbon tax at all?

Perhaps one could argue that profitability is too far in the future, that only those with very deep pockets can afford to invest in clean energy now, and that if we don't the Chinese will—and will leave us in the dust when the time for clean energy arrives. But he hasn't made that point. Or perhaps he can argue that the free market is too short-sighted to see as far ahead as is necessary to invest in clean energy—and that the necessary development will take so long that when we need it we will not have the time to develop it. But he hasn't made that case either.

Appealing to the power of the free market to develop the technology if only it is subsidized by government tax policy somehow doesn't seem like a completely cogent argument.

scanl in "Infinite list tricks in Haskell"

See this for a description of scanl. It's similar to foldl except that it returns a list of intermediate results..

in reference to:

"Infinite list tricks in Haskell"
- Infinite list tricks in Haskell - Program - Builder AU (view on Google Sidewiki)

This was my first "sidewiki" posting.

A view from the paranoid right

I don't know how I got on this mailing list, but for the past few weeks I've been getting a stream of scare messages from an organizatino calling itself AmeriPac. It's been mainly anti-healthcare. Today's was partciularly amusing.

Register For Your ObamaCare Draft Card!

White House Alert: The ObamaCare Draft Is Legal!

You are to be drafted against your will into ObamaCare. …

The ObamaCare Draft plan is simple, you just register to get your ObamaCare Draft Card. Then wait in line for the ObamaCare lottery to draw your number and tell you when you can line up at a government clinic to get care.

Why Compact, Contiguous Districts are Bad for the Democrats

The abstract from a paper by Chen and Roddin.

When one of the major parties in the United States wins a substantially larger share of the seats than its vote share would seem to warrant, the conventional explanation lies in manipulation of maps by the party that controls the redistricting process. Yet this paper uses a unique data set from Florida to demonstrate a common mechanism through which substantial partisan bias can emerge purely from residential patterns. When partisan preferences are spatially dependent and partisanship is highly correlated with population density, any districting scheme that generates relatively compact, contiguous districts will tend to produce bias against the urban party. In order to demonstrate this empirically, we apply automated districting algorithms driven solely by compactness and contiguity parameters, building winner-take-all districts out of the precinct-level results of the tied Florida presidential election of 2000. The simulation results demonstrate that with 50 percent of the votes statewide, the Republicans can expect to win around 59 percent of the seats without any “intentional” gerrymandering. This is because urban districts tend to be homogeneous and Democratic while suburban and rural districts tend to be moderately Republican. Thus in Florida and other states where Democrats are highly concentrated in cities, the seemingly apolitical practice of requiring compact, contiguous districts will produce systematic pro-Republican electoral bias.

Once you think about it, it's obvious. The Democratic districts will be overwhelmingly Democratic; the Republican districts will be only moderately Republican. So there may be more Democrats overall, but if the Democratic districts are overwhelmingly Democratic and the Republican districts are only slightly more Republican than Democratic, the Republicans will win more districts than their proportion of the population deserves.