Archive for January, 2014

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Rosetta awakes

January 21, 2014

The European Space Agency is – justifiably – feeling pleased with itself:

Rosetta wake-up signal

It was a fairy-tale ending to a tense chapter in the story of the Rosetta space mission this evening as ESA heard from its distant spacecraft for the first time in 31 months.

Rosetta is chasing down Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will become the first space mission to rendezvous with a comet, the first to attempt a landing on a comet’s surface, and the first to follow a comet as it swings around the Sun.

Since its launch in 2004, Rosetta has made three flybys of Earth and one of Mars to help it on course to its rendezvous with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, encountering asteroids Steins and Lutetia along the way.

Operating on solar energy alone, Rosetta was placed into a deep space slumber in June 2011 as it cruised out to a distance of nearly 800 million km from the warmth of the Sun, beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Now, as Rosetta’s orbit has brought it back to within ‘only’ 673 million km from the Sun, there is enough solar energy to power the spacecraft fully again.

Thus today, still about 9 million km from the comet, Rosetta’s pre-programmed internal ‘alarm clock’ woke up the spacecraft. After warming up its key navigation instruments, coming out of a stabilising spin, and aiming its main radio antenna at Earth, Rosetta sent a signal to let mission operators know it had survived the most distant part of its journey.

The signal was received by both NASA’s Goldstone and Canberra ground stations at 18:18 GMT/ 19:18 CET, during the first window of opportunity the spacecraft had to communicate with Earth. It was immediately confirmed in ESA’s space operations centre in Darmstadt and the successful wake-up announced via the @ESA_Rosetta twitter account, which tweeted: “Hello, World!”

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Pfizer writes off $725 million – were they a victim of scientific fraud?

January 20, 2014

Whether it is just error or bad judgement or fraud we will never know. Perhaps all three.

NewsObserver: In 2008, Pfizer paid $725 million for the rights to a Russian cold medicine called Dimebon. The pharmaceutical giant thought the drug could help ameliorate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Several clinical trials showed the medicine had no more impact than a placebo. Pfizer has largely abandoned the project.

Earlier this week came the news that Pfizer have now written off the entire $725 million.

The last flickering hope that Medivation’s Dimebon could help Alzheimer’s disease patients has just been extinguished. The biotech announced this morning that a 12-month study of the drug failed to register significant improvements for patients, mirroring two shorter Phase III studies in which Dimebon failed to outperform a sugar pill. Pfizer took the opportunity to bow out of its partnership, writing off its $225 million upfront and $500 million milestone program for what proved to be another embarrassing pipeline failure.

In 2008, Dimebon looked like an odds-on success, with positive data from a Russian study and 10 years of sales experience to underscore its safety. But Medivation was shaken to the core when its first late-stage study ended in failure, with an additional pratfall for Huntington’s disease to cap the disaster.

In the end, Dimebon’s failure helped tarnish the reputation of Russian drug studies while raising severe doubts about Medivation.

It is not only Pfizer which has been forced to make costly write-offs. Not long ago  GlaxoSmithKline was forced to shut down Sirtris Pharmaceuticals which it had acquired in 2008 for $720 million:

Xconomy:

Glaxo paid $720 million to acquire Sirtris in April 2008, to get ahold of technology that generated lots of breathless media coverage as a modern-day fountain of youth. The company sought to make drugs that act on sirtuins, a class of proteins that scientists believe play a role in aging, programmed cell death, and other key cell processes.

Even though the company is closing the Sirtris site, Stubbee says Glaxo remains confident in the drug candidates it got from that acquisition. ….

…. Sirtuins are known to be active when the body is in a calorie-restricted state, which scientists have shown contributes to longer lifespan. The idea at Sirtris was to make small-molecule chemical compounds that activated sirtuins as a way of fighting diseases that develop as people age—including Type 2 diabetes and cancer. ….. The research into the biological role of sirtuins, from Sirtris co-founder David Sinclair, has attracted its share of skeptics. Just last week, Sinclair, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, sought to buttress his early work with a new article in Science that says resveratrol and related compounds can activate sirtuins. One critic, quoted by the Boston Globe last week, said the role of one sirtuin called SIRT1 in aging, “is still as clear as mud.”

GSK is putting a brave face on all of this.

But for many medical and biotech researchers, the path to fame and fortune is by starting a start-up with some new compound or technique and by “leveraging the promise”. For pharma and biotechnology start-ups the objective is to be bought up by one of the majors for as exorbitant an amount as can be managed. And it seems that one way to inflate the value is by making preliminary data and trials show very optimistic results. Negative results never see the light of day and the positive aspects are exaggerated and at worst manipulated.

The ten-fold growth of retractions in medicine related fields since 1975 is mainly due to misconduct according to this report in Nature where “fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of the retractions”.

For Big Pharma this is simply a consequence of having “outsourced” part of their research. They can afford a few failures it could be thought. Of course the final cost is eventually borne by the consumers but some start-ups make a killing along the way.

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Vultures judge probability of mortality of their prey

January 20, 2014

Vultures, it seems, weigh up the probability of prey mortality before selecting the prey they will follow. But is this innate sense of statistical probability inherent in their genes or is it just a behaviour taught from one generation to the next?

I suspect it is a learned behavioural pattern which is reinforced by success and which would be given up if it failed. Just habit then and probably not  a genetic knowledge of ststistical probability.

A new paper in PLOS ONE:

Corinne J. Kendall, Munir Z. Virani, J. Grant C. Hopcraft, Keith L. Bildstein and Daniel I. Rubenstein, African Vultures Don’t Follow Migratory Herds: Scavenger Habitat Use Is Not Mediated by Prey Abundance, Published: January 08, 2014, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083470

vulture

RUPPELL’S GRIFFON VULTURE

Science News: …  if you’re a vulture, following a bunch of fat and happy wildebeest probably means you’re going to go hungry. These carrion-eating birds usually follow the wildebeest herd only during the dry season, when there’s more likely to be dead animals along the migration trail, reports Corinne Kendall of Princeton University and her colleagues in a study published January 8 in PLOS ONE.

Kendall and her colleagues kitted out 39 vultures (15 Ruppell’s vultures, 12 white-backed vultures and 12 lappet-faced vultures) from the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya with GPS transmitters and tracked them for months as the birds flew across East Africa. The three bird species each had slightly different patterns of flight — with similar lifestyles, they have to figure out how to not get in each other’s way — but they all showed a preference for visiting the wildebeest herds in Kenya in the dry season, July to October.

That suggests that the vultures take into consideration not only their potential prey’s location but also how likely it is that the prey will die and provide the vultures with a meal. These birds are specialized for eating dead things, after all. Because low rainfall should result in less food for wildebeest and more wildebeest deaths, the best time to find dead wildebeest is during the dry season.

During other times of the year, the vultures took different paths to finding meals. Some went to areas outside the migratory paths, probably trying to find dead animals among the region’s nonmigratory populations. Some headed for other areas of Kenya, such as the Tsavo National Parks. One Ruppell’s vulture took off for three months to a region in Sudan and Ethiopia where a species of antelope, the white-eared kob, follows its own migratory route.

“Despite the fact that migratory wildebeest herds consistently represent the greatest prey abundance in this landscape, vultures selectively associate with them only during the dry season,” the researchers write. “Our study suggests that prey mortality may be a more important driver of vulture habitat use than prey abundance.”

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I am but a prisoner of my genes

January 20, 2014

I’d like to fly but but my genes don’t agree

And they determine how tall I will be,

I am but a lowly prisoner of my genes,

My apparent freedom is not quite what it seems.

But thanks to my genes I’m not a chimpanzee.

–

All abnormal behaviour is illness, says DSM-five,

Just following precisely what our genes do contrive.

Our genomes hold us tightly captive,

As slaves in their battle to survive,

So it matters not how much we strive.

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Rosetta will be woken up Monday at 1000GMT after a two-and-a-half year sleep

January 19, 2014

The European Space Agency will try and wake-up its sleeping Rosetta spacecraft on Monday at 1000 GMT. The spacecraft entered deep space hibernation in June 2011 when it was too far away from the sun to capture much solar energy. If this works it will be a considerable achievement considering that Rosetta was launched 10 years ago  and the communications technology on board is effectively at least two  “generations” old!

Rosetta trajectory till June 2011

ESA:

At 10:00 GMT on Monday, the most important alarm clock in the Solar System will wake up ESA’s sleeping Rosetta spacecraft.

Rosetta is chasing comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and, since its launch in 2004, has made three flybys of Earth and one of Mars to build up enough speed and get on a trajectory towards the comet. It has also encountered asteroids Steins and Lutetia along the way.

Operating on solar energy alone, the spacecraft was placed into a deep space slumber in mid-2011 as it cruised far from the Sun and out towards the orbit of Jupiter. To prepare for its long sleep, Rosetta was oriented so that its solar arrays faced the Sun and put into a once per minute spin for stability.

The only devices left running were its computer and several heaters.

Thirty-one months later, Rosetta’s orbit has brought it back to within ‘only’ 673 million kilometres of the Sun, and there is finally enough solar energy to power the spacecraft fully again. It is time to wake up.

Rosetta’s computer is programmed to carry out a sequence of events to re-establish contact with Earth on 20 January, starting with an ‘alarm clock’ at 10:00 GMT.

Immediately after, the spacecraft’s startrackers will begin to warm up, taking around six hours.

Then its thrusters will fire to stop the slow rotation. A slight adjustment will be made to Rosetta’s orientation to ensure that the solar arrays are still facing directly towards the Sun, before the startrackers are switched on to determine the spacecraft’s attitude.

Once that has been established, Rosetta will turn directly towards Earth, switch on its transmitter and point its high-gain antenna to send its signal to announce that it is awake.

Because of Rosetta’s vast distance – just over 807 million kilometres from Earth – it will take 45 minutes for the signal to reach the ground stations. The first opportunity for receiving a signal on Earth is expected between 17:30 GMT and 18:30 GMT.

Graphic of mission

Rosetta Mission (ESA via BBC)

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The true size of Africa

January 18, 2014

Amazing.

Even little Madagascar (22 million population) is as large as the UK in area!

Behold: major countries of the world, overlaid atop an outline of the positively giant African continent.

If this is your first time seeing this comparison (click here to see it in hi-res), you might be surprised by Africa’s immensity.

The True Size of Africa

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Ohio execution fails the humane animal slaughter test

January 18, 2014

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of capital punishment, the botched execution of Dennis McGuire on January 16th in Ohio leaves me feeling very uneasy.

The most powerful State in today’s world – in the name of the citizens of that State – took almost 25 minutes to execute a condemned man. Ohio plans 5 more executions this year and the State Assistant Attorney General Thomas Madden has argued that while the U.S. Constitution bans cruel and unusual punishment, “you’re not entitled to a pain-free execution.” U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost apparently agrees with that. Thomas Madden and Gregory Frost would seem to hold that humans – unlike animals – are not entitled to be executed humanely.

The US has a Law for the humane slaughter of animals – The Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act. This law requires as follows:

7 U.S.C.A. § 1902. Humane methods ….. Either of the following two methods of slaughtering and handling are hereby found to be humane:

(a) in the case of cattle, calves, horses, mules, sheep, swine, and other livestock, all animals are rendered insensible to pain by a single blow or gunshot or an electrical, chemical or other means that is rapid and effective, before being shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut; or

(b) by slaughtering in accordance with the ritual requirements of the Jewish faith or any other religious faith that prescribes a method of slaughter whereby the animal suffers loss of consciousness by anemia of the brain caused by the simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument and handling in connection with such slaughtering.

Contrast this with the AP report of the execution:

A condemned man appeared to gasp several times and took an unusually long time to die — more than 20 minutes — in an execution carried out Thursday with a combination of drugs never before tried in the U.S. …….  McGuire’s lawyers had attempted last week to block his execution, arguing that the untried method could lead to a medical phenomenon known as “air hunger” and could cause him to suffer “agony and terror” while struggling to catch his breath. McGuire, 53, made loud snorting noises during one of the longest executions since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999. Nearly 25 minutes passed between the time the lethal drugs began flowing and McGuire was pronounced dead at 10:53 a.m. Executions under the old method were typically much shorter and did not cause the kind of sounds McGuire made. ………. Prison officials gave intravenous doses of two drugs, the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone, to put McGuire to death for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of a pregnant newlywed, Joy Stewart. The method was adopted after supplies of a previously used drug, the powerful sedative pentobarbital, dried up because the manufacturer declared it off limits for capital punishment. ……… What was particularly unusual Thursday was the five minutes or so that McGuire lay motionless on the gurney after the drugs began flowing, followed by a sudden snort and then more than 10 minutes of irregular breathing and gasping. Normally, movement comes at the beginning and is followed by inactivity.

The key point for “humaneness” would appear to be that the victim be first rendered insensible or unconscious very quickly and by methods that are “rapid and effective”. That seems to have been missing here. Presumably the sanctity of “the process” of execution prevented any of the assembled crowd from doing anything to correct the situation. Everybody just waited the full 25 minutes and watched!

I take barbarism to be inelegance of behaviour. Beheading would have been less barbaric. If a firing squad or a guillotine were not appropriate, couldn’t someone have just hit him on the head or otherwise “rendered him insensible” first?

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A garbage disposal system for space junk

January 17, 2014

NASA keeps track of all the debris in orbit. About 13,000 known objects are bigger than 10 centimeters in diameter and there are more than 100,000 pieces of orbital debris between 1 cm and 10 cm. Pieces smaller than 1 cm number in the tens of millions. All pieces of debris larger than 10 cm are carefully tracked using radar and telescopes.

Many schemes have been proposed for trying to get rid of space debris orbiting the Earth. The schemes have ranged from space harpoons, clouds of of ballistic gas, housekeeping, robotic satellites and laser cannon. The Japanese have a plan for an electrodynamic tether to be attached to the debris by a robot arm. the tether then generates an electric field as it orbits around the Earth and the magnetic field then encourages the debris to drop into lower orbits and eventually burn up. A tether is going to be sent up into space at the end of February for a trial.

Electrodynamic tether

SpaceDaily: Researchers at The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have developed what they called an electrodynamic tether made from thin wires of stainless steel and aluminium.

The idea is that one end of the strip will be attached to one of the thousands of dead satellites or bits of rocket that are jamming up space and endangering working equipment.

The electricity generated by the tether as it swings through the Earth’s magnetic field is expected to have a slowing effect on the space junk, which should, scientists say, pull it into a lower and lower orbit.

Eventually the detritus will enter the Earth’s atmosphere, burning up harmlessly long before it has chance to crash to the planet’s surface.

“The experiment is specifically designed to contribute to developing a space debris cleaning method,” said Masahiro Nohmi, associate professor at Kagawa University, who is working with JAXA on the project, told AFP. Nohmi said a satellite developed by the university is expected to be launched into space on February 28, with the tether aboard.

“We have two main objectives in the trial next month,” he said. “First, to extend a 300-metre (1,000-foot) tether in orbit and secondly to observe the transfer of electricity.” The actual reeling in of orbiting rubbish will be the objective of future experiments, he said. A spokesman for JAXA said the agency also plans to conduct its own trial on a tether in 2015.

More than 20,000 bits of cast off equipment, including old satellites, pieces of rocket and other fragments are uselessly orbiting the Earth in a band 800-1,400 kilometres (500-900 miles) from the surface of the planet at terrific speed. 

JAXA write:

If we are able to calculate the motion of debris, we can attach a propulsion system for removal. As the propulsion system, we have envisioned an “electrodynamic tether”, which is extremely efficient because it does not require fuel. The end of an electrically conductive cord (tether) is attached to the debris, transferring it to a lower orbit through the Lorentz force generated by the interference between Earth’s magnetic field and the current flowing through the tether, causing it to re-enter the atmosphere. Two methods are being considered for attaching the tether. One is a method of using a robot arm, for example, to hook the end of the tether into a 1-meter-diameter hole in a payload attachment fitting used as a base for mounting the satellite onto the rocket.  Another is a method where the side of the rocket stage, which is extremely thin for reduced weight, is approached and harpooned by the tether end to attach it. This method is considered to be a safer operation since the tether can be attached from a distance of 10 to 20m.

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Without immigration OECD populations will be in decline and in crisis

January 17, 2014

In times of high unemployment the anti-immigration voices are raised very high everywhere and especially in many European countries. Much of the sentiment is rooted in racist views whether against those of Asian or African or East European origin. In Japan it is seen as threatening the homogeneity of the country. But what every politician well knows – but which some will not dare to admit for fear of losing their populist base – is that  without net immigration in, OECD countries will face an increasing crisis of declining populations, declining labour force and an increase in the  proportion of the aged. They are all very well aware that expanding the working population to at least match the increase in the “aged” proportion is critical to maintaining the standard of welfare and health care that they have become accustomed to. Increasing the retirement age – which is already on the table as trial balloons – is unavoidable because even with immigration the proportion of the working population relative to the “aged” is in decline.

In OECD countries fertility rates are already well below the replacement level of 2.1 per woman. It is higher only in Israel, Iceland and New Zealand, and in India, South Africa and Indonesia. China is already down at 1.6 and India is down to 2.63 and declining fast.

The Local

France’s fertility rate has fallen below the symbolic level of two babies per woman and 2013 saw the slowest population growth in the country for well over a decade, new data revealed this week.

The 280,000 births in 2013 marked a 1.3 percent decline from 2012 with France’s fertility rate falling from 2.03 children per woman in 2010 to 1.99 children last year, according to the France’s national statistics agency INSEE. …… 

Despite the drop in the birth rate, France remains second only to Ireland when it comes to Europe’s most fertile nations. Women in Ireland, where the population is 4.6 million, had on average 2.01 children each in 2013.

These figures stand in stark contrast to Germany and Portugal, which had the lowest fertility rates on the continent. Germany recorded a rate of 1.38 per woman, followed by Portugal with 1.28 offspring per woman.

Korea, Hungary, Spain and Japan are the other countries where fertility rates are less than 1.4.

Fertility rates (2010 data) by country is here: OECD Total fertility rates 1970, 2010

Statistics are from the OECD Library:

Total fertility rates in OECD countries have declined dramatically over the past few decades, falling on average from 2.7 in 1970 to 1.7 children per woman of childbearing age in the 2000s. In all OECD countries, fertility rates declined for young women and increased at older ages. A modest recovery in total fertility rates started in the early 2000’s, to an average level of 1.7 in 2010. The total fertility rate is below its replacement level of 2.1 in most OECD countries except Israel, Iceland and New Zealand, and in India, South Africa and Indonesia.

The last few years have seen various trends emerge in fertility rates. A drop in fertility rates has occurred, for example in Australia, New Zealand, Spain and the United States, while rates have continued to rise in Iceland, Israel, Sweden, and Switzerland. The increase in fertility stopped in many other countries. The effect of the economic downturn is as yet unknown, but persistent economic uncertainties can impact downward the number of children women may have over their reproductive life.

OECD Fertility trends

OECD Fertility trends

OECD fertility table

The difference between the decline in fertility rates between India and China is of particular interest. While some of the difference is due to different rates of development, most of the difference can be attributed to the draconian one-child policy in China. But that is now being relaxed as the coming decline in the Chinese population becomes obvious..

The shortages of the proportion of working population – unless immigration is used to mitigate the shortfall – is inevitable and will really begin to bite over the next twenty years or so.

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Posted in Anthropology, Demographics, Development | 1 Comment »

China to industrialise desalination of sea-ice

January 16, 2014

During an ice age as water gets trapped in expanding ice, the entire water cycle stabilises at much lower rates of flux than during an inter-glacial period. Evaporation (due to absorption of solar energy) is the primary force which drives the water cycle. During an ice age, rates of evaporation will decrease sharply, precipitation will reduce and the flow of fresh water through rivers and streams back into the seas will reduce as a consequence. Sea levels would drop by up to 150 m from current levels and while currently submerged land will be exposed, desertification of many regions will also take place.

One of the technologies that will be necessary at such a time will be for the extraction of fresh water from sea ice.

Bohai Bay China

Bohai Bay China

The Bohai Rim is one of the water-scarce regions in China. But every winter, more than 1 billion m3 of sea ice formed in the sea, about 40% of which distributes within 10 km offshore and is expected to be exploited and utilized as source of freshwater.

They may not be expecting a return to full glacial conditions anytime soon, but perhaps the Chinese are already preparing for another Little Ice Age and the fresh water availability reduction that will undoubtedly cause.

Xinhua reports:

China will soon begin production of large amounts of fresh water through the desalination of sea ice, according university research team and a Chinese company on Tuesday. A research team from Beijing Normal University signed a sea ice desalination technology transfer agreement with Beijing Huahaideyuan Technology Co. Ltd on Tuesday.

The company is expected to be able to produce at least 1 billion cubic meters of fresh water annually by 2023, said Yu Jian, executive president of the company. The salinity of sea ice is between 0.4 percent to 0.8 percent, much lower than that of sea water, which stands at about 2.8 percent to 3.1 percent, said Professor Gu Wei, head of the research team.

The research team has mastered the basic principles and technology of sea ice desalination and developed the equipment to be used in the process, including an ice-breaking platform and an ice-gatherer, he said. The salinity of sea ice water after desalination is 0.1 percent, which meets the national standard. The water can be used in agriculture, by industry and for drinking, he said.

The cost of desalination is expected to fall to 4 yuan per tonne, he said.

China’s sea ice desalination program started in 1996 when Shi Peijun, a professor from Beijing Normal University, realized that low saline ice could ease the water shortage around the Pan-Bohai Bay area in north China, after desalination. The program has received a total of 29.72 million yuan (4.88 million U.S. dollars) from various government departments in the past 18 years.

In winter in high-latitude oceans, there is a great amount of sea ice, which is being recognized as a new resource of fresh water by scientists.

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