illuminating science

Don’t forget that if you’re in Brisbane, the next BrisScience talk is on tonight! It features John Quiggan, who I can vouch for as an excellent speaker, talking about eternal problem of economic growth vs preserving the environment. Most people want to do the right thing for the environment, but very few people are williing to put their money where their mouth is. However, he says that economics has a compromise which will allow us to address the major problems facing Australia (and ultimately, everywhere) while still allowing our standard of living to keep increasing. Come along tonight to find out - Brisbane City Hall, 6:30pm. And free wine and nibblies to follow!

BrisScience - ECONOMICS: THE HOPEFUL SCIENCE - John Quiggin

***********
Discussion of environmental problems is often polarised between two kinds of
pessimists.

On the one hand, many environmentalists argue that we cannot possibly
sustain existing standards of living without wrecking the environment. On
the other hand, are opponents of environmental policy who argue that we must
accept grave damage to the environment as the cost of economic progress.
Economics suggests a more hopeful answer. We can, if we choose, address the
most severe environmental problems facing Australia and the world, and still
enjoy rising standards of living over time.
***********

John Quiggin is a Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science at
the University of Queensland. He is prominent both as a research economist
and as a commentator on Australian economic policy. He has published over
750 research articles, books and reports, and he has been an active
contributor to Australian public debate. He is a regular columnist for the
Australian Financial Review and he frequently comments on policy issues for
radio and TV. Since 2002, he has published a weblog (http://johnquiggin.com)
providing daily comments on a wide range of topics.

DATE: Monday July 31

TIME: 6:30pm to 7:30pm (doors open at 6:00pm); complimentary wine, soft
drinks, and nibblies follow

VENUE: Ithaca Auditorium, City Hall, King George Square, Brisbane City

This free talk is open to all and there is no need to book.

Please forward this announcement on to friends or colleagues.

For further information, have a look at www.BrisScience.org. Don’t hesitate
to contact me (0408 796 357, dodd.jen@gmail.com) with any questions.
Looking forward to seeing you on tonight!

More news quote commentary today. Labor (Australia’s opposition party) has said that if elected they will scrap the “no new uranium mines” policy, and allow companies to open new uranium mines under tough terms and conditions. Personally, I think it’s a good idea, provided the mining can be done with minimum impact to the local environment. I guess, being very utilitarian here, I’d also be willing to accept damage to a non-critical part of Australia if the companies were then required to invest large sums in restoring/maintaining other parts of the Australian landscape. One of Australia’s former Prime Ministers proposed recently that Australia should become a leader in the “nuclear economy”, not only in terms of exporting uranium, but also storing the waste in the outback, where we are very geologically stable and sparsely populated. Obviously, there are many issues that would need to be very carefuly considered, but economically it would be a Very Good Thing for Oz. And probably even in terms of safety, it’s better to have all the the processing, etc, done by one group who really knows what they’re doing.

Anyway, what sparked this post in particular was Greenpeace’s comments on the issue.

Firstly, Greenpeace’s campaign manager says:

Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change - it’s not a good business to be in and certainly you can’t divorce nuclear power from the nuclear weapons industry,” Mr Kennedy said.

Well, yes and no. Firstly, no, it’s not a perfect solution to climate change, but I’m becoming a strong believer that it provides, at least partially, a better solution than what we have now. As I understand it, nuclear power couldn’t power all of Australia, at least not in the short term - setting up the infrastructure and the number of power stations etc is going to be expensive and time consuming, and you need lots. But the key thing is that expect for nuclear waste (!) it’s a clean power source. No pollution, no greenhouse gas emissions. We still have to deal with the waste, which lasts for 10,000 years, give or take, but at least we can control the waste. Does anyone have estimates on how long it will take green house gases to return to their normal levels? Let alone the fact that extinctions are irreversible, and that several models of climate change propose a run away scenario where our global climate will be dramatically changed (no, not like “Day after tomorow”…truly terrible movie…)

Then the clincher:

The fact that the reason we have the threat of nuclear war on Earth is because of the nuclear industry itself.

Well, not really, guys. The fact we have the threat of nuclear war is because of that constant arms race. And if it wasn’t nuclear, it would just be increasingly big bombs, or germ warfare, or something else again. There is the issue of terrorists getting nuclear bombs or nuclear waste which can be put into “dirt bombs” (which just explode and spray radioactive waste everwhere), but this then becomes an issue more of better controls and safety around nuclear power than actually of nuclear power itself. As well say that the reason I risk getting stabbed walking home is because of the food industry, producing a market for sharp knives. (Okay, maybe that’s stretching it a little, but you get the idea.)

I’d really like to support a conservation group, but I guess what I really want is one run by scientists. People who actually understand the issues involve and don’t protest something just because it has the word “nuclear” or “genetic” in its title. I want to support the anti-whaling ban, I want to support sustainable forrest industries, and I want to support more humane, sustainable animal treatment. But I don’t want to protest against food irradiation (sound scary? Scientists need to work on their naming skills…) or genetically modified foods in all forms. I’m open to suggestions here!

Labor (the governmet party in Australia that’s sorta kinda like the Democrats in the US) today announced that if they’re elected next year they will eliminate full fee paying positions from Australian universities and reduce the cost of HECS, as well as increase funding to Universities. (Quick background: Australian students get given an interest free loan scheme to go to University, known as HECS. This covers the student contribution to higher education (~$5000/yr, about 25%) with the government paying the rest. You then only need to pay back the loan when your salary reaches a certain level, and then repayments are taken out as an extra tax. Note that although the loan is interest free, it is indexed to inflation (2%ish) - so your debt when you start repaying is the same as it would be for a student who just graduated that year.)

So, my opinions on these (and keep in mind, I actually vote Labor…):

Reducing HECS Labor says “Australian students can no longer afford their courses because of government under-funding” and that “rising cost of tertiary education is deterring young people from going to uni”. Bull. If you’re being deterred from going to Uni on the basis of HECS debts, then you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed and it’s natural selectrion in action! You only pay the HECS back when you start earning enough money, and it’s a decent salary too. Odds are good (though by no means guaranteed) that a degree will get you into a position where you can afford to pay off that debt, and that you’ll be earning more than someone who doesn’t have a degree. If you don’t earn enough, then you don’t pay it back - so why worry?

Even more pertinent is that different universities can charge you different (HECS) fees. My advice? Go to the best university you can - if they charge you $7000 instead of $3000, you’ll end up with a debt of $2000 instead of $1000 - who cares? It’s likely you’ve gotten a better education, better exposure, better job opportunities, etc. Obviously, if the cheaper university fits you better - go there! But don’t let HECS in any way affect your decision.

Finally, I think we should have to contribute something to our education. We’re likely going to earn more later (though yes, we’ll of course pay more back in tax) and, ultimately, it’s pretty cheap. Especially compared to our American counterparts!

Full fee paying positions. Originally, the idea is that students are allocated to places on the basis of their marks and receive their HECS loans, end of story. In a controversial move recently, Universities were allowed to then offer an additional number of full fee paying places which are not funded by HECS. Instead, you have to pay the full fee upfront. The government does offer loans to cover these, but you pay CPI+3.5% (so about 5.5%ish).

I know I said don’t worry about money, and the idea here is that if you’re really keen to get into this course you’ll pay what you need to, and hope to recoup it later. But if you didn’t get the marks you needed to get into the course on your own merit, you need to think about your options. Is this really a course you can do? If so, why not do a year of another course first, work your butt off, and then upgrade It’s very doable, and far easier to get in than straight from school. Basically, full fee paying places means that students who are willing to accrue massive debts, or have a rich Mummy or Daddy, are granted places over those students who are in fact more qualified than them. I don’t think this is fair, either to the full fee students or the HECS students, and I agree with it being abolished.

In yet another example of how animals are often a lot smarter than we give them credit for, meerkat pups are taught how to hunt by elder meerkats, not necessarily their parents. The adults will bite the poisonous stinger of a scorpion, then give it to a “student” to kill and eat. If they don’t get it before it escapes, the adults round it up and push it back to give the youngster another go.

In particular, they stress that there’s a difference between teaching and just social learning (watching what others do and copying). They define teaching as:

• an individual (the teacher) modifies its behaviour only in the presence of a naive observer
• that the “teacher” gets no benefit from its actions and in fact may lose opportunities to forage itself
• the “student” learns more rapidly than it would have on its own

(And yes, meerkats might not be quite as cool as lemurs )

It’s somewhat ironic that I read about this on the web, but there was a conference in Brisbane this week on nanotechnology (building structures that are only a few billionths of a metre (thousands of a millimetre) in size). One of the talks was on a proposal to make a DVD where the information is not stored as tiny pits and grooves, but in the form of proteins, the fundamental molecules which DNA creates to build our bodies.

The particular protein is bacteriorhodopsin, which comes from a microbe (whose name you probably don’t care about) that feeds itself by photosynthesis. This particular protein absorbs sunlight and twists, storing the energy until it can be used to feed the microbe - the chemistry is different to that found in plants, but it’s the same principles. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that this protein will appear different colours depending on whether it’s in the ground (relaxed, ordinary) state, or the excited (absorbed some sunlight) state. That means that if you can make these two states stable enough, then you basically have a tiny “bit” - it’s either on (excited) or off (ground). And because it’s so small, you can fit bajillions of them (scientifically speaking) onto a standard sized DVD - packing a lot more information.

Amazingly, they expect to have a protein based USB storage disk on the market within 12 months, and a DVD in 18 months, although obviously it will require specialised hardware to read it. They’re expecting at least 20 times more information than the latest generation “blue ray” disks and, ultimately, up to 50,000 gigabtyes - compared to just 4 gigabytes on a standard DVD. 12,500 DVDs stored on one disk! Whoa!

Of course, I’m still slightly skeptical. As they mention in the article, the excited states of these proteins are generally pretty shortlived - once you absorb the sunlight, you only have a short time (hours at most) to extract something useful (e.g., make plant food) before the protein relaxes back to its ground state. They claim to have modified the proteins so that they’re stable for a few years, but that’s still not really a long term solution. Admittedly, there’s still some debate about how long term regular DVDs are, but this certainly won’t make for a great movie storage mechanism. (Although, Hollywood would just love it if you had to buy new disks every couple of years. At the moment they have to settle for releasing movies in different formats and with various extras that no-one watches…) Nevertheless, this has been something which has been talked about for a long time, if not in quite this form - using biological molecules and their immensely efficient functions - as alternatives to regular electronics or storage mechanisms, and if these DVDs are commercially successful we might see a lot of new technologies appearing quite rapidly!

This morning saw the launch of the U.S. shuttle “Discovery”, despite high winds and objections from the chief engineer. The biggest concern has been foam falling of the outside of the shuttle and possibly damaging the tiles which protect against the heat generated during re-entry, which was responsible for the Columbia disaster in 2003. Unfortunately, several pieces of foam were observed falling off the shuttle during take-off, although it seems this occurred after the riskiest period of the launch. Actually, apparently a piece of foam actually fell off before the launch, but it was decided that the damage would not pose a significant safety risk, and there was no need to repair it before launch.

Even if the foam did cause damage, it would not affect the the take-off - only during reentry, like with Columbia, would it cause a problem. This is part of why the decision to go ahead with the launch was made - the astronauts can always stay at the International Space Station (ISS) (their destination anyway) until a rescue mission can be launched. A more cynical person, however, might argue that the ISS was responsible in another way - the shuttles will be retired in 2010-ish, and there’s a lot of pressure to have the ISS completed by then.

I guess when it comes down to it, astronauts do have risky jobs, and must be expected to take some risks - after all, they’ve signed up to explore the frontiers (sort of) and there’s no shortage of men and women willing and eager to go into space whatever the risks. Still, Wikipedia says that, statistically, there’s about a 2% fatality rate, per astronaut per flight (based on the Challenger and Columbia disasters). That’s disturbingly high in some ways, perhaps surprisingly low in others. Either way, I think I’ll wait until Virgin Galactic has some cheap internet fares…

Interesting story over at ABC News on a new technique which allows skin cells to grow on metal. Everyone’s interested in this because it might prove a way of making artificial limbs which are lighter, stronger and hopefully more useful than existing models. And, if the skin really can be grown over the top of them, perhaps even smoothly integrated with the body.

The article itself has taken the Terminator/cyborg slant, which makes the article appealing, I guess, but it suggests connotations of artificial intelligence (evil, of course) rather than the more “mundane” job of replacing limbs. And, of course, actual application of the technology is no doubt years down the track, but nonetheless interesting. But perhaps combined with the various BrainGate technologies for interfacing brains with computers, we really will be seeing cyborg technology sooner rather than later.