What a waste
A “reactor that eats nuclear waste” indeed
(21 October, p 24)! The proposed
reactor splits “atoms of plutonium and other radionuclides that last (sic)
hundreds of thousands of years into isotopes that only last hundreds of years.
After 30 years of operation, more than 96 per cent of the radioactivity would
vanish.”
This is certainly a wonderful machine. The basic mathematics of decay assure
us that the activity of a certain number of atoms of radionuclide is inversely
proportional to their half-life. Transmutation to isotopes with three orders of
magnitude shorter half-life increases the activity by a similar factor.
This is the fundamental problem with all current transmutation proposals
(apart from absurd economics and doses to workers). Small quantities of
technically unproblematic but PR-sensitive high-level waste would be converted
into low or intermediate-level waste of large quantities and increased activity,
which is much more difficult to dispose of.
Schemes have been proposed to use parks of reactors, accelerators and
reprocessing facilities which could theoretically decrease the inventory of
long-lived radionuclides by 96 per cent (see, for example, Scientific Basis
for Nuclear Waste Management, XXI, 3-10 1998). Not only do the high
activities of shorter-lived nuclides need geological disposal, but so does the
waste with the remaining 4 per cent of long-lived isotopes plus all of the waste
from decommissioning the transmutation facilities.
It is often said that fusion is the power of tomorrow鈥� and always will
be. Attempts to drum up support by touting it as the ideal way to dispose of
nuclear waste must be seen as nonsense.
Drugs.com
Charles Medawar raises legitimate concerns with regard to proposed changes to
the law allowing “direct-to-consumer advertising” by pharmaceuticals companies
(28 October, p 45).
Another possible outcome would be an unprecedented increase
in patients demanding antibiotics from their doctors. Antibiotics are already
woefully over-prescribed for self-limiting viral disorders, such as colds and
flu. Surely the last thing we need is doctors prescribing more and exacerbating
the problem of antibiotic-resistant organisms.
Painful monogamy
It may not only be female weevils who need to beware of injury during mating
(21 October, p 27). Many animals, including some mammals, have mysterious spines
and hooks on the penis. Could these be for the same purpose as those of the bean
weevil鈥攖o encourage females to have fewer partners?
If females risk injury, infection, or pain when mating, they may do so as
rarely as possible. Indeed, it need not be a spiny penis that does the
damage鈥攎any species bite their partner at some stage during sex. Pain
seems to be a widespread feature of courtship and mating鈥攆emale cats may
scream and take a swipe at the male after mating, and male terrapins bite the
legs of the female in courtship.
Some animals become temporarily locked together during mating鈥攑erhaps
the female needs to let the danger subside before disengaging, while the male
increases the chance he is the only one to fertilise her eggs.
The weevils may illustrate an evolutionary route to sadism, but fortunately
there are other ways of encouraging monogamy.
Satirical cloning
The concept of cloning Jesus
(Feedback 21 October) is not original to Feral
House but to that celebrated media terrorist Chris Morris, creator of Radio
One’s Blue Jam and Channel Four’s Brass Eye. Morris intended to use the idea in
On The Hour, a Radio Four satirical program, in 1992. It was not used there, but
later surfaced as a conversation piece between Morris and Peter Cook, in the
character of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, in Why Bother?, a Radio Three
programme broadcast in 1994. The evidence is available in tape and CD formats
from the BBC.
Whale meat is not on the menu
Well done Peter Hadfield
(21 October, p 69) for exposing the duplicity behind
the “food culture” and “fish conservation” arguments currently touted by
Japanese pro-whaling interests. The Japanese, like the British, ate whale meat
during the early post-war decades. Then, albeit more slowly than the British,
most Japanese abandoned the practice as supplies shrank and alternative foods
became available.
As a result, the number of Japanese who still indulge in whale is minuscule.
Back in the 1960s, annual Japanese consumption of whale meat was about 400,000
tonnes. Today, legal supplies (from “research” whaling, by-catch, and so on) are
limited to around 2000 tonnes鈥攅quivalent to less than 20 grams per capita.
Most Japanese don’t eat whale meat at all and have no desire to do so.
Moreover, even if the International Whaling Commission were to end
restrictions on whaling everywhere and all the whale meat harvested was reserved
for the Japanese market, the supply would only be boosted temporarily before the
remaining whale populations crashed.
The idea that Western cultural imperialism is preventing Japan from carrying
on as whale-eating culture is not just wrong, it is a ridiculous myth.
Split electron
Congratulations to Humphrey Maris in his quest to split the electron
(14 October, p 25).
Ever since Sheldon Glashow and Murray Gell-Mann invented the
picture of baryons and mesons consisting of quarks with fractional electric
charges, it has been difficult to accept that the electron is indivisible.
Composite particles like nucleons and mesons exhibit only integer charges in
“normal” situations. Could there be a similar principle at work in the case of
the electron? And can a soft approach ease apart constituents which will not
yield to brutal smashing, as Maris is trying to demonstrate?
Cold shoulder
Joanna Marchant’s report of using EDTA, a simple chelating agent, to offset
the effects of hypothermia
(21 October, p 4)
may not be as straightforward as it seems.
The idea of using EDTA to mop up excess calcium ions in the blood as they
arise during hypothermia is novel, but needs to be treated with caution. As well
as binding to calcium ions, EDTA is also good at binding to many other cations,
including those found in the d-block of the periodic table such as zinc, iron
and manganese. These ions may play key roles in cold-induced responses in
mammals.
Perhaps we should wait for further research using a more specific
calcium-binding agent such as EGTA before we conclude that calcium causes
hypothermia-induced responses in mammals.
Adam and Eve
Surely Cohen
(4 November, p 16)
is wrong to say that all the descendants of
women with different mitochondria have died out. Their descendants must still be
with us, albeit through lines of descent which at some stage have passed through
a male. Just because we all share, in Eve, a common ancestor through the
female-only line doesn’t mean that we can’t have other ancestors, including
common ancestors, through other pathways as well. And if this is true the mirror
argument must apply to Y-chromosome Adam, who is thus no more the “founding
father of humankind” than Eve is its only mother.
Philip Cohen writes: While there is a “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-chromosome
Adam”, it is quite true that the hereditary history of our other chromosomes is
more complex and might well include genetic material from Adam’s and Eve’s
contemporaries.
Letter
Philip Cohen reports that Peter Oefner of Stanford University has traced
humankind’s founding father
(4 November, p 16). I suspect Oefner would not have
been so surprised that mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam never really met
if he had read Steve Jones’s In the Blood. Under the title of “Did Adam meet
Eve?”, Jones explains why they didn’t and illustrates this with diagrams showing
the male ancestry of 10 men and the female ancestry of 10 women. These show the
common male ancestor of the 10 men lying three generations back and the common
female ancestor of the 10 women eight generations back. Jones gives: “There is
much more variation in the mating success of males, some men having many
children, some none. Most women, though, have roughly the same number of
offspring. As a result, the last shared male ancestor lived long after the last
shared female.”
If the diagrams that Jones gives represent a certain reality then there is a
difference of about a factor 2 in time (or generations), which ties in neatly
with 50,000 to 70,000 years for Adam’s age and 140,000 for Eve.
Enigma puzzle
It is clear from Netropolitan’s recent final paragraph that someone failed to do their homework before commenting on the fuss over the recent theft of an Enigma machine (28 October, p 19).
From the outset, the codebreaking work of Bletchley Park had the backing of Winston Churchill. He drew on his association with espionage during the First World War. Not long after the end of Second World War in August 1945 differences emerged between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta on the course that post-war settlements should take.
The wartime Allied coalition collapsed and 鈥� as his US “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946 shows 鈥� Churchill perceived that the Soviet Union’s ambitions for its own brand of socialism included world domination. As one of his last acts as post-war “caretaker” Prime Minister in 1945, he ordered eight of the ten Colossus codebreaking computers to be smashed, but two were sent to GCHQ at Cheltenham and became part of Britain’s secret, cold-war decryption resource.
By the time these machines were dismantled in 1960, their designs had been superseded, mainframe computers were well on the way to becoming more compact, transistor-based devices, and few could see any point in keeping outdated and cumbersome machines.
But if, like Frank Whittle’s jet engines and their designs 鈥� which were given to the Stalinist Soviet Union in a gesture of socialist solidarity by the Attlee government that succeeded Churchill’s 鈥� Colossus had gone the same way, the outcome of the cold war could perhaps have been very different.
Besides books such as Station X and Britain’s Best Kept Secret, much of this story is now to be found in paper 13 of Computer Security Foundation Workshop Proceedings (IEEE, July 2000).
Mighty spiders
I read your news piece on making spider webs more resistant to
“supercontraction” by replacing certain amino acids in their structure
(28 October, p 22).
Couldn’t the supercontraction effect be used to create synthetic
muscle fibres?
I know that robotics groups have tried using various materials to create
artificial muscle with varying success. Some have used alloys with
“shape-memory”, or organic polymers that react to electrical stimulation. But
fibres that are five times stronger than steel and contract 55 per cent could
have very useful applications.
The spider-web fibres alone probably wouldn’t be effective but if we could
find a fast reversible chemical method to simulate the effects of water on the
fibre then we might have found the solution.
Letter
Why is so little attention being given to the possibility of developing an
effective treatment for the human form of BSE
(4 November, p 4)? Faced with the
prospect of a future epidemic affecting thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands
of people in Britain alone, we seem to have adopted the fatalistic attitude that
nothing can be done. Could we ever forgive ourselves if a major epidemic did
develop and we didn’t even try to discover an effective treatment?
Letter
Your coverage of BSE and vCJD
(4 November, p 3 to
p 9) did not assess the
crucial scientific question for human health: is eating BSE-infected meat the
cause of vCJD? Instead you make bald statements that it does.
The Phillips report contains good coverage of the question, so far as it can
be answered at present. Although the current consensus favours a causal link
this is still an unquantified probabilistic judgement. The linking mechanism is
unknown and we are still in the realm of indirect inference.
It would also have been helpful to have included an assessment of the related
question about openness on matters of risk. It is no good saying, as you do in
your Editorial
(p 3), that everyone should “become comfortable with the notions
of uncertainty and risk”. As a statistician I am only too aware of how hard this
is even for those with training.
There is plenty of scientific evidence that, in general, people handle such
notions badly and are pretty uncomfortable with them. This does not excuse
secrecy but it suggests that debate is much needed on when and how to publicise
information on risky practices, not least with regard to how the news media
exaggerate risks because it helps sell their product.
Andy Coghlan writes: The intention was to say that infected meat is possibly
the cause of vCJD, but the word “possibly” was lost.
Letter
In your Editorial you blame only the politicians and experts for the problem
and conclude that all they have to do is provide the public with information and
then magically everything will be fine. Sadly, this approach has a number of
shortcomings. It only works if people are well educated, sensible and reasonably
intelligent. European league tables show that the English are ranked as the
third least intelligent and knowledgeable people in Europe鈥攕o there is
little comfort to be found there.
We also have a media which is dumbed down and sensationalist, in particular
the press, and politically motivated. The public’s hysterical overreaction to
genetically modified food and the wholesale panic over the petrol blockade also
shows that a large percentage of the population is unwilling or unable to take
on board complicated issues.
They want someone to blame, and as long as they can find someone鈥攑apers
like the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Telegraph
will always point out suitable targets鈥攖hey do not have to think for
themselves, make difficult decisions, or take any blame. In countries such as
Sweden or Switzerland, your approach would indeed be viable, but then a problem
such as vCJD or BSE would never have arisen in the first place.
I speak not as an elitist but as member of the public who is interested in
science and sees everyday evidence of the stupidity of a large part of the
populace.
BSE lessons
The report of Lord Phillips into the events leading to the tragedy of BSE
suggests that an unwillingness to “alarm the public” exacerbated the vCJD
problem. In your editorial
(4 November, p 3), you implore scientists to make
their voices heard when they have the expertise on important issues that
confront us. Yes, perhaps too many scientists are willing to tell their
paymasters what they want to hear. But is this any surprise when history teaches
us that it is safer and more comfortable to be part of the herd than to question
the consensus? There is no point in scientists voicing concerns if the “powers
that be” refuse to hear them.
Will the establishment become more receptive to the concerns raised by
renegade scientists following the lessons highlighted by the Phillips report?
While I hope for the best, I fear the worst. Sadly, I do not believe that the
desire to protect vested interests will diminish as a result of this
investigation.