Recent Stories in Science

This photo has nothing to do with Sand Point.

This just in over the e-wire: "In a letter sent today to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Under Secretary Jane Lubchenco, Mayor Mike McGinn and the Seattle City Council argued that consolidating NOAA’s operations in Seattle at existing federal facilities is the best option for NOAA to achieve its mission and the best deal for federal taxpayers."

(Note to the Mayor: My mother would prefer you went by Michael, at least on official documents.)

The Seattle sites up for NOAA grabs are the Western Regional Center at Sand Point and Federal Center South, both conspicuously not located in a floodplain. (Due to pressure from, well, everyone outside of Newport, OR, but specifically a protest from the Port of Bellingham, NOAA has had to go back and prove the necessity of leaving Seattle to build in Newport, which is in floodplain territory.)

There are real heavyweights involved here--NOAA provides employment for 1,200 people, directly and indirectly, and is said to pump about $180 million in economic activity into the area. That's why we're presented with the unusual sight of the International Association of Machinist Local 160 linking arms with the Laurelhurst Community Club.

NOAA's reassessment should finish up by the end of May 2010.

Waves pound a beach and structure between Depot Bay and Boiler Bay on the Oregon Coast. (Photo by Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

Twenty years ago, a big winter storm might generate 25-foot waves offshore of the Pacific Northwest. Scientists pegged 33 feet as the maximum in a 100-year storm. But the intervening years--and a strong El Niño weather pattern--brought 33-foot waves...and then some (see photos here). Now researchers at OSU believe that the maximum wave height in a 100-year event is 46 feet (or as much as 55, depending on how you measure).

The largest wave increase, in fact, centers on the Washington coast, down to northern Oregon, says Science Daily. Wave height has grown about four inches per year, for a total of about ten feet over the past three decades.

"Possible causes might be changes in storm tracks, higher winds, more intense winter storms, or other factors," Ruggiero said. "These probably are related to global warming, but could also be involved with periodic climate fluctuations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and our wave records are sufficiently short that we can't be certain yet. But what is clear is the waves are getting larger."

The change is a boon to storm watchers and shutterbugs, but the mundane result is coastal erosion that occurs two to three times faster than normal. That, in conjunction with the ongoing sea level rise from climate change, argues the NPI Advocate, means real money, as coastal development is damaged and roads wash away....

Dr. Colleen Delaney

Using cord blood for transplant, following chemotherapy for leukemia, significantly lowers the chance of host rejection--but because the cord blood contains fewer stem cells than a typical transplant, it usually takes a full month for white blood cells to generate in numbers that can protect a patient from infection.

That's four full weeks when the slightest thing could kill a patient.

Delaney's work (the results were just published in Nature Medicine) has cut that time in half, to fourteen days. As PhysOrg.com describes the study, "10 patients in an ongoing phase 1 clinical trial...received two units of cord blood to treat high-risk, acute leukemia." Each patient got one unit of regular cord blood, and one unit of cord blood that had been manipulated to increase its stem cell content.

For seven of the ten, the transplant worked completely: white cell counts are back, and there is no sign of leukemia. For three, the transplant and/or chemotherapy was apparently unsuccessful....

You've probably spent a lot of time the past week watching video and photos, reading news articles and tweets about the Haiti earthquake. You've felt sorry for the Haitians, aghast at the scenes of death and ruin, and agonized over the condition of the survivors. But you probably haven't imagined anything remotely similar happening in the Seattle area.

Back in June 2005, a half year after the earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia, and over four years after the Nisqually earthquake, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the Washington Military Department brought out a "Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault."

That is, an earthquake slightly lighter than what struck Haiti last week, and one that would come on the Seattle Fault, which runs through south Seattle, Mercer Island, Bellevue, and the Issaquah area. It wasn't pretty: the vision of the aftermath of a 14-mile surface rupture running roughly parallel to I-90 involved over 1,600 dead, another 24,000 wounded, $33 billion of damage, and months of transportation problems for Puget Sound.

The scenario said a 6.7 Seattle Fault quake will cause damage "far worse and more extensive than seen in any earthquake in the state's history."

"The viaduct will be heavily damaged or collapse," in a way very similar to how Oakland's Cypress Viaduct pancaked in the Loma Prieta quake, Boeing Field "will experience significant liquefaction" on its runways and close for several days, the Seattle ferry terminals "will shut down for at least a week due to damage from ground failures and failure of the seawall," and we'll see a lot of the brick buildings in Pioneer Square tumble, along with a lot of the concrete warehouses south of downtown....

Will it never end? This morning's New York Times brings news of the latest salvo in the long-running battle between the co-founders of the popular Baby Einstein series, William Clark and Julie Aigner-Clark, and the University of Washington. The Clarks are now suing the UW for records related to two studies in 2004 and 2007, where researchers Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis seemed to confirm that, as SunBreak photo editor James Callan put it in Seattlest at the time, the videos were nothing more than "21st century snake oil," with no demonstrable educational impact on children--while subjecting them to the potentially harmful effects of TV.

The Clarks sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company back in 2001, and at one point the brand was generating $200 million in sales and controlled 90 percent of the booming baby edutainment market. The problem was that for years, pediatricians had been discouraging parents from letting infants watch any television, to the point that in 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a formal recommendation that children under the age of two (Baby Einstein's target market) shouldn't be watching any television....

Direct primary care provider Qliance opened up its third clinic this week, at 7707 SE 27th Street, next to Walgreen’s on Mercer Island.

An open house is scheduled for the curious on Saturday, January 16, from 12-2 p.m., and if you are curious I recommend you stop in. You might read this interview with founder Garrison Bliss first. They also have clinics downtown and in Kent.

Back in December, the Qliance business model got a boost when Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced the "Manager’s Amendment" to the Senate's health care reform bill. The amendment would let flat-fee direct primary care practices like Qliance take part in the insurance exchange--a provision that both the House and Senate bills include.

Qliance advertises itself as "insurance-free" because it charges monthly fees--from $39 to $129 a month, depending on your plan--for access to primary care physicians and nurse practitioners. But that doesn't mean you don't need any insurance at all.

What Bliss is arguing is that since 90 percent of your likely medical needs fall under primary, preventive or chronic care, you can reduce health costs by switching to a subscription model, and by using "wrap-around" insurance to cover more unusual or infrequent medical problems....

Mount Rainier's glaciers have shrunk by more than 25 percent in the past 50 years, says the Seattle Times in a story on the effects of melting glaciers. One of those effects is rivers choked by rock (and debris slides closing park roads).

It's not just glacial melt, either: "According to stream-flow data, what was once a 100-year flood on the Nisqually River now occurs every 14 years." Records show that the bed of the river is almost 40 feet higher today than in 1910 because of sediment and gravel collection.

The retreating glaciers are of particular concern in our neck of the woods because their runoff provides drinking water and hydroelectric power.

Autism is a major research driver in the Northwest--in Seattle we have both the UW's Autism Center and Seattle Children's Autism Center (along with an autism walk and the Lakeside Center for Autism). Seattle Children's Autism Center is a recent creation, resulting from Children's friendly takeover of ASTAR, and offers both clinical study and treatment, making it a one-stop autism shop for families.

Tonight at 8 p.m., KING 5 is airing a Children's Healthlink Special, "The World Within: Northwest Stories of Autism" (also on KONG at 7 p.m. on January 3). Local icon Jean Enersen will be exploring the startling spike in autism rates--it's estimated that one in a hundred children have autism spectrum disorder (ASD)--and why researchers still don't know precisely what is responsible for either ASD or its increase.

What we do know is that when the CDC compared rates of diagnosis in eight-year-olds in 2006 and compared that to 2002, autism's prevalence had increased 57 percent. We also know that early intervention treatment has good results, but that the "early" part is absolutely key. Parents tend to notice something unusual about their children at age two, but in most cases official diagnosis and treatment don't occur until the child is over four years old.

In the House health care bill, $17 would be set aside during the first year for a "National Training Initiative on Autism Spectrum Disorders." This is after NIMH allocated $60 million in "stimulus" funding to promote research on better, earlier means of diagnosis and/or effective treatment for older children and adults with ASD. So autism is literally in all the headlines, though for the short term it seems we're more focused on learning how to live with it than on solid leads for cure or prevention.

"Day 253/365 - Beware of Falling Fruit" from our SunBreak Flickr pool--thanks, Great Beyond!

The Seattle Times found on the PCC website the local flashpoint in the conflict over genetically engineered food: A letter came in from Dennis L. Weaver: "I caution the organic community to be watchful of this NEW Green Revolution, especially since The Gates Foundation science and technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher."

PCC included an editor's note:

The Gates Foundation apparently is pushing genetically modified crops on African farmers. It named a 25-year Monsanto veteran, Rob Horsch, to be the senior officer for a program in sub-Saharan Africa. The foundation also reportedly gave $42 million to a project (believed to be Monsanto’s) involving genetically engineered (GE) corn...

Monsanto is of course a fighting word in organic and food cooperative circles, not least for its championing of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Actually, it's a long list of things if you get into it, including Agent Orange.

Farmers themselves are also suspicious of a company that develops seed "terminator technology"--which would require farmers to buy new seeds each year. (Monsanto responds: "Sharing many of the concerns of small landholder farmers, Monsanto made a commitment in 1999 not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops.")

Briefly, this is why the Gates Foundation's hiring of a Monsanto executive would raise hackles. Monsanto has a "trust gap."

Genetically engineered food would seem to show such promise, on the face of it. Texas A&M's Normal Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal over the summer, promoting advancements and bemoaning the fact that "some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food."

Not all the opposition reeks of stinky hippiedom. Even Michael Specter, who thinks such risks as there are are worth taking, describes in his book Denialism how in 1995 Pioneer Hi-Bred "placed genes from a Brazil nut into a soybean...to make beans used as animal feed more nutritious." So far so good, but Specter adds that if someone allergic to Brazil nuts ate something made from that soy, "the results could be deadly."...

[UPDATE: I'm reposting this story from September because I just read its mirror image in The New Yorker: "The Ice Retreat" by Fen Montaigne is about the fate of the Adelie penguins on Litchfield Island, and how a researcher who's been visiting the Antarctic since 1974, is watching a once-thriving colony collapse. "Within several decades, Fraser believes, Adélie penguins will disappear from the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula." Compare that to George Divoky's field research with the black guillemots of Cooper Island, off the Alaskan coast.]

Right now, if you're looking for Arctic seabird researcher George Divoky, you might find him analyzing data at Capitol Hill's coworking space, Office Nomads , which he switched to from working at home.

Home alone was too isolating, he says, which sounds strange coming from a guy who spends three months each summer on a tiny, uninhabited island off Alaska's north coast. When he ventured out into the neighborhood, though, he discovered the dark side of peer pressure. "Madison Valley, Madison Park, is a bad place to be for me because I go into a coffee shop, there's a bunch of people of leisure, and I think, Oh, no one is working today."

In practice, Divoky really does have some nomad in him. Since the mid-1970s, he has been making a trek north to Cooper Island, up by Barrow, Alaska, to study the black guillemots of Cooper Island. At first the idea was to survey the offshore wildlife in conjunction with the '70s push for oil exploration, the impacts of pipelines vs. supertankers, but over time, it's become a case study for the effects of global warming.

At first, Divoky saw the birds' population flourish: "What seems like a long, long time ago, black guillemots on Cooper Island had the best of all possible worlds. The summer snow-free period was increasing annually, providing breeding birds with more time to raise their young, and the Arctic pack ice was close enough offshore that there was a readily accessible supply of Arctic cod to feed the nestlings."

Now, he's watching their population crash. Global warming has caused the retreat of even multi-year ice, and the cod that the black guillemots feed on have been retreating with the ice. The open water brought a proliferation of krill that Divoky hoped might keep the cod offshore, but the cod left. His birds are feeding instead on a bottom fish, sculpin, which is less nutritious. Egg laying has begun occurring earlier and earlier.

Though for decades Cooper Island sat adjacent to polar bear territory, and he felt safe in a tent, in 2002 his tent was been torn apart by polar bears ranging into new territory. Now Divoky sleeps in an 8' x 12' shack with a polar bear trip-wire alarm."You really appreciate the windows, compared to the tent, where you can't see anything coming up on you."

This year, a bear rampaged though the nesting boxes, downing chicks out of desperation--Divoky points out "a thousand-pound bear doesn't get much from something the size of a Cornish game hen." And homicidal horned puffins--which, like the polar bears, were once infrequent visitors to the island--have moved in and kill the black guillemots before and after they hatch.

Divoky wrote on his blog for the Discovery Channel: "It is important to recognize the one certain fledge from the colony this year, since it may well be one of the last guillemots to fledge from the island."...

Amnon Shoenfeld

Yesterday morning on my way to the office, I bicycled past a man who was shouting to someone from the sidewalk. "MA MEENY MA MOSEY!" he yelled, repeatedly, spittle flying. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance, his face was red with rage, and the object of his anger was invisible to me.

Depending on who you are, and the time of day, this is the kind of sight--after Shannon Harps--that usually reminds you that there's a good reason to walk a block out of your way. Stretch the legs.

I have felt that I've been seeing more and more homeless, mentally ill people in the grip of visible psychosis since the recession started, and I called Amnon Shoenfeld, director of the King County Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division, to see if this was purely anecdotal or not.

Shoenfeld has been director for the past seven years, and with the County in various capacities for 30. He earned his MSW from the University of Washington, and went to work for King County as a crisis outreach and involuntary commitment specialist in 1979.

There are about 27,000 people who rely (voluntarily or not) on King County's mental health services, and another 12,000 who are involved in substance abuse services. This number hasn't varied much recently, Shoenfeld said, but recent budget cuts at the state level have reduced funding by $7 million for mental health, and $3 million for substance abuse.

Funding cuts are about to worsen: Governor Gregoire has just released a doomsday balanced budget that would eliminate the Basic Health Plan and GAU (assistance for people unemployable because of mental or physical disabilities), slash financial aid for college students, and suspend "all-day" kindergarten and support for poorer school districts.

The Seattle Times notes that, "Most of the state budget is off-limits to cuts because it's either protected by the state constitution (such as funding for basic education) or by other requirements (such as the state's share of Medicaid, a federal-state insurance program for the poor.)"

"If I could say anything right now, I'd just say: Please don't cut us any more," Shoenfeld said near the end of our conversation.

I had asked him, looking for a bright spot, if extra funding was somehow found, where he would like it to go. But Shoenfeld, beleaguered, thinking of his case managers with up to 70 clients, couldn't go there at first.

Despite the fact that much of the mental health and substance abuse "bill" is associated with Medicaid, with the federal government footing as much as 60 percent, the state is perversely focused on what it is permitted to cut, rather than the overall cost-effectiveness  of combined federal and state dollars.

"We had to cut back on outreach to kids--mainly street kids--who are abusing substances." As in so many cases, prevention is the cheapest option, Shoenfeld explained, but it seems less critical to the budget-cutting eye.

"We've had to cut back on the number of people who can get into outpatient treatment, both adults and kids. In King County, we have to use all our 'non-Medicaid dollars' to cover crisis services and involuntary commitment services, our evaluation-and-treatment programs, our residential programs," said Shoenfeld.

Now he's expecting proposed cuts of over $1 million in those core crisis services, which for the general public, is related to the sense of insecurity you feel at noticing more people ranting and raving, and behaving unpredictably....

"dry docks" gives you Renoir's Seattle, courtesy of The SunBreak Flickr pool's Seattle_rainscreen

The UW's Probcast-ometer calls for below-freezing temperatures tonight (30ish) and tomorrow night (upper twenties). We should see a mostly sunny weekend, but temperatures will continue to drop, says UW meteorologist Cliff Mass.

To increase your Mass, drop by Elliott Bay Book Company at noon today for his talk, "Is Rainfall Getting More Extreme?" He's also signing his book, Weather of the Pacific Northwest.

If that's not enough weather for you, KIRO TV's Rebecca Stevenson is hosting a special tonight at 7 p.m. titled "What's Up With Our Weather?" Among other things, she'll be discussing the predicted El Niño effects for 2010, which has been on Cliff Mass's mind, too: He thinks a low snowpack might be in store.

Finally, if you haven't read it yet, Cliff's in the Seattle Weekly. Mike Seely wrote a nice long piece on Mass, his history with Carl Sagan, and the difference between deterministic and probabilistic weather forecasting.

Closer to home, Mount Rainier's glaciers have retreated, too.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis is out (23MB download here), authored by 26 researchers, one of whom is Eric J. Steig, professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. The report updates the last IPCC assessment in 2007, with the general tone being that, even then, the speed of climate change was underestimated.

In just one instance, the area of the Arctic's summer sea-ice that melted between 2007 and 2009 was about 40 percent more than the IPCC model average. Earlier, the models were off by as much as 80 percent: Over the past 15 years, the sea level has risen more than five centimeters, almost most double 2001 IPCC projections. At the time, various people dismissed those as "doomsday" predictions.

UW News quotes Steig as saying the Copenhagen Diagnosis "articulates a much clearer picture of what has to happen if the world wants to keep future warming within the reasonable threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that most scientists believe is prudent."

Steig also says if you've been paying attention to research results since 2007, you may not be all that surprised. However, if you've been told repeatedly that climate change has stopped, or pointed toward the effects of solar forcing, you might be taken aback. So that is really what the "diagnosis" does, is survey the climate change field and bring everyone up to date.

It's disquieting to read, then, that despite all the rhetoric around climate change, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 grew by 40 percent from 1990. That, too, was unanticipated. UW professor Edward Miles emphasizes to UW News that while the IPCC has consistently led with non-worst-case climate change forecasts, the growth in fossil fuel emissions since 2005 does exceed the worst-case scenarios of the IPCC.

The report concludes that to keep the sea level rising three to six feet, as ice caps and sheets reach a tipping point, we need to reduce CO2 emissions by...well, that's not going to happen. And I have bulletproof models of past political action to back me up on that. Maybe look into this option instead.

I often think of Seattle as a small town, but maybe it's only in a city that I would not have known one of my neighbors on the next block was "freelance rocket scientist" Jordin Kare. He's been living on Capitol Hill since March 2003, though his first visit to Seattle was back in 1979.

Previously at Lawrence Livermore, he moved up from the Bay to consult on a commercial satellite project at Boeing. Now he's associated with Bellevue's Intellectual Ventures, though it's his side project, LaserMotive, that brought him to my attention.

A weary but suddenly richer version of Kare greeted me at the Victrola last week to discuss LaserMotive's $900,000 win at the Space Elevator Games, held November 2 to 6, 2009.

"So, what can I do for you?" Kare asked. He's unprepossessing at first glance, clad for Seattle's cold and rain, unruly gray hair longer on the sides and back, and slightly reserved. After the interview he was off to catch a late show of 2012 with his wife, with whom I had a quick discussion about Joss Whedon's Buffy, Firefly, and Dollhouse. (She's still angry at Whedon for the way he killed off "Wash"--really, a shock for all of us Fireflyers.)

This is just proof that you can't tell by looking at someone that he's devoted his professional life to laser propulsion; Kare has been a leader in his field pretty much since he got into it as a post-grad in 1986. It is the power-beaming aspect of space elevators that got him into the Games. As it happens, it's a great, high profile way to demonstrate that you can beam power over a kilometer's distance in a challenging setting.

LaserMotive was founded, essentially, as a part-time enterprise that would have one product, or goal: to create a laser-powered climber that would win the Space Elevator Games power beaming competition. First prize, for a climber that could travel one kilometer vertically at speeds of five meters per second or more, was $2 million, provided by NASA.

LaserMotive's climber set a world record, doing the kilometer twice at an average speed of four meters per second (topping out at 4.13 m/s), which netted them $900,00. "Hopefully we'll pick up the spare next time we go back down there," said Kare, cheerful at the prospect of holding another huge novelty check, this one for $1.1 million.

This is not precisely the space elevator you've seen on NOVA, with carbon nanotubes. For the competition, pilot Doug Uttecht's helicopter hauled aloft a 3/16-inch steel cable, 4300 feet long, that weighed about 300 pounds. (The people with this niche expertise are Northwest Helicopters, who also flew the cables in for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.)...

It's like a bad advertising slogan: "Imagine yourself in a Mercury." Except this time it's "Imagine the mercury in you." Washington Toxics Coalition has produced a new study of pregnant mothers that illustrates just that. As the PostGlobe reports, Seattle mom Kim Radtke discovered eleven chemicals were coursing through her bloodstream, and "rated worst among nine West Coast women tested for a particular class of chemicals: perfluorinated compounds (PFOS)."

Every woman tested was found to have been exposed to , found in such things as the lining of food cans. Each woman had two to four so-called “Teflon chemicals” (All had detectable levels of , a chemical found in long-lived fish like tuna that is known to harm brain development. And every woman was exposed to at least four (pronounced THAL-ates).

This kind of news is just terrible for the chemicals industry, who have been on the lookout for a young, attractive pregnant woman willing to go on record about how the convenience of BPA outweighs its role as an endocrine disruptor. [Per Harper's magazine, subscription-only viewing] So far, no takers.

The hard news is voiced by Molly Gray, a Seattle midwife and naturopathic physician: "The answer I received from this study is that the fight is too big for just one person."

Seattle blog Sightline is running a series called "Sustainababy," about the real world challenges of mothering and sustainability, from polluted air to baby clothes. Anna Fahey writes that her eyes have been opened, too, by the impossibility of personal choice making a dent in her child's exposure to pollutants and contaminants. In a very real way, energy and air quality policy are where mothers need to focus their outrage, but that's not how anyone talks to moms.

The emphasis--and burden--is always on the mother to educate herself personally, to learn what to avoid, and to build a bubble of clean green living for the baby to enjoy.

But no mother goes out to shop for lead, carbon monoxide, or nitrogen dioxide. That comes for free with the air around her. Holding her breath for nine months is longer than most yogis can manage, and they really practice at it.

Michael Specter's book Denialism (de rigueur subtitle-of-absurd-length: How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives) might look like it'd fit nicely on the bookshelf with Why People Believe Weird Things and Unscientific America, but it would likely jump the other two and scuff up their dust jackets. Specter has been writing for the New Yorker since 1998, and some of the Big Apple's pugnacity seems to have rubbed off on him. Or maybe he was always that way.

It's a curious book because while you might expect Holocaust (or other genocide) deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, creationists, global warming skeptics, or other troublesome bands of misinformers to pop up, they don't. "I decided to focus on issues like food, vaccinations, and our politically correct approach to medicine," writes Specter in the introduction, "because in each of these arenas irrational thought and frank denialism have taken firm root."

Yet as Grist argues in a critique of the book, if a small group of global warming deniers delays action long enough that we reach a point of no return for the planet, that's a big deal. If a small group of people insist on paying more for Whole Foods organic produce because it makes them feel healthier, that's...part of their shopping budget. Yet, Grist notes, "The book’s index has no entry for 'climate change.' The entry for 'Global warming' cites just one page—a reference to genetically modified foods as a “solution” to global warming."

I can't speak for Specter, but his approach feels Freakonomics-y or Gladwellian: one of those "forget everything you thought you knew" come-ons, juiced up with the blood of a few hodgepodge sacred cows. In his introduction, Specter's language is fairly circumspect and even-keeled. But the chapters on the "irrational" response to Vioxx, hysteria around vaccines, the rise of the organic food fetish and natural supplement worship, and the role of genetics in medical treatment, contain what some call "provocative" and others might call "unsubstantiated" claims.

Even when I agreed with him, Specter managed to rub me the wrong way. Though he struggles to sound filled with empathy for the irrationalists, Specter comes off as an old-school anthropologist tolerant of a tribe's quaint superstitions. Of course it's natural for you to believe that god threw the lightning at you, he seems to say. (I kept wondering who he was writing for--I'll get the chance to ask him when he's town.)

Again and again, Specter presents what sounds like both sides of an argument, except that one's irrational, anti-science, and threatening all our lives. Specter takes the lesson of the Vioxx scandal to be primarily one of emotional overreaction. We don't understand pharmacological medicine, so we trust and fear it in equally overreaching amounts. If we rationally accepted its risks, Vioxx might be on the market today.

What he doesn't spend a lot of time considering is whether the overreaction is called for given the scope of our reliance on this medicine. That is, we can't really afford to have pharmaceutical companies lying to us about known problems with medicine prescribed to millions--it would set a troubling precedent.

There's an argument to make for Vioxx, and Specter makes it persuasively. But he also tells a story of practiced deceit, political pressure, and retributive firing and ends his chapter saying: "Most people don't walk out the door trying to hurt other people." No, they don't. But most people don't run pharmaceutical companies. That pool is tiny. And a few bad apples could potentially poison the apple cart. So we hold them to higher standards....

Moon at "Crazy Pretty Sunset" courtesy of The SunBreak Flickr pool user slightlynorth

It's been a while since we've visited the moon, 37 years since the last Apollo mission, to be more exact. Sure, we've sent robots up there, but no one's taken a leisurely stroll on the moon since Eugene Cernan on the Apollo 17 mission.

Andrew Chaikin has spoken with 23 out of the 24 people that have walked on the moon, and has written several books about moon exploration. Recently he visited the Pacific Science Center to make his case for a return to the moon.

After a short introduction by the Science Center's Senior Vice President for Strategic Programs, Chaikin shared with us his excitement for all things moon-related. In the cavernous reaches of the old Eames IMAX Theater, an intimate crowd of bespectacled gentlemen, families, and two kids that weren't like the others braved the weatherpocalypse to listen to him speak and show slides.

His tan sportcoat and the earthy green sweater of a college professor contrasted with the hints of smiles at the corners of his mouth. Like a kid who just got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas, his enthusiasm for the subject was contagious. I'm pretty sure that was his goal.

There are several reasons why we are not running manned missions to the Moon these days, according to Chaikin. The most obvious is the lack of money. Yet, the reason for the lack of money can be traced back to the distinct lack of societal interest. In the late '60s, Chaikin was 12 and visited a NASA space center. Like many young boys of his generation, he wanted to be an astronaut.

(I would guess that the number of young children who currently respond "astronaut" when asked what they want to be when they grow up is pretty disheartening to Chaikin)

Chaikin presented a slide show that felt a lot like family vacation photos. Except this family went to the moon. Even though Chaikin has never been, his description of the slides made it seem like he was a part of the exploration of it. And, in a way, he was. He has recorded the personal history of the experiences of those that have traveled to that remote vacation spot in various books in a search to know what it felt like to go.

As far as I can tell, it's pretty amazing. The view is pretty decent. You can run for miles and never get tired. You can drive as fast as your battery-powered car will go without worrying about tickets. Your tan when you come back will really impress your co-workers. And, you will have a chance to learn about the history of the solar system by checking out "a book from the cosmic library," as Chaikin calls it....

"The local angle really does get people's interest," said Michael McCarthy, editor, publisher and et al of the Seattle Local Health Guide. He's a slender, bearded man with a warm manner and it's not all that surprising to learn he's an M.D. himself, trained in internal medicine by Virginia Mason.

His online health guide currently devotes a section to H1N1 flu developments, another to health advice and tips, another to healthcare industry news. It's attracting about 25,000 readers per month--all the flu news has pushed numbers up ever since May, and once people find the site, they come back. The initial site was born in 2007, and reborn a year ago in its Wordpress incarnation.

It may be time, McCarthy admitted a little ruefully, to work harder on the site's revenue stream. Like many people who have founded a news site, he's driven primarily by the sense that it's a public necessity.

Michael McCarthy

McCarthy writes stories himself, and aggregates health industry and policy news from sources like Kaiser Health News and ProPublica. "There are more than enough stories out there," he emphasized. He likes to follow a story's real-time transmission, from a World Health Organization H1N1 conference, to the CDC presser hours later, to a public announcement the next day by Madrona's public schools about their flu policy.

"Part of what's valuable is just finding what's good that's available," he added. Health care news that hasn't caught mainstream interest is out there, but it's chasing too few reporting resources.

His imaginary "reader" is a mom staying educated on health care, but in practice, the site casts a much wider net. McCarthy points out that King County total employment in the health care sector rivals Boeing's. Recently he's begun working with the Seattle Times, which has, thanks to a grant from American University's J-Lab (via the Knight Foundation), started exploring content collaboration with local bloggers....

Reading The Atlantic magazine's "Shots in the Dark" article, I paused at this sentence: "When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of the 50 percent mortality rate reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science." (Scientific denialism?)

Actually, I paused earlier, at "What if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong?"

But let's back up a moment. Amid the novelty of H1N1 lies the more mundane annual death rate from seasonal flu. On average, estimates place the number of people the flu kills in the U.S. at 37,000. (The CDC penciled down 56,000 for influenza and pneumonia combined in 2006.) For context, about 37,000 people die in car accidents each year, and 30,000 are shot to death.

The problem is that the U.S. population is getting older, and one thing no one is arguing is that the flu kills...

Science is happening as these government employees feed radioactive waste to sheep at Hanford!

For people of a certain age, each new ecological horror story that emerges from the Hanford clean-up project holds a special fascination. It reminds us of the glorious, prelapsarian days of the late Cold War, when we didn't have to worry about global warming or Islamic terrorists because we all knew we were going to die in a nuclear apocalypse. Ah, childhood!

So it was with sweet memories of grade school and my dad forcing me to watch Red Dawn (because "this is going to be you some day") rolling through my head, that I read this morning's New York Times story on how the feds are searching out radioactive rabbit droppings by helicopter.

Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter. And at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.

A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level radioactive waste.

Frankly, I'm just impressed anything can live there at all. Mother Nature is truly impressive. Oh, and do I need to point out this was paid for with $300,000 in stimulus money? Apparently locating radioactive critters wasn't important enough to include in the main operating budget.

If you share my fascination with this disgusting hell-on-Earth that science has created for us, don't forget that Hanford is now the most sought-after tourist destination east of the Cascades! Last year, the Department of Energy opened a limited number of public tours that booked within hours. There's no set date yet for when registration for 2010 tours opens, but you can check at this link. It's Super Fund for the whole family!

And one final note: Why the hell are they remaking Red Dawn?

Certain people found my moon-cracking-open-like-an-egg fears alarmist. And obviously, in retrospect, the egg is on my face.* NASA's LCROSS mission, designed to test for water (ice, actually) on the moon, went off without a hitch at around 4:30 this morning. The Centaur rocket made its divot, the following spacecraft sent back its data (series of photos, impact video), and then it too augured in a few minutes later, leaving a 100-foot-wide hole.

However, sane people do have concerns about tossing our old tincan spacecraft all over the moon. As National Geographic reports, NASA has already littered the lunar surroundings with over two dozen orbiters, landers, and rovers. It sounds funny, but there's a growing "lunar conservationist" movement that wants to make sure future smash landings are carefully vetted, so that the moon doesn't end up looking like Oscar Madison's apartment. Neatniks in space!

*I can't believe I left off the /joke tag.

Photo: NASA

I know some of you may be wondering what NASA's LCROSS mission (aka "bombing the moon") has to do with Seattle, and it is simply this: If the moon happens to crack open after impact, that stuff is going to go everywhere.

"This is a completely unique mission that will excavate two large holes dozens of meters across on the lunar surface. It will give us composition measurements we wouldn't otherwise be able to get," said Tim McClanahan, from Goddard Space Flight Center.

And it may end life as we know it. Good night, moon. (It's almost as bad as CERN sucking us into a black hole.)

Here is the deal: NASA is winding up its Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission with a bang. The mission launched last June 18, and its goal is to determine whether there's ice on the moon. Tonight, the spacecraft will separate from its upper-stage Centaur rocket, and the rocket will impact a crater at the lunar south pole at about 4:30 a.m.PDT.

Photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Cue moon dust. The spacecraft will shoot through the plume and analyze the shit out of it in a hurry, because four minutes later it's due to smack into the moon itself. (It's got two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer, says NASA.)

The idea is that once the moon dust hits the sunlight above the crater rim, anything water-esque will vaporize and the instruments will catch the results. NASA says, in all seriousness, that we need to know if the moon's got water because it would totally help with manned interplanetary trips....