Science Odds and Ends

TPP wrote:

Science Chic wrote: Nanobots - ain't gettin' anywhere near me until the safety data is decades old and proven safe!

Funny how folks will say just that, but get they're flu shot after 3months testing by the fda, when it usually takes years to get FOOD though...
And than combining all the different viriuses <sp?> into one shot. NO THANKS!
Just say'in...

There's a big difference between flu shots and nanobots. Vaccinations have been around since the turn of the last century and almost all flu vaccines are made the same way and have been for decades. The only ingredients that change are the DNA pieces for each flu variant, and the DNA snippets chosen cannot cause disease by themselves, and the procedure itself doesn't - that's why the FDA doesn't have to go through the lengthy, extended reviews - safety trials and efficacy results are all that's required. It doesn't matter how many pieces of DNA of different viruses you add - they all are parts from the same region of the flu virus and together cannot make a functional virus. It's like getting vaccinations to three different diseases all at once - your immune system is more than capable of handling the attenuated or heat inactivated viral material (fun fact: single flu vaccinations use to contain over 100X the amount of antigen that is used today. Antigen is the DNA, in current flu vaccines, against which your body creates antibodies. The antigen that used to be used was whole, isolated viruses - all the DNA, not just one part of one gene - that were either heat-killed or live, attenuated and if they weren't inactivated correctly, or regained strength, they could cause disease).

Nanobots, on the other hand, are a completely novel, unproven technology of which no one truly knows how they will affect a person long-term. Safety studies on nanotechnology are woefully incomplete. Remember radial keratotomy surgery to repair short-sightedness? It was great at first, until they started doing long-term follow-up studies. I like my surgical options to be well-established. Vaccines are; nanotechnology, not so much. Call me conservative! lol

Grady - our brains are remarkably plastic!
http://www.neurologyreviews.com/jan00/n ... tored.html
http://iospress.metapress.com/content/3wh401657876mp58/
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/ol ... 02752.html

TPP wrote: MORE GOOD NEWS!!!!

Obama drops plan to limit global warming gases

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/en ... ming_N.htm

Saving U.S. money already.

Yeah, not really. He's just going to go about it in another manner than trying to pass cap-and-trade (hallelujah that it's dead!).
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/en ... ming_N.htm

Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way," Obama said at a news conference Wednesday, a day after Democrats lost control of the House. "I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem."

One of the things that's very important for me is not to have us ignore the science, but rather to find ways that we can solve these problems that don't hurt the economy, that encourage the development of clean energy in this country, that, in fact, may give us opportunities to create entire new industries and create jobs."

And it may save money in the short-term, but not dealing with it sooner rather than later will cost a whole lot more in the long run.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... hange.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Br ... ate-change

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 134445.htm
Costs Of Climate Change, State-by-State: Billions, Says New Report
ScienceDaily (July 25, 2008)

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/30/g ... h-benefit/
Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar
March 30, 2009

And a nice detailed plan by the Aussies to get themselves to 100% renewable energy in 10 years and what it will cost:
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/6682

Financial Cost
Given their target audience, BZE understandably rely on some conventional economic comparisons to show that while the Zero Carbon Plan is certainly expensive, it is still 'affordable' compared to other sectors of the economy and Government expenditure.
The website: http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/
The report (8.4Mb): http://media.beyondzeroemissions.org/ZC ... ort_v1.pdf

Yes, it is, but fortunately, it's not as long-lived as CO2 so it doesn't have the cumulative effects that CO2 has (kinda like the study of which drugs were most harmful and alcohol came out on top not because it was most lethal but because it was most widely used - that's CO2; methane would be tobacco). Unfortunately, it degrades to CO2 and H2O, increasing CO2 concentrations even more and adding H2O - an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2! Relax, H2O's half-life is 10 days.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... -the-move/

Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.

Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, while CO2 essentially accumulates in the atmosphere / ocean carbon cycle, so in the end the climate forcing from the accumulating CO2 that methane oxidizes into may be as important as the transient concentration of methane itself. For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... l-warming/
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7a.html