Crumbling Infrastructure-Satellite Edition

From All Things Considered yesterday:

Then, Lubchenco used the occasion to point to the importance of NOAA's satellite program.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: Satellites are a must-have when it comes to being prepared in detecting and tracking dangerous tropical weather. Not having satellites and not applying their latest capabilities could spell disaster.
HAMILTON: And she said there's a very real possibility that could happen.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: The future funding for our satellite program is very much in limbo right now.
HAMILTON: Already, Lubchenco said, the agency has been forced to delay the launch of a critical satellite. It would have traveled in a polar orbit, beaming down information for weather and climate forecasts. As a result, when the current satellite doing that job stops working, there will be no replacement.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: We are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do severe storm warnings and long-term weather forecasts that people have come to expect today.
HAMILTON: And Lubchenco says satellites aren't just for hurricanes.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: For example, our ability to do a five-day heads-up about the severe tornadoes that hit a couple of weeks ago was a direct consequence of our having polar orbiting satellites.
HAMILTON: Lubchenco's comments come after years of warnings by groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, that the U.S. needed to replace many aging satellites used to study and monitor the Earth.

The Republican attempts to slash non-defense, non-entitlement spending, combined with constant tax cuts, leads to valuable basic science funding being slashed.  These programs don't have a strong constituency, but they have large real-life effects, and are extremely cheap based on their usefulness.  This nation will suffer for many years because of the 30 years of malinvestment under generally Republican guidance.

Centroid of Population in Plato, MO

NOAA:

If you filled out the 2010 Census form from the U.S. Census Bureau, then you had a part in defining the centroid — the point where the center of the U.S. population falls. Every 10 years, after the Census Bureau crunches the numbers and figures out where the centroid is, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) places a geodetic survey disk (also called a survey marker, monument, or bench mark) in the incorporated community closest to its exact geographic location.
NOAA Chief Geodetic Surveyor Dave Doyle, who has helped place a survey marker at the centroid every 10 years since 1980, says first to think of a rectangular-shaped state like Colorado. “If you imagine Colorado as a perfectly flat plain without all the mountains and valleys, and you put it on a map, the place where this rectangular shape balances perfectly on a point is the centroid.”
“Then, think of the United States, including Alaska and the territories, as a flat plain and put it on a map. Imagine also that every individual in the population weighs exactly the same,” he continues. “The centroid is where the center of the population is located.”
The process that the Census Bureau uses to figure out the centroid for the U.S. population is more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.

Company Remining Iron Ore Tailings Moves Ahead

A couple of years ago, I saw this article about a company processing the waste tailings piles in the Minnesota Iron Range to capture more iron ore:

Gazing across the craggy canyon that is the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine in Minnesota's legendary Iron Range, it's hard to believe that our planet's most abundant element - iron - is mostly locked away in the earth's core. For here iron-bearing rock has shouldered its way to the surface in heroic quantities, and men and machines have carved out the world's largest iron-ore pit. And as it has for over a century, Range iron still forges the steel sinews of the American economy. But more than a century of mining has left Iron Country scraped and scarred, a landscape dominated by vast quarries and basins of stony waste from processed ore - tailings, which sprawl across the land like a mighty river delta. Now largely covered by scrub vegetation, these tailings are the remains of a struggle to wrest a living from the earth that began with the great Iron Rush of the 1880s. Fortune hunters from far afield flocked to the rich hematite mines of the Vermilion and Mesabi ranges, which were soon minting millionaires so fast that by 1910 regional capital Duluth was reckoned to have more than any other city in the world.
Two world wars brought boom times as the Range answered the call for iron and steel to arm the nation. And there were busts too, notably during the Depression, when output crashed from 47 million metric tons in 1929 to just 2 million metric tons in 1932. And all the time those tailings kept accumulating - a buildup that will continue until the ore runs out. Then the Range will fall silent, closing a long chapter of American history.
Or maybe not. Just west along Route 169 from the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine, near the town of Keewatin (pop. 1,164), a vast domed structure dominates a tailings basin left by the defunct Mesabi Chief mine. The dome can't be seen from the highway, and few Rangers (and even fewer mining corporations) know it's there. Inside sits equipment that could prove to be as significant to the region as the 1950s-era discovery of a way to extract iron from low-grade taconite rock. The earlier technique arrived in the nick of time for the Range, for its hematite - known locally as "natural" ore - was almost depleted. Similarly, the dome at Keewatin is home to a revolutionary process, dubbed "magnetation," that can extract valuable iron from the tailings - just when the Range is in need of new sources of ore.

I was curious what happened to them, since I hadn't heard anything since.  So after a search, I came across this:

According to Magnetation, the patent-pending Rev 3™ Separator technology allows mining operators to recover a marketable, high-grade iron ore concentrate from low-grade hematite iron deposits, including material left behind from prior mining and mineral processing operations.
The recovered product can be sold to a variety of iron-making industry customers.
As part of the agreement, Cargill has the exclusive, worldwide right to jointly develop and apply the technology with Magnetation, and the right to market the recovered iron concentrate to its international iron ore customers.
Cargill’s financial involvement will help enable Magnetation to boost its production of recovered iron in Minnesota from 150,000 to 450,000 tons per year.
Magnetation points to the promising commercial aspects of the technology internationally, as well as to the environmental benefits in transforming iron tailings basins into functioning ecological wetlands.
“This pioneering technology generates, in essence, a new source for high-grade iron concentrate from existing resources,” said Larry Lehtinen, Magnetation chief executive officer. “Cargill’s support of this iron recovery technology demonstrates the real commercial value it presents to the iron industry worldwide, as well as the promise it holds in terms of its positive environmental footprint.”
“We are pleased to contribute to the advancement of what we see as next-generation technology in iron recovery,” said Bob Mann, vice president of Cargill Ferrous International. “This agreement capitalizes on Magnetation’s iron recovery expertise and Cargill’s international commodity merchandising and asset development capabilities.”

 So apparently, things are going forward with that technology.  That there appears to be one of those billion dollar ideas.

Crows Are Too Damned Smart

From a story about the U.S. military considering using crows to locate Bin Laden (h/t the Dish):

The idea of using crows to find the world's most wanted man was based on the work of John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington who has been studying crow behaviour for over 20 years. Working with a population of wild American crows on the university campus in Seattle, Marzluff and his colleagues noticed that birds which they had previously captured seemed to be wary of them and were harder to catch.

The researchers therefore decided to investigate the possibility that crows can recognize human faces, and devised a relatively experiment using rubber masks. They went out on campus and in the surrounding areas wearing either a 'caveman' mask or a Dick Cheney mask. Those who wore the caveman mask caught and banded between 7 and 15 crows on each excursion, but those who wore the Dick Cheney mask did not. 

In the following months, they went out wearing the same masks, walking around  the university campus in pre-determined routes without bothering the crows. They also recruited volunteers to do the same. The crows consistently harassed anyone they saw wearing the caveman mask, scolding them with loud squawks and even mobbing them.

This happened regardless of the size, sex or walking style of the person wearing the mask., and even when the mask was partly hidden under a hat or worn upside down. They were, however, indifferent to the neutral mask - when they saw both masks simultaneously, they would ignore the person wearing wearing it, and instead follow the person wearing the caveman mask and scold them aggressively.

They always disappear when I grab a shotgun, and they sure seem to communicate well with each other. 

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today is an excellent set of links.  I'm going to highlight two, because they are both significant agriculturally, but there are excellent links to an awesome sky survey, an investigation of corruption in Southern Illinois courts, concern that Fukushima is as bad as, or worse than Chernobyl, a report on Bahrain's Sunni government demolishing Shiite mosques, an interesting history of the removal of the gold indexation clause in debt contracts in the Great Depression, and several other interesting stories.

The first link I'll highlight is Unnatural Selection: Wily Weeds outwit herbicides, at New Scientist:

The weedkillers atrazine and simazine were introduced in 1958. Ten years later, a plant nursery in the US that had been regularly using the pesticides reported that they were no longer effective against a plant called common groundsel – the first confirmed case of herbicide resistance.

Half a century on, the number of known strains of resistant weeds stands at 357 and counting. "Herbicide resistance is a fantastic example of evolution in response to human-induced selection pressure," says Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia in Perth, who studies the problem.

Because of its huge commercial importance, a lot of money is spent studying the problem and in many cases we know exactly how plants are evolving resistance. The mechanisms range from changes in leaf shape or waxiness to reduce herbicide uptake, to mutations that prevent herbicides binding to the proteins they target.

Strategies such as alternating the type of herbicide used can slow the evolution of resistance, but it is not foolproof. Many weeds have developed resistance to more than one herbicide. In some cases, this is due to plants evolving resistance mechanisms that are effective against more than one pesticide. For instance, many break down pesticides using new variants or higher levels of enzymes of a kind called P450s. These enzymes often protect against a range of different herbicides. In the 1980s, two weeds were found to be resistant to weedkillers that had never been used in the field. In other words, says Powles, weeds can evolve resistance to herbicides that have not even been developed yet.

The second story is Farm Antibiotics: 'Pig Staph' in a Daycare Worker, at Wired:

It’s been just about seven years since an alert epidemiologist in the Dutch town of Nijmegen identified an aberrant strain of MRSA, drug-resistant staph, in a toddler who was going in for surgery to fix a hole in her heart. The strain was odd because it didn’t behave normally on the standard identifying tests, and because it had an unusual resistance factor — to tetracycline, a drug that it should not have been resistant to, because the Netherlands had such low rates of MRSA that tetracycline wasn’t being used against the bacterium there.

Pursuing the source of the strain, researchers at Radboud University found it in the toddler’s parents and sister, and in the family’s friends. Not knowing where else to look, they asked what the parents and their friends did for a living; discovered they were all pig farmers; and went to their farms, and checked the pigs, and found it being carried by them, too. Suddenly, that strange resistance pattern made sense: The Netherlands uses more antibiotics in pig agriculture than any other country in the European Union, and the drug that it uses the most is tetracycline. Clearly, the aberrant strain — known as MRSA ST398 for its performance on a particular identifying test — at some point had wandered into pigs, become resistant to the drugs being given to the pigs, and then crossed back to humans, carrying that new resistance factor as it went.

From that first discovery unrolled the microbiological equivalent of a car-chase scene, complete with unpredictable turns, skids around corners, and unexpected dead ends. Researchers have identified ST398 in animals, people and retail meat in most of the EU; in pigs, farmers and hospital patients in Canada, and in pigs and a few farm workers, and most recently supermarket meat, in the United States. (You’ll find a long archive of posts on ST398, and more here.)

Both of these stories raise significant concerns about how we raise our foods.  They each also indicate that things may become more challenging in the near future, as we deal with glyphosate resistance and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  Without even throwing in peak oil, I believe there will be no shortage of challenges in the future.

The Case For Human Ingenuity

Niels Jensen says oil is not a good long-term investment:

There are essentially three reasons why I think oil prices will go through a rather dramatic correction over the next several years:

1. Many investors who, in recent years, have added commodities to their portfolios as a hedge will ultimately be disappointed by the lack of diversification this asset class offers;
2. Governments and regulatory authorities, both in Europe and the United States, have effectively declared war on commodity speculators, and the area will become subject to a lot more scrutiny and regulation in the years to come;
3. A number of new alternative energy forms are in much more advanced development than many investors realise and will, over the next 3-5 years, become serious alternatives to oil, particularly as far as transportation is concerned.

He goes on to mention the Volkswagen XL1:

Earlier this year, at the Qatar Motor Show, Volkswagen unveiled a remarkable new car called the XL1 (see pictures here and more details about the car  here), which is expected to go into limited production as early as 2013. The car runs on a 0.8 litre hybrid engine (combined TDI engine and lithium battery) capable of carrying two people at a top speed of 160 km/h (100 mph).

The XL1 can drive an astonishing 110 km/l (313 mpg) and emits only 24 g/km of CO₂ in the process. As an added bonus, the car can do up to 35 km (22 miles) in battery mode, i.e. with zero carbon emissions. A lightweight body of only 795 kg partly explains the impressive performance. The car has been 13 years in the making and is by far the most fuel efficient car the world has seen to date.

I think there are tremendous opportunities to improve fuel efficiency, but that way too many people believe that there isn't a limit to the amount of oil we can consume.  I would think that diesel-electric cars with electric motors replacing a mechanical transmission could improve efficiency, and that there should be smaller, essentially one-person vehicles to replace larger cars which generally only carry one person.  Unfortunately, not very many people realize how much we actually spend each year on vehicles, fuel, insurance and maintenance.  I estimated at least $3000 per vehicle per year, and probably more.  That is a lot of scratch. 

Why 5, 8 and 24 Are The Most Interesting Numbers

Warning, this is beyond me, but interesting none the less (via Mark Thoma):

In the May 2011 issue of Scientific American mathematician John Baez co-authors "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory," an article about the octonions, an eight-dimensional number system that was discovered in the mid–19th century but that has been largely ignored until quite recently. As the name of the article implies, interest in the octonions has been rekindled by their surprising relationship to recent developments in theoretical physics, including supersymmetry, string theory and M-theory. Baez and his co-author John Huerta wrote, "If string theory is right, the octonions are not a useless curiosity; on the contrary, they provide the deep reason why the universe must have 10 dimensions: in 10 dimensions, matter and force particles are embodied in the same type of numbers—the octonions."

There's more there, including references to sphere stacking and the golden ratio.  I'm sure I can't understand much any of this, but when I get a spare hour, I'll try to watch the lecture.

Is Semen An Antidepressant?

Popular Science:

Semen is a complex mixture of different compounds, and sperm actually only makes up a small amount of it. When you remove the sperm, what's left is seminal plasma, a fluid that contains an array of ingredients, some of which can pass through the vagina and be detected in the bloodstream after sex. Three compounds of interest in seminal plasma are estrogen, prostaglandins and oxytocin. Estrogen and prostaglandins have been linked to lower levels of depression, while oxytocin (which women release during birth, breastfeeding and orgasm) promotes social bonding. These and other compounds in semen could function to keep women coming back for more. "I think there's reason to believe based on some of the evidence we've collected that females that are in committed relationships that are having unprotected sex may use sex in part to self-medicate," Gallup says. "It's discovered after the fact that being inseminated has effects on mood, and they use sex to modulate their mood."

There's also evidence, he says, that women may actually go through semen withdrawal. In an unpublished study he conducted a few years ago, women in committed relationships who were having unprotected sex and were exposed to semen were "far more devastated and adversely affected [after a breakup] than those that were using condoms." He also found a risk of a rebound effect, where women who were not using condoms had sex with a new partner after a breakup within a couple of weeks versus several months for those who had used condoms. "I don't think the evidence is conclusive, but it's certainly very suggestive that it's a response, in effect, to semen withdrawal," Gallup says.

Interesting.  I'd maybe say more, but that might cause trouble.