Jun 1 2013: I have just read my first paper, a meta-study, on GMO, from 2012:
"Assessment of the health impact of GM plant diets in long-term
and multigenerational animal feeding trials: A literature review"
It says:
"3.2.1. Insect-resistant maize
No long-term rodent studies are available for GM maize.
However, a study in which 36 cows in total were fed a feed based
on Bt-maize (event MON810) containing the protein Cry1Ab, or its
isogenic not genetically modified counterpart for over 25 months
covering two consecutive lactations has been published recently
(Steinke et al., 2010)."
All the rodent studies are over 90 days. This is ridiculously short, given that a survey on the lifespan of Norwegian rats puts that at between 72 to 120 weeks or 504 to 840 days. In terms of human lifespans, trials extend up to only a human equivalent of 11 years of age. Surely we are more worried about the effect on the diseases of old-age, such as diabetes, endothelium dysfunction and its long-term effects, cancer, and dementia.
We are at the top of the food-chain and will be drinking milk and eating beef from cattle that have been fed on cattle-feed based on GM-maize, all their lives. We need to know that such a practice will not increase the disease rate post-retirement.
The least we could expect would be trials lasting over the full lifetime of the rodents. I would also like to see rodent groups following sedentary lifestyles. This is routinely done in medical reseaerch on the diseases I have just mentioned.
Jun 1 2013: Jacky Jian,
Your safety claims just do not wash. Go to Wikipedia and look up "Bovine spongiform encephalopathy". That catastrophe peaked as recently as 1989, and continued for a decade after that. To suggest that in 24 years there has been an enormous improvement in safety is simply naive. Medicine has currently very large epidemics in obesity, diabetes and its complications, cancer, and dementia. They didn't come from nowhere. Read a few medical research papers and you will see that most of our body mechanisms are understood only very sketchily. The critics of GMO say that independent research trials over the full lifetime of a rat show a large increase in tumours, when they are fed on GMO foods. Tests run by the industry lasted only 90 days.
May 16 2013: I stop on holiday with an ex-farmer who decided that a 100-head herd was uneconomic, so he went into the tourist industry instead.
Down the road, a farmer expanded to 2000-head. These are kept on concrete in sheds, where they lie on mattresses. They eat only cattle feed, and not grass. If the cattle feed eventually comes from GMO crops, as I believe is already the case in the USA, then whatever is in those crops will get concentrated in the cows and can end up in higher concentrations on our plates.
Everything could just possibly turn out ok, but the risks are obvious. We are already warned not to eat some fish, because their mercury levels are dangerously high. So the riks are there. I will personally remain very suspicious of GMO, until there is proper expert discussion of risk assessment and how the trials that have been carried out, have shown these risks to be acceptable.
May 16 2013: I certainly agree with you. One factor in the mass death of bees is the use of neo-nicotinide systemic pesticide. This penetrates the whole of the plant, and has been detected in nectar that is I believe 1000 days old! You can't get any more systemic than by changing the genes so the plant makes its own pesticide.It is reported that these neo-nicotinides do not decay in the soil and may be killing earthworms. That suggests that they may not decay during cooking. so that could go for GMO-produced pesticides too. So even if the bacteria that are used in the production of the GMOs are kept secure (and there is little evidence for this), we can, as you say, still end up eating large quanatities of pesticides.These issues are so frighteningly complex and non-local, that a journalist making great hand-waving generalisations about them, has no credibility whatsoever.We have had asbestosis, thalidomide, the Bhopal pesticide factory, and BSE. The record of chemical and biochemical companies is not a good one.
May 5 2013: The bias against vitamins and antioxidants is very dangerous. I developed Stage 1 diabetic retinopathy (despite passing glucose load tests for the last 8 years). I cured it with a drastically lowered glucose level, exercise, weight loss, and a lot of vitamins and antioxidants. So I collected papers in this area. Here is my discussion of just a couple of these:
As regards the effect of antioxidants on the endothelium, an interesting 2007 paper is at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2007.00339.x/full
“Vascular superoxide and hydrogen peroxide production and oxidative stress resistance in two closely related rodent species with disparate longevity”.
In short, one mouse species with a lifespan of 8 years had much less endothelium damage and much higher levels of glutathione peroxidase, a known antioxidant produced in the body, than another species with a lifetime of 3.5 years.
Astaxanthin, which I have been taking, is a known precursor to glutathione.
There is a 2011 paper from Hong Kong at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21217409
Entitled “Relationships among diabetic retinopathy, antioxidants, and glycemic control.”
I can access only the abstract, which states the following result:
“Overall DR(diabetic retinopathy) prevalence (amongst a group of type II diabetics) was 89%. No significant differences in any demographic measures or biomarkers were found among those subjects with different DR grades, or in those without DR. Significant correlations (p < 0.0001) between HbA1c and DNA damage, (ρ = 0.32) and fasting plasma glucose and DNA damage (ρ = 0.52) were seen. DNA damage was also significantly and inversely correlated (p < 0.0001) with both plasma ascorbic acid (ρ = -0.41) and plasma total antioxidant level (ρ = -0.21).
May 5 2013: A bit too glib. In fact a lot too glib.Talking catastrophies, you forgot "mad cow disease" or BSE, which in the UK resulted in the slaughter of millions of cows. The biologists working for the animal feed companies thought that 80 degree centigrade sterilization would kill all known pathogens. However, they neglected prions. Big mistake, eh?The climatologists thought that climate change due to global warming would result in a warmer climate for Europe. Completely wrong. The winters have got colder and longer, because their models did not properly take account of the Jet Stream.GM foods are genuinely frightening. When fed to rats over a full liifetime, the tumour rate increases markedly. "RoundUp ready crops" encourage farmers to spray herbicide onto growing food crops, which then concentrate it accumulatively so that it gets into our bodies. In order to introduce pest resistance into crops, bacteria are used as a carrier of the gene. These bacteria have been found in the waste ground around biochemical plants. Our guts are full of bacteria, and bacteria swap DNA between each other. It is quite possible that we may end up with bacteria in our guts that produce pesticide.So please do not do a whitewash for GM crops. Regarding antioxidants, there are lots and lots of scientific papers showing beneficial effects in rats and mice, and in reversing retinopathy in humans (only vitamins C and E have been researched in human trials so far).This talk is now talking about fraud. This talk is a fraud and is very dangerious indeed.
Mar 16 2013: It is in the very nature of simple conditioning that two stimuli have to have a high covariance at a fixed interval of time between them. For example, meat is presented to a dog exactly 2 minutes after a bell sounds, and after repeated training that you can detect an increase in salivation around 2 minutes after the bell is sounded, even without the presence of meat.
So if neurons are suffering from a "hyperactive state" so that they continue to fire for some time after the stimulus is removed, they are by that very fact going to learn associations less thoroughly. Any stimulus you present them with will occur at some random time within the fading activation from an earlier stimulus. The neural net will detect the co-occurence of two stimuli at a given interval between them, far less strongly, because it perceives a whole range of possible intervals. It has a big wide gaussian distribution curve, and not a tall sharp one. So learning will necessarily fall off as "hyperstimulation" takes over. The brain will not be able to pick out the particular pair of stimuli that the experimenter presented, from the delayed decaying response to earlier stimuli.
That explains the co-occurrence of apparentt hyperactivity with learning disorder in a very simple fly brain. It could not be otherwise.
If you take learning of vocabulary in a child, you are dealing with a completely different phenomenon. Experiments have shown that a word has to be presented in only a small number of differing contexts, for it to be permanently learnt. This is not like simple conditioning. Recent books like that by Dehaene show by fMRI and PET that quite widely-spaced areas of the brain are involved in the reaction to a single word, so the training to recognize such a word is unlikely to resemble simple conditioning. We might also remember the work in cognitive psychology on context. Divers remember objects on the sea-bed less well when they return to the surface, but if they dive again memories return.
May 30 2012: Thank you for a lovely concise exhaustive analysis.
But although you show the energy density of tidal stream to be 2.5 times that of wind, you did not discuss this source. The Severn estuary and the westerly tips of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall come immediately to mind, but maybe the funnelling effect of the Channel would make the North Sea more suitable. Transmission losses should be lower because of the shorter distances to near-coastal cities.
Everybody talks about the challenge of storage during cloudy and wind-less days, but presumably tidal stream is only inoperable at slack tide for a couple of hours. We seem to hear very little about this energy source, which would seem ideal for our geography.
Like you I have heavily insulated my house, with cavity wall, new double-glazing and lots of loft insulation, and heavy curtains over doors and windows, and blinds half into the window-recess. These curtains and blinds make my living room 3 degrees warmer on winter mornings. Nowadays I hardly use my electric storage heaters and rely instead on quartz radiative fires which heat me and not the room.
I am considering a heat pump, which should get my overall annual (electric only) energy costs below the current £700.
May 23 2012: At first glance this analysis is a cause for moderate relief, although an expected rise from 7 million to 10 million is still a 43% increase.
However, a Web search reveals that the 10 most generous nations in overall dollars given to aid, total 46 billion dollars, and range from 12.9 down to 1.8, between the United States and Norway.
India and China, whom your graphs show to hold the vast majority of the world's population, do not figure at all in this list.
For China and India to get down to 2 to 3 babies per woman is a first step, but they must also generate their share of foreign aid to the countries that still have 5+ babies per woman, and whose population can clearly be seen to be growing at an un-diminished rate. In other words their round symbols must not only stay at their newly vertically depressed level, but they must move far to the right, and they must be encouraged to spend a growing proportion of income on those countries still growing their populations.
Without this, the top ten givers will have to more than double their current contributions over the coming years.
This is a simplification, since at least India no longer requires aid from the United Kingdom, but it still gives us a ball-park feel for the unfair burden that is likely to fall on the current top 10 givers, at a time when they are suffering austerity at home. UK aid may only be $87 per head at the moment ($340 for a 2-child family), but this will double, and it represents a fifth to an eighth of typical petrol/diesel costs. If you have not got a job, that is a lot of money.
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A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
"Assessment of the health impact of GM plant diets in long-term
and multigenerational animal feeding trials: A literature review"
It says:
"3.2.1. Insect-resistant maize
No long-term rodent studies are available for GM maize.
However, a study in which 36 cows in total were fed a feed based
on Bt-maize (event MON810) containing the protein Cry1Ab, or its
isogenic not genetically modified counterpart for over 25 months
covering two consecutive lactations has been published recently
(Steinke et al., 2010)."
All the rodent studies are over 90 days. This is ridiculously short, given that a survey on the lifespan of Norwegian rats puts that at between 72 to 120 weeks or 504 to 840 days. In terms of human lifespans, trials extend up to only a human equivalent of 11 years of age. Surely we are more worried about the effect on the diseases of old-age, such as diabetes, endothelium dysfunction and its long-term effects, cancer, and dementia.
We are at the top of the food-chain and will be drinking milk and eating beef from cattle that have been fed on cattle-feed based on GM-maize, all their lives. We need to know that such a practice will not increase the disease rate post-retirement.
The least we could expect would be trials lasting over the full lifetime of the rodents. I would also like to see rodent groups following sedentary lifestyles. This is routinely done in medical reseaerch on the diseases I have just mentioned.
A reply on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
Your safety claims just do not wash. Go to Wikipedia and look up "Bovine spongiform encephalopathy". That catastrophe peaked as recently as 1989, and continued for a decade after that. To suggest that in 24 years there has been an enormous improvement in safety is simply naive. Medicine has currently very large epidemics in obesity, diabetes and its complications, cancer, and dementia. They didn't come from nowhere. Read a few medical research papers and you will see that most of our body mechanisms are understood only very sketchily. The critics of GMO say that independent research trials over the full lifetime of a rat show a large increase in tumours, when they are fed on GMO foods. Tests run by the industry lasted only 90 days.
A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
Down the road, a farmer expanded to 2000-head. These are kept on concrete in sheds, where they lie on mattresses. They eat only cattle feed, and not grass. If the cattle feed eventually comes from GMO crops, as I believe is already the case in the USA, then whatever is in those crops will get concentrated in the cows and can end up in higher concentrations on our plates.
Everything could just possibly turn out ok, but the risks are obvious. We are already warned not to eat some fish, because their mercury levels are dangerously high. So the riks are there. I will personally remain very suspicious of GMO, until there is proper expert discussion of risk assessment and how the trials that have been carried out, have shown these risks to be acceptable.
A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
Who are you to tell me what I should or should not get into?
"Imagine that we have here a machine, a cool GMO machine, and you all have to eat what it produces".
Such talk is not appropriate to democracies operating under the rule of law.
A reply on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
A reply on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
As regards the effect of antioxidants on the endothelium, an interesting 2007 paper is at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2007.00339.x/full
“Vascular superoxide and hydrogen peroxide production and oxidative stress resistance in two closely related rodent species with disparate longevity”.
In short, one mouse species with a lifespan of 8 years had much less endothelium damage and much higher levels of glutathione peroxidase, a known antioxidant produced in the body, than another species with a lifetime of 3.5 years.
Astaxanthin, which I have been taking, is a known precursor to glutathione.
There is a 2011 paper from Hong Kong at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21217409
Entitled “Relationships among diabetic retinopathy, antioxidants, and glycemic control.”
I can access only the abstract, which states the following result:
“Overall DR(diabetic retinopathy) prevalence (amongst a group of type II diabetics) was 89%. No significant differences in any demographic measures or biomarkers were found among those subjects with different DR grades, or in those without DR. Significant correlations (p < 0.0001) between HbA1c and DNA damage, (ρ = 0.32) and fasting plasma glucose and DNA damage (ρ = 0.52) were seen. DNA damage was also significantly and inversely correlated (p < 0.0001) with both plasma ascorbic acid (ρ = -0.41) and plasma total antioxidant level (ρ = -0.21).
A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
A comment on Talk: David Anderson: Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals
So if neurons are suffering from a "hyperactive state" so that they continue to fire for some time after the stimulus is removed, they are by that very fact going to learn associations less thoroughly. Any stimulus you present them with will occur at some random time within the fading activation from an earlier stimulus. The neural net will detect the co-occurence of two stimuli at a given interval between them, far less strongly, because it perceives a whole range of possible intervals. It has a big wide gaussian distribution curve, and not a tall sharp one. So learning will necessarily fall off as "hyperstimulation" takes over. The brain will not be able to pick out the particular pair of stimuli that the experimenter presented, from the delayed decaying response to earlier stimuli.
That explains the co-occurrence of apparentt hyperactivity with learning disorder in a very simple fly brain. It could not be otherwise.
If you take learning of vocabulary in a child, you are dealing with a completely different phenomenon. Experiments have shown that a word has to be presented in only a small number of differing contexts, for it to be permanently learnt. This is not like simple conditioning. Recent books like that by Dehaene show by fMRI and PET that quite widely-spaced areas of the brain are involved in the reaction to a single word, so the training to recognize such a word is unlikely to resemble simple conditioning. We might also remember the work in cognitive psychology on context. Divers remember objects on the sea-bed less well when they return to the surface, but if they dive again memories return.
A comment on Talk: David MacKay: A reality check on renewables
But although you show the energy density of tidal stream to be 2.5 times that of wind, you did not discuss this source. The Severn estuary and the westerly tips of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall come immediately to mind, but maybe the funnelling effect of the Channel would make the North Sea more suitable. Transmission losses should be lower because of the shorter distances to near-coastal cities.
Everybody talks about the challenge of storage during cloudy and wind-less days, but presumably tidal stream is only inoperable at slack tide for a couple of hours. We seem to hear very little about this energy source, which would seem ideal for our geography.
Like you I have heavily insulated my house, with cavity wall, new double-glazing and lots of loft insulation, and heavy curtains over doors and windows, and blinds half into the window-recess. These curtains and blinds make my living room 3 degrees warmer on winter mornings. Nowadays I hardly use my electric storage heaters and rely instead on quartz radiative fires which heat me and not the room.
I am considering a heat pump, which should get my overall annual (electric only) energy costs below the current £700.
A comment on Talk: Hans Rosling: Religions and babies
However, a Web search reveals that the 10 most generous nations in overall dollars given to aid, total 46 billion dollars, and range from 12.9 down to 1.8, between the United States and Norway.
India and China, whom your graphs show to hold the vast majority of the world's population, do not figure at all in this list.
For China and India to get down to 2 to 3 babies per woman is a first step, but they must also generate their share of foreign aid to the countries that still have 5+ babies per woman, and whose population can clearly be seen to be growing at an un-diminished rate. In other words their round symbols must not only stay at their newly vertically depressed level, but they must move far to the right, and they must be encouraged to spend a growing proportion of income on those countries still growing their populations.
Without this, the top ten givers will have to more than double their current contributions over the coming years.
This is a simplification, since at least India no longer requires aid from the United Kingdom, but it still gives us a ball-park feel for the unfair burden that is likely to fall on the current top 10 givers, at a time when they are suffering austerity at home. UK aid may only be $87 per head at the moment ($340 for a 2-child family), but this will double, and it represents a fifth to an eighth of typical petrol/diesel costs. If you have not got a job, that is a lot of money.