Kat's Catches

By Kat and John

The Japanese earthquake and nuclear catastrophe have put science and medicine in the spotlight more than usual so this collection is heavy on matters of scientific interest.

?Bats Are Worth at Least $3 Billion Per Year
Odd place to start, you say?
Not so fast. Here are the dots you can connect...

• Earthquake


• Tsunami


• Nuclear accident


• Energy alternatives, wind, &c.


• Wind farms kill bats


• Bats are more important than you think.


• Now do your homework...

Drilling into the links will take time. Bats are far more important than most of us imagine. Because they work at night, we take what they do for granted. And because they have no natural predators they live a long time ("decades") and reproduce slowly ("Healthy populations of little brown bats grow at an infinitesimal annual rate of about .008 percent.")  In the same way that colony collapse disorder threatens honey bees, a fungal disease threatens the world's bat population. (Careful. That last link takes you to another four thousand word article.)

Like melting glaciers and other effects of climate change, this issue is not as arcane as the climate zombies would have it. A higher level of public awareness is warranted.

?How to Stop the Water Wars of 2050
File this under "Wish we had started sooner."
Most people are still in denial of water problems. As long as we can put out fires and shower with potable water few people will worry.  We live in a time when people pay more for water than for gas and complain the gas is overpriced. But both of those irrational attitudes will change in the next few years. Get ready to 'splain it to your grandchildren.

?Masturbation calms restless leg syndrome.
No comment. This link is included to see if you're paying attention.
For some reason this item reminds me of yesterday's Dr. Phil program about people who have a genetic trait called the warrior gene predisposing them to hair-trigger aggressive responses to stress. 
I want to see a scientific analysis comparing Liberals with Conservative to determine if there is any statistical difference in impulsive behavior or restless leg syndrome.

?Salty tombs could contain nuclear waste
As Kat said, haven't they been talking about this for forty years? Whaddya waiting for?
(I was interested to discover during the Katrina disaster that America's strategic oil reserves are stored in abandoned salt mines.)

?NY Times editorial, No to a New Tar Sands Pipeline
Reasons opposing yet another fossil fuel tranfusion, featuring all the usual suspects.

?Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs
Yet another story about being poor in America.

?Japan's Nuclear Crisis Is Seen Clearly from Afar
What we know may be frightening but what we don't know could be worse.

Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as �safety codes.� Many of these institutions � including ones in Japan � are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.

�The codes got better and better� after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.

Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.

�They don�t want to go there,� said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. �The spin is all about reassurance.�

?Mangroves excel at storing climate-warming carbon

Tropical mangrove trees are better at storing climate-warming carbon than most other forests, so cutting them down unleashes far more greenhouse gas than deforestation elsewhere, scientists reported on Sunday. Mangroves are so efficient at keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that when they are destroyed, they release as much as 10 percent of all emissions worldwide attributable to deforestation -- even though mangroves account for just 0.7 percent of the tropical forest area, researchers said.

?Algae holds promise for nuclear clean-up
I read the article but was not reassured. Apparently the organism can help separate the dangerous part of waste from the rest, but separating, not deactivating, was the achievement. I'm glad someone is on the case and this is clearly a step in the right direction.

But I kept thinking about one of the everyday problems I had to guard against in the food business: broken glass in the ice bank. A cardinal safety rule is Never use a glass to scoop ice. Use paper, plastic or a scoop. In the event that broken glass gets into crushed ice the only safe handling is to toss the whole mess and start over.

This is a perfect example of a preventable accident.
Risk-benefit analytics should not apply to radioactivity.
Just. Don't. Take. Chances.