Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans of people in the early stages of romantic love show romantic love is less about emotions and more about rewards and the parts of the brain that control motivation.

BETHESDA, Md. (May 31, 2005) – You just can't tell where you might find love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a social psychologist found love-related neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They detected quantifiable love responses in the brains of 17 young men and women who each described themselves as being newly and madly in love.

The multidisciplinary team found that early, intense romantic love may have more to do with motivation, reward and "drive" aspects of human behavior than with the emotions or sex drive. Brain systems were activated that humans share with other mammals. So the researchers think "early-stage romantic love is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates, and that it has an important influence on social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic consequences."

People in romantic love showed no consistent pattern of emotional activation in areas of the brain known to govern emotions. But they did show consistent activation of brain areas associated with motivation and goal-seeking mental states.

"Most of the participants in our study clearly showed emotional responses," noted Arthur Aron of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, "but we found no consistent emotional pattern. Instead, all of our subjects showed activity in reward and motivation regions. To emotion researchers like me, this is pretty exciting because it's the first physiological data to confirm a connection between romantic love and motivation networks in the brain.

"As it turns out, romantic love is probably best characterized as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various specific emotions, such as euphoria or anxiety," Aron noted. "With this view, it becomes clearer why the lover expresses such an imperative to pursue his or her beloved and protect the relationship."

Romantic love happens in the basal ganglia region of the brain.

Aron reported that, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other measurements, he and his colleagues found support for their two major predictions: (1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with subcortical reward regions rich with dopamine; and (2) romantic love engages brain systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward.

Brown explains some of these findings, commenting that "when our participants looked at a photo of his/her beloved, specific activation occurred in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal caudate body. These regions were significant compared to two control conditions, providing strong evidence that these brain areas, which are associated with the motivation to win rewards, are central to the experience of being in love."

Brown noted that "an important concept is that the caudate probably integrates huge amounts of information, everything from early personal memories to one's personal notions of beauty. Then, this brain region (and related regions of the basal ganglia) helps to direct one's actions toward attaining one's goals. For neuroscientists," she said, "these findings about the diverse regional functions of the basal ganglia in humans have remarkable implications."

Romantic love happens on the right side of the brain while facial attraction happens on the left side.

Another important discovery, Brown said, was that "to our surprise, the activation regions associated with intense romantic love were mostly on the right side of the brain, while the activation regions associated with facial attractiveness were mostly on the left.

"We didn't predict such a striking lateralization," Brown reported. "It is well known that speech is largely a left-sided cortical function. But our data indicate that lateralization also occurs in lower parts of the brain. Moreover, different kinds of rewards (in this case, the "rush" of romantic love, compared with the pleasing experience of looking at a pretty or handsome face) is also lateralized. These results give us a lot to think about how the normal human brain learns and remembers and functions in general," Brown added.

Humans form attachments to each other using the same part of the brain that prairie voles use for pair-bonding.

Another breakthrough, Brown noted, was that "we found several brain areas where the strength of neural activity changed with the length of the romance. Everyone knows that relationships are dynamic over time, but we are beginning to track what happens in the brain as a love relationship matures."

Helen E. Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey, noted that not only did the brain change as romantic love endured, but that some of these changes were in regions associated with pair-bonding in prairie voles. The fMRI images showed more activity in the ventral pallidum portion of the basal ganglia in people with longer romantic relationships. It's in this region where receptors for the hormone vasopressin are critical for vole pair-bonding, or attachment.

"Humans have evolved three distinct but interrelated brain systems for mating and reproduction – the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment to a long term partner," Fisher said, "and our results suggest how feelings of romantic love might change into feelings of attachment. Our results support what people have always assumed – that romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences. It is definitely more powerful than the sex drive."

People consider rejection in love as more important than rejection for sex.

For instance, Fisher point out, "If someone rejects your sexual overtures, you don't harm yourself or the other person. But rejected men and women in societies around the world sometimes kill themselves or someone else. In fact, studies indicate that some 40% of people who are rejected in love slip into clinical depression. Our study may also suggest some of the underlying physiology of stalking behavior," she added.

Fisher sees love as a product of natural selection.

"Darwin and many of his intellectual descendants have studied the myriad physiological ornaments that one sex of a species have evolved to attract members of the opposite sex, like the peacock's fancy tail feathers that attract the peahen," Fisher noted. "But no one has studied what happened in the brain of the viewer, the individual that becomes attracted to these traits. Our study indicates what happens in the brain of the viewer as he or she becomes physiologically attracted to these traits."

She added, "This brain system probably evolved for an important reason – to drive our forebears to focus their courtship energy on specific individuals, thereby conserving precious mating time and energy. Perhaps," she hypothesized, "even love-at-first-sight is a basic mammalian response that developed in other animals and our ancestors inherited in order to speed up the mating process."

What does the future hold for love? Greater knowledge of a phenomenon very often brings with it the ability to manipulate and control it. I expect the development of drugs and other treatments that cause people to fall in and out of love and to recover more easily from lost love.

Some people will choose to immunize themselves from love by using treatments that prevent the love process from developing in the first place. A person with history of heart breaks might decide that the possibility of a new love is just too painful to bear. Or someone who wants to devote their time to career might decide to innoculate themselves from the risk of romantic distractions. Still others of a more cerebral sort will decide that love is just a costly cognition distorting evolutionary vestige that they are best off without.

The ability to manipulate love medically will inevitably lead to misuse via surreptious reprogramming of the love state of others. Someone who wants to ditch their mate will be tempted to surreptitiously deliver medicine that will cause the mate to fall out of love. Or imagine the case where a suitor is rejected because the object of their love is in love with someone else. Inevitably some suitors will look for ways to surreptiously deliver a medical treatment that will cause the object of their love to fall out of love with someone else and thereby open up the possibility of forming a new love bond with them.

Motives also exist to cause people to fall in love with each other. This might be done by someone who has unrequited love for another. One can also very easily imagine members of couples (married or otherwise) using love potions to revive flagging marriages by returning their partner to an earlier state of love. But one can also imagine third parties (e.g. parents wanting to form a dynastic alliance of some sort) deciding to secretly do this as well.

The ability to surreptitiously cause people to fall in and out of love will inevitably lead to suspicions by those falling in and out of love. Can they trust their feelings as legitimate? Is pharmaceutically induced love less legitimate than natural love? If so, why? Will it be possible to develop technologies that check for unnaturally induced feelings of love?

Also see my previous posts "Love Deactivates Brain Areas For Fear, Planning, Critical Social Assessment", Hormone Levels Change When Falling In Love, and What Brain Scans Of People Falling In Love Tell Us.

Writing for the New York Times John Tierney draws attention to a worldwide trend toward a reduction in wars.

You would never guess it from the news, but we're living in a peculiarly tranquil world. The new edition of "Peace and Conflict," a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world.

Before his death Julian Simon predicted to Tierney that the incidence of war would decline.

"I predict that the incidence of war will decline," he told me in 1996, two years before his death. He based his prediction on the principle that there is less and less to be gained economically from war. As people get richer and smarter, their lives and their knowledge become far more valuable than the land, minerals and natural resources they used to fight over.

The Iraq war is sometimes described, by both foes and supporters, as a pragmatic venture to keep oil flowing, but not even the most ruthless accountant can justify the expense. Even before the war, America's military costs in the Persian Gulf were much greater than the value of all the oil it was getting from the region, and now it's spending at least four times what the oil's worth.

Knowledge about how to create new resouces avoids the need to come to blows over existing useful resources. Technological societies can reduce their need to get entangled relationships with more backward but resource-rich societies by making technological advances which eliminate the need for the natural resources.

Tierney's argument about costs illustrates why an increase in government energy research funding makes so much sense. Even before the war were US military costs in the Persian Gulf high enough to justify much more government funding of research aimed at obsolescing oil.

The cost of the Iraq war is growing with no end in sight. Even official cost estimates understate the total cost of the Iraq war because the soldiers who die will make no future economic contributions to the US economy (or to the raising of their children) and survivor benefits will cost the public purse. Plus, the maimed will need care for decades to come with some requiring institutionalizatoin. Some of the injured survivors will be unable to work again while others will be able to work only at diminished levels. Due to advances in medical treatments the permanently damaged outnumber the killed.

But the invincibly ignorant Bush Administration wants to cut energy research.

In February, President George W. Bush’s Administration requested approximately $3.5 billion for fiscal 2006 for the Science Office—a 3.8% cut from 2005.

More than two thirds of the US Senate members want energy research to go up, not down.

More than two-thirds of U.S. senators have signed a letter recommending an increase of 3.2% in the FY 2006 DOE Office of Science budget. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) were joined by 66 of their colleagues in signing a letter to Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM) and the subcommittee's Ranking Member Harry Reid (D-NV) advocating a $3.715 billion budget for the Office of Science.

This strong demonstration of bipartisan support for the Office of Science comes at a key time. Appropriators will wrap up their hearings in the next few weeks and will then start drafting their FY 2006 budget bills. Setting the stage for this year's budget cycle was a Bush Administration request of a 3.8% reduction in the Office of Science's budget to $3.463 billion for the fiscal year that begins on October 1. This amount is less than the FY 2004 budget (see http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/016.html.)

The $421 billion US Defense Department baseline budget plus at least $85 billion in supplementary appropriations - mostly for Iraq but also for Afghanistan - include only part of the total cost of defense. Once other security related items are added in US defense costs add up to over $667 billion.

If other security items are added in - homeland security ($40.4 billion), foreign policy and international stability ($31.7 billion), and Veterans Affairs ($68.3 billion) - the grand total reaches $667.2 billion. That exceeds any annual sum the US has ever paid for security in any war at any time, Mr. Wheeler notes. It even exceeds annual security spending today by all other nations on Earth.

US federal energy research spending therefore equals about a half of a percentage point of US defense costs. Yet technological advances could obsolesce oil, reduce money available for terrorism, reduce money available to spread Wahhabi Islam, and greatly decrease US interests in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East as a whole.

When faced with arguments for war or projections of future conflicts over resources we should always stop and ask ourselves whether armed conflict could be avoided by accelerated advances in science and technology.

Will the trend toward less armed conflict continue indefinitely? Here are some reasons why that may not be the case:

• The current trend might just be a calm before the storm while new powers rise up to become strong enough to eventually challenge the existing world order. China comes to mind on this score.
• The number of people and governments which want to engage in conflict might continue to decline. But those few who do want to engage in conflict might find technological advances allow them to engage in asymmetrical warfare using biological or nuclear weapons that kill large numbers of people.
• Genetic engineering might eventually split the human race into subspecies whose interests and motvations are deeply incompatible.
• Artificially intelligent robots might make a bid for supremacy.
• Highly xenophobic aliens will receive the radio signals we started sending out in the early 20th century and they will send spacecraft to attack us.
• Religious and cultural differences will supplant economic competition as drivers of human conflict. Samuel Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations will lead to war. Certainly such differences helped cause wars in the past.

We can not avoid all violent conflict. But scientific and technological advances could eliminate the motives and means behind some conflicts.

Update: Some factors weigh in favor of reduced conflict in the future. Most obviously, the populations of the Western countries, Japan, and China are all rapidly aging. War is a young man's game. As young men become proportionally smaller portions of various populations the mainstream of each population will oppose war. Also, small family sizes make mothers especially more reluctant to risk losing a single son at war.

The effects of future rejuvenation therapies will cut in both directions. By making populations physically younger and boosting testosterone levels rejuvenation will make populations more physically able to engage in war. But the knowledge that one's own death in war would cost one thousands of years of foregone life might make people very risk averse. Some rejuvenation enthusiasts make that argument. But I'm not totally sold on it because human minds are flawed and humans do not always properly calculate risks and benefits. Look at gambling addicts or people who engage in dangerous sports for the thrill of it. Rejuvenation by itself will not make people perfectly rational calculators. For a substantial fraction of the world's population urges for immediate gratification of desires for revenge, pleasure, and dominance might override fears of death or desire for longer term satisfaction.

Oral contraceptives for women cause the female body to overproduce sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) which is a protein that binds to testosterone. Testosterone enhances sexual desire in women just as it does in men. Researchers led by Irwin Goldstein and Claudia Panzer at Boston University have found that SHBG levels remain elevated even a year after women stop taking the pill and women may suffer sexual dysfunction as a result. (same article here)

Hormonal changes induced by oral contraceptives (OC) are not immediately reversible after discontinuation of use, according to new research issued today at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) Fourteenth Annual Meeting and Clinical Congress.

Despite the benefits of OC, their use has been associated with sexual dysfunction and androgen insufficiency. OC are known to decrease serum testosterone levels by decreasing ovarian production of testosterone and by increasing production of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) from the liver. It has been assumed that these changes are reversible after discontinuation of OC use.

In the study of 102 pre-menopausal women with female sexual dysfunction, SHBG values in the OC group were seven times higher than those in the never-user group. OC lowers the free androgen index, in part, by substantially increasing SHBG levels. Despite a decrease in SHBG values after discontinuation of OC use, SHBG levels remained continuously elevated for up to one year in comparison with those in the control group. The free androgen index may remain low for a prolonged period.

Decreased libido, problems havng orgasms, painful intercourse, and other side effects of the Pill may be long lasting and perhaps even permanent for some women. Dr. Panzer warns:

"It is important that when doctors advise women to take oral contraception that potential side-effects, including loss of sexual appetite and arousal, are pointed out.

"If, as our study suggests, the Pill can cause a long-term or permanent loss of libido, that is something women need to be made aware of."

Parenthetical aside: The Pill has been in use for 45 years and yet a major side effect from its use is only being discovered now. Keep that in mind the next time a fairly new drug is found to have an unexpected side effect and the US Food and Drug Administration comes under a chorus of criticism for failing to foresee some problem. Discovery of drug side effects is hard to do even when a drug has been studied for decades.

Will women who have suffered a decreased desire for sex from taking oral contraceptives have to resign themselves to permanently reduced libidos? Maybe not. Drugs exist which suppress SHBG production.

The picture following treatment with tibolone was quite different. There was only a minor influence on circulating estrogens, and SHBG levels were reduced by 50%. Androgens are known to suppress SHBG production at the hepatic level [9,10,26,27]. After oral intake, tibolone is rapidly converted into 3α- and 3β- hydroxy tibolone, both having estrogenic properties, and the Δ4 isomer, which is known to possess progestogenic as well as androgenic activity. In fact, the receptor affinity for this isomer is about 40% of that of the potent androgen dihydrotestosterone [3,4]. The marked reduction in SHBG levels and as a consequence increased concentrations of free testosterone implies an enhanced circulating androgenic activity. This may be important as regards some clinical effects of tibolone.

A drug to suppress SHBG production would need to be either safe to take for the long term or capable of resetting liver SHBG production in a way that sticks once the drug is stopped. It is time to start looking in earnest for such a drug.

Dr. Essi Viding of the London Kings College Institute of Psychiatry and colleagues have found the tendency toward psychopathic behavior has a strong genetic component. (same press release here)

New research on the origins of antisocial behaviour, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, suggests that early-onset antisocial behaviour in children with psychopathic tendencies is largely inherited.

...

Dr Viding's research looked into the factors that contribute to antisocial behaviour in children with and without psychopathic tendencies. By studying sets of 7-year-old twins, Dr. Viding and her colleagues were able to pinpoint to what extent antisocial behaviour in these two groups was caused by genetic and/or environmental risk factors.

A sample of 3687 twin pairs formed the starting point for this research. Teacher ratings for antisocial behaviour and psychopathic tendencies (i.e. lack of empathy and remorse) were used to classify the twins. Those who were in the top 10% of the sample for antisocial behaviour were separated into two groups - those with and without psychopathic tendencies.

Following analysis, the results showed that, in children with psychopathic tendencies, antisocial behaviour was strongly inherited. In contrast, the antisocial behaviour of children who did not have psychopathic tendencies was mainly influenced by environmental factors. These findings are in line with previous research showing that children with psychopathic tendencies are at risk to continue their antisocial behaviour and are often resistant to traditional forms of intervention.

For those who recognize the name note that Robert Plomin is one of the co-authors.

Evidence for substantial genetic risk for psychopathy in 7-year-olds (Essi Viding, R. James R. Blair, Terrie E. Moffitt, Robert Plomin) is published in the June 2005 issue of The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

The bad kids who feel no remorse are genetically bad.

Preliminary findings from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) indicate that within the early-onset group there are at least two etiologically distinct groups of children. Antisocial behavior in 7-year-old children with callous and unemotional traits is under strong genetic influence, whereas antisocial behavior in children without such personality traits is primarily environmentally mediated.

Such findings of etiological differences are prompting the search for risk genes, as well as highlighting the need to study environmental risk within a genetic framework. It must be emphasized that high heritability is not equivalent to immutability. Better understanding of gene-environment interactions can come to inform successful prevention programs that target young children. These prevention programs may well be different for etiologically distinct subgroups of children at risk for violent and antisocial outcomes.

Psychopathy is strongly genetically infuenced.

Twin studies can help distinguish between genetic and environmental determinants of violence, said Essi Viding of the Institute of Psychiatry in London. In antisocial 7-year-olds with callous and unemotional traits, Viding found, the antisocial behavior was strongly genetic in origin (a group heritability of 80%). If these youths can be identified early, perhaps with a genetic test on cells from a cheek swab, one could target programs for them. "Genes are not a blueprint that determines outcome," said Viding. "Rather, they act together with other risk or protective factors to increase or reduce the risk of disorder."

...

Antisocial behavior and physical violence, it turns out, are moderately heritable. A recent meta-analysis of behavioral genetic studies estimated that 41% of the variance on antisocial behavior is due to genetic factors, about 16% to shared environmental factors, and about 43% to nonshared environmental factors.

...

Viding's group is currently trying to find genes associated with callous-unemotional traits. If such genes can be identified, the researchers can explore how environment affects the outcomes of children who carry the genes. For example, they may be able to see whether the same genes place children at risk for both antisocial behavior and hyperactivity. They may also be able to assess how risk genes interact with risk environments throughout development.

Genes are not a blueprint that determines outcome. Genes alone are neither sufficient, nor necessary, in causing the antisocial behavior.

I am highly skeptical of claims that genes alone are never sufficient to cause antisocial behavior. Certainly some genotypes make people more at risk of being violent or antisocial only in response to specific types of environmental influences. But surely other genotypes must make other children born "bad to the bone". Claims that environmental interventions can always override genetic influences strike me as denial. Sorry, sometimes the genome wins.

To put my argument another way: Some people are more genetically determined than others. (and I predict people will become more genetically determined in the future) Some people have genes that make them highly susceptible to programming by environmental influences. But others have genes that make them highly resistant to various types of environmental influences. For example, some people are going to be happy or unhappy regardless of their environment. Others will have moods and motivations that are greatly influenced by disappointments or good fortune. Some will become violent as a result of child abuse. Others will stay pacifist no matter how much abuse they suffer.

Also, in some cases where genes make someone highly susceptible to environmental influences the effect is to make that person more prone to become criminal or otherwise problematic for the rest of us. Genes can make a person prone to going down an undesirable developmental path or so prone to antisocial behavior that without taking some rather severe steps to isolate such people from "the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune" some of them are going to go over to the "dark side of the force". The degree to which they can be triggered by environmental stimuli is so great that the ability of environment to influence them is not a reason for optimism.

Even in cases where one twin becomes a psychopath and the other does not become a psychopath that is not automatic proof that therefore social environment made the difference. Some part of deveopmental outcome is due to random noise. Genes do not perfectly control development. Hardwired differences in brains of twins will be present at birth due to chance. Throw in additional noise in very early childhood and before many social influences are felt genetic and non-genetic but developmentally caused and irreversible (at least with current biotechnology) differences will already be well established.

Genes control the extent to which a person is susceptible to various events in the environment and genes exercise great influence over how a person will respond to abuse as a child or a threat uttered in a bar or other events in a person's life. Genes even control the extent to which developmental outcomes are due to random noise from the environment and from Brownian motion. Hopes that socialization can always compensate for genetic inheritance to prevent antisocial thought patterns and behavior strike me as hopelessly naive.

Once psychopathy as a genetically caused condition becomes accepted and genetic testing and genetic engineering becomes possible do you favor or oppose the use of either genetic testing (for selective abortion) or genetic engineering (perhaps delivered in utero) to prevent the development of psychopaths? Consider your other choices. Early and lifetime institutionalization of kids who are bad to the bone would prevent them from preying on others but conflict with the assumption of "innocent until one has committed a crime", let alone "innocent until proven guilty". The other option is what we do now: let those kids grow up and victimize people before being caught committing crimes. That latter option consigns some people to future victimhood and, worse yet, not all psychopaths are ever caught by the criminal justice system. "Successful psychopaths" with an increased corpus callosum but with a symmetrical hippocampus are much less likely to get caught by the police than psychopaths that also have an asymmetrical hippocampus.

Suppose early environmental conditioning techniques which can reverse psychopathy are discovered. Parentheticaly I'm extremely skeptical of the notion than any socialization practices can counteract the effects of gross differences in brain morphology characteristic of psychopaths. But suppose I'm wrong. Would you favor removing a very young budding psychopath from his parents in order to put him through a social conditioning therapy to reverse his psychopathy?

The mitochondria are a subcellular organelle (a sort of cell within a cell) that break down sugar to generate energy molecules used throughout the cell. Clay F. Semenkovich, MD at the Washington University School of Medicine and colleagues report that failures in mitochondria due to aging are suspected of causing atherosclerosis and heart disease.

The research team genetically engineered mice to have especially leaky mitochondria in their blood vessel cells. It found that although normal mice very rarely acquire atherosclerosis, the mutant mice all developed the disease, even when fed on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. The results of the experiment appear this week in Nature.

...

They speculate that an increased flow of reactive oxygen damages the blood vessel's walls. The body then mounts an immune response to repair this damage, and scientists have already established that cells trying to fix arterial damage can create problems. These immune cells attract a form of cholesterol that sticks to arterial walls, forming plaques.

Mentally I file this under "Totally Unsurprising". Mitochondria have their own DNA for some of their proteins. Some gerontologists (e.g. Aubrey de Grey) theorize that the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) acts as a sort of Achilles Heel in cellular metabolism and cellular aging. Very reactive chemical compounds get generated in mitochondria by breaking down sugar and some of those compounds occasionally break loose and fly into the mtDNA causing damage. So mtDNA might accumulate damage at a much faster rate than DNA in the nucleus.

The increased rate of mutational damage to mitochondrial DNA eventually disables some of the genes that a mitochondrion needs to generate energy. Given that many other mitochondria in a cell could step in to make up the shortage of energy from a single damaged mitochondrion one might not expect damage to one or two mitochondria to make much difference. But note how the article talks about reactive oxygen generated by old mitochondria. The same mutations that cause mitochondria to stop breaking down sugar properly also are suspected of causing mitochondria to generate lots of free radicals. Those free radicals cause inflammation that, through some additional steps, cause hardening and clogging of arteries.

So what to do about this? As one of his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Aubrey de Grey proposes development of gene therapies to move mtDNA genes into the nucleus where they won't get damaged by mitochondrial metabolism.

This gives us a wonderful opportunity: rather than fixing mitochondrial mutations, we can obviate them. We can make copies of those 13 genes, modified in fairly obvious ways so that the TIM/TOM machinery will work on them, and put these copies into the chromosomes in the nucleus. Then, if and when the mitochondrial DNA gets mutated so that one or more of the 13 proteins are no longer being synthesised inside the mitochondria, it won't matter -- the mitochondria will be getting the same proteins from outside. Since genes in our chromosomes are very, very much better protected from mutations than the mitochondrial DNA is, we can rely on the chromosomal copies carrying on working in very nearly all our cells for much longer than a currently normal lifetime.

This project needs a lot of work, though, even though it sounds simple. The 13 proteins of interest are actually quite difficult for the TIM/TOM machinery to process even when we "tell" it to do so, so we still need to work on making that part easier. But there has been good progress in this area in the past couple of years.

This latest report does not prove that mitochondrial aging is a major cause of plaque build-up in arteries. However, it is certainly consistent with this theory.

The development of gene therapy to fix the problem with mtDNA mutation accumulation still lies many years in the future. Semenkovich is looking for ways to change the amounts of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids available in cell walls in hopes that the inflammation response can be reduced so that perhaps the development atherosclerosis will be slowed.

"It would be interesting to figure out how to take essential fatty acids, get them into the vessel wall and see if you could treat atherosclerosis that way," said Semenkovich.

More omega 3 fatty acids from fish might help and I hope Semenkovich succeeds in his investigations. But I'd much rather have gene therapies that would rejuvenate artery and vein wall cells or cell therapies that would replace existing cells with younger and healthier cells.

Lawyer, novelist, and aspiring screen writer Julie Hilden writing in FindLaw analyses a hypothetical not very distant future created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson where a hypothetical merger of Amazon and Google produces sophisticated software which reads all the news stories on the web and writes personalized news articles that synthesize the knowledge from many news sources.

In 2010, Googlezon wins its fight with Newsbotser by inventing a clever new technique that further tailors content to the user: "Googlezon's computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a [personalized] news story for every user."

For the copyright holders who funded the writing of the original stories the problem arises when increasing numbers of readers no longer read the original stories. The New York Times or Washington Post get fewer visitors to their site or fewer subscribers for home delivery and hence less revenue from ads and subscribers.

So to give an example - mine, not Sloan and Thompson's - suppose the knowledge that Googlezon uses to customize content indicates that a particular user is very interested in international news. In putting together a news story even on a domestic happening, Googlezon could emphasize the international aspects - stripping from other sites (including blogs), say, only five sentences on the domestic happening, and twenty sentences on its international implications, to make a story.

Returning to Sloan and Thompson's predictions, in 2011, the New York Times and other media whose content is not customized to the user go the Supreme Court, "claiming that [Googlezon's] fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law."

But - according to Sloan and Thompson - the old media lose. As a result, they disappear - relegated to the status of newsletters for the elite and the elderly!)

Read the full article for Julie's discussion of the legal angles and how the hypothetical future legal case might turn out.

Consider how media firms might respond if no legal remedies are available. One response would be to reduce what gets put on the web. But even if the New York Times reduced how many articles it put on its web site the mythical future Googlezon company could still buy hard copies of daily NY Times newspapers, scan them into their computers, and use optical character recognition technology to convert the articles to text. Then their software could parse that text just as search engines read text on web pages. The knowledge extracted by the sophisticated parsing along with the knowledge extracted from all the other newspapers in the world could still be used to write news stories.

In one sense the Googlezon automated news story writer is not qualitiatively different from what already goes on. Talk show hosts read newspapers and then tell their listeners about what is going on. Have you ever watched C-SPAN where they read local newspapers from around the country? Or look at web logs which excerpt from various newspapers and other news sources.

The problem with the Googlezon idea is that once it becomes possible (and I think it is a matter of when, not if) this future tool will very efficiently separate the original gathering of information from the writing about it so thoroughly that news organizations that pay news gatherers (a.k.a. reporters) to go into the field to collect information will have a hard time generating much revenue to pay for their information gathering efforts.

I see this as part of a wider problem. Movie makers, music makers, software writers, and other content providers suffer economic losses from bootleggers who make copies of work which is copyrighted or in some other way owned as intellectual property. New technological developments continue to make copying easier. Faster internet connections make downloads easier. Cheap internet hosting services and the spread of the internet to countries with less intellectual property protection provide easy ways for bootleggers to make copyrighted material accessible for copying in violation of laws in many jurisdictions. Mass storage device capacities keep going up while their sizes shrink.

As the Googlezon example demonstrates, not all undermining of the value of legally protected material takes the form of violation of copyright law or of violation of other existing intellectual property law. Here is the root problem: New methods of information processing and information distribution effectively undermine old models for funding knowledge gathering and content production. The new methods of information processing, transmission, and storage may not - at least initially - provide a different set of incentives and mechanisms for doing as much content generation as is done today.

This wider problem extends even to the point of reducing the economic incentives for governments to fund basic research. When information flowed much more slowly basic research funded in one country which yielded economically valuable discoveries was most likely to go through commercialization where the basic discoveries were made. The value of propinquity between researchers and start-up companies was so high that, say, a Stanford professor who made a commercially valuable discovery most likely caused the formation of a company near Stanford to commercialize the knowledge from the discovery. But in the future the odds of a discovery in America first being commercialized in China or other countries will become much higher as the details about scientific discoveries propagate around the world more quickly via the web. When that happens many governments will see fewer incentives to pay for basic research. The resulting decrease in funding will be a loss for us all.

These problems are market failures. The concept of property has been extended from land and physical things into ideas, designs, and other intellectual creations that basically amount to patterns. This extension of property into the intellectual realm has caused a boom in efforts to generate useful knowledge and other products of the mind. But technological advances are increasing the cost of protecting existing intellectual property. The market for intellectual property increasingly fails due to the ease with which people can benefit from knowledge without financially contributing to its creation. Those technological trends in computing and communications show no sign of running out of steam. The solutions to this problem are not obvious to me.

Update: On the bright side advances in computing and communications technologies also lower the cost of knowledge creation and other forms of content creation. For each type of content we need to ask what is happening more quickly: Is "stealabilty" (for lack of a better term) going up faster or slower than costs of patterns production are dropping? Even if "stealability" is not advancing more rapidly than technological advances lower production costs we still suffer losses from a reduction in the amount of content generated as compared to an environment where more content use must be paid for.

Business models can be adjusted to respond to the new environment of rampant intellectual property theft. For example, rather than sell a shrinkwrap piece of software that does some function a business can sell the service of actually doing that function. Then the software can be loaded only on a server controlled by the business and customers can send in data to be transformed by the software or interact with the software over the web and pay per use. However, these adjustments will not restore all the incentives for knowledge production which are being lost due to easy copying and uncompensated reuse.

Photovoltaic solar cell efficiency might be boosted to 65% by use of quantum dots.

Golden, Colo. — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have shown that nanotechnology may greatly increase the amount of electricity produced by solar cells.

In a paper published in a May issue of the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters journal, an NREL team found that tiny "nanocrystals," also known as "quantum dots," produce as many as three electrons from one high energy photon of sunlight. When today's photovoltaic solar cells absorb a photon of sunlight, the energy gets converted to at most one electron, and the rest is lost as heat.

The research demonstrates the potential for solar, or photovoltaic, cells that reduce wasteful heat and maximize the amount of the sun's energy that is converted to electricity—a key step toward making solar energy more cost-competitive with conventional power sources.

The NREL research team, led by Arthur Nozik, included Randy Ellingson, Matt Beard, Justin Johnson, Pingrong Yu, and Olga Micic, and worked in collaboration with theorists Alexander Efros and Andrew Shabaev of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C.

The findings are further confirmation of pioneering work by Nozik, who in 2000 predicted that quantum dots could increase the efficiency of solar cells, through a process now termed "multiple exciton generation," or "MEG". Last year, Richard Schaller and Victor Klimov of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico were the first to demonstrate the electron multiplication phenomenon predicted by Nozik, using quantum dots made from lead selenide.

They say the existing solar cells go as high as 33% efficiency of conversion. But production solar cells installed on roofs are typically much lower efficiency than that. So if this new approach could be manufactured cheaply it would be at least 3 times higher in efficiency than existing manufactured solar cells.

"We have shown that solar cells based on quantum dots theoretically could convert more than 65 percent of the sun's energy into electricity, approximately doubling the efficiency of solar cells," Nozik said. The best cells today convert about 33 percent of the sun's energy into electricity.

The NREL and NRL researchers' paper also describes a new theoretical foundation for the multiple exciton generation process that is based on certain unique aspects of quantum theory.

The recent work demonstrates MEG in quantum dots of a second semiconductor material, lead sulfide.

The NREL/NRL work not only shows higher overall efficiency for multiple exciton generation,

it also establishes that the process occurs with lower photon energies, meaning it could make use of an even greater portion of the sun's light spectrum.

I am just guessing but this approach might be cheap to manufacture. Lead and sulfur are cheap. Selenium is also used (see below). Is selenium expensive?

Note above the reference to work by Richard Schaller and Victor Klimov that provided experimental evidence that led to this work. See my post from April 26, 2004 "Nanocrystal Photovoltaics May Achieve 60% Conversion Efficiency" for more on Schaller and Klimov's work.

From the abstract.

We report ultra-efficient multiple exciton generation (MEG) for single photon absorption in colloidal PbSe and PbS quantum dots (QDs). We employ transient absorption spectroscopy and present measurement data acquired for both intraband as well as interband probe energies. Quantum yields of 300% indicate the creation, on average, of three excitons per absorbed photon for PbSe QDs at photon energies that are four times the QD energy gap.

Thanks to Dave Gobel for the tip.

South Korea's birth rate breaks a new low record.

The birth rate is estimated to have plunged to its lowest point ever at 1.15. The lowest total fertility rate recorded so far was the 1.17 recorded in 2002.

In a population where everyone has only one child no one would have a cousin or aunts or uncles. Think about it. Your parent would have no brothers or sisters and hence you couldn't have aunts or uncles, let alone cousins.

Once rejuvenation therapies come to market then in a society where everyone has only one child the population would at most double. Picture 128 people forming 64 couples to make 64 offspring. Then those 64 have 32 children. Then those 32 have 16 children who have 8 who have 4 who have 2. Those last two mate with each other and have a single last child.

But once rejuvenation is commonplace and people can stay young for hundreds or even thousands of years most people would want to have more children. Instead of a woman having a 20 year window during which she could reproduce she could work for 50 or 100 or 200 years, amass great wealth, and then easily afford to have a dozen children over a fwe of decades. So once rejuvenation therapies become available only government regulation could prevent long term population growth.

A 2004 article reports that Korea has the lowest total fertility rate in the world.

Last year, the total fertility rate (TFR) among Korean women was the lowest in the world, at 1.19, a figure much lower than the average 1.6 to 1.7 for OECD member countries and significantly lower than the 2.1 needed to maintain the current population level in this country. The TFR is the average number of babies born to women during their reproductive years between ages 15 and 49. The number of births, which once reached as many as one million in 1970 alone, fell to 493,500 last year. From 2017, 13 years from now, the country’s total population will start to decrease.

Korea's businesses are shaping incentives to encourage Korean women to make more babies.

Employers are coming up with a plethora of ideas to help boost Korea’s worryingly low birthrate, with incentives ranging from the sensible to the bizarre. Maternity leave events and maternity lounges, birth bonuses and child rearing support are all on the list, as are “sterility sabbaticals.”

South Korea will be losing 0.2 percent population per year by 2030.

The population growth is forecast to record a negative growth rate of 0.2 percent in 2030 as the number of newly born babies would continue to decline in the future.

...

An average Korean worker would have to pay about 54.7 percent of his or her income in taxes, pension contributions, and other social welfare-related payments to support the aged population in 2030, up from 39.3 percent in 2005.

The high taxes to pay for an increasing elderly population will serve as an additional disincentive for having children.

In the longer run Darwinian natural selection will have its way. As compared to the women who are having fewer children the South Korean women who are having larger families carry, on average, more genotypes that cause them to have more children. So genotypes that encourage having more offspring are being selected for in South Korea (and in the rest of the industrialized world for that matter). This process of natural selection takes generations to play out. But the anti-natal effects of industrialised society will eventually be overcome by increased frequency of genes that lead to a much stronger desire to have children. Selective pressures can not be escaped from without genetic engineering and government intervention.

Mice born to older mothers have shorter life expectancies than mice born to younger mothers.

The June 2005 issue of Biology of Reproduction includes a special paper by a team of Spanish scientists indicating that delayed motherhood in mice results in shorter life expectancy and reduced body weight in their offspring.

Negative effects of late maternal age in women, such as abnormal numbers of chromosomes in their children, are well known. However, other potential negative effects on offspring from delayed motherhood have been only anecdotal.

In what the editors of Biology of Reproduction feel will be a controversial topic of discussion, a team of reproductive biologists headed by Juan Tarín at the Department of Pediatrics, University of Valencia, Spain, presents data in the June issue of the journal that delayed motherhood in mice results in decreased life expectancy and reduced body weight of their offspring.

Several other aspects of reproductive fitness of offspring were assessed, but none showed significant deleterious effects.

This report identifying effects of delayed motherhood on life expectancy and body weight of offspring will surely stimulate inquiries into mechanisms resulting in these disturbing consequences, as well as epidemiological studies in humans, according to the editors of Biology of Reproduction.

The abstract for this report does not provide much detail on the size of the effect.

Do humans born to older mothers suffer decreased life expectancy? If so, by how much? We will have to wait for epidemiological research to answer this question. But epidemiological data is hard to interpret. Women who have babies later in life are, on average, also more able to have babies later in life than women who do not do so. Well, does that ability come as a result of genetic variations that influence life expectancy? We'd need data in women who have multiple children at ages that are far apart from each other in order to compare life expectancy of babies born to the same mother years apart.

An article in the Christian Science Monitor examines a variety of scenarios for the growth of hybrid vehicle sales. The most optimistic scenario has non-hybrids as the exception by 2015.

For example: If consumers keep snapping up hybrids and automakers begin to integrate the technology throughout their product lines - including pickup trucks - then hybrids might quickly reach 20 percent of new vehicle sales by 2010 and 80 percent by 2015, according to another Booz Allen Hamilton report. That's the most optimistic of three scenarios the management consulting firm laid out. In the "high adoption" scenario, hybrids would save 2 million barrels of gasoline a day by 2015; in the "medium adoption" scenario, 800,000 barrels of gasoline.

The Department of Energy offers a less optimistic projection for the rate of growth of hybrids. But Walter McManus, an economist and Director of the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan Transportation Institute, expects big savings in oil by 2010.

But with gasoline use increasing 1.7 percent a year through 2025, hybrids' impact on oil consumption will be small, according to the latest outlook by the US Department of Energy. It predicts only 1.1 million hybrids will be sold in 2025. Even in the most optimistic case, assuming rapid adoption of hybrid and other car technologies, the US would still chop only 172 million barrels of oil a year by 2025 - about 2.5 percent of expected oil imports that year. On the other side, Mr. McManus predicts more hybrids will be sold in 2010 than the DOE's 2025 estimate.

However, McManus expects Americans to take advantage of efficient cars by driving more.

McManus has a blog Walter's Brain on Sustainable Mobility on the Hybrid Cars web site. There he discusses in greater detail future scenarios for different levels average vehicle fuel efficiency.

"Status Quo Forever" assumes no further improvement in light vehicle fleet fuel economy (so it stays at 20mpg), and a 2% per year increase in the real price of gasoline. This scenario also assumes that hybrids fizzle and stop being built. The rising price of fuel limits the growth of vehicle miles traveled from population and income growth. By 2030 we would be consuming 73% more fuel than in 2004.

"Hybrids (30mpg)" assumes very aggressive growth in hybrids. It makes the same assumption about rising fuel prices. The average hybrid is assumed to achieve 30 mpg, and hybrids are assumed to be available across all segments. By 2015 this scenario assumes hybrids are 50% of new vehicle sales, and by 2030 that they are 100%.

The figure shows that by 2030 there would be significant savings (25%) of fuel compared to "Status Quo Forever," but fuel consumption would nevertheless rise compared to today, but by only 30%. The annual savings would not pass 10% and hybrids would not be more than 50% of all vehicles on the road until 2028.

McManus claims that only 30% of a reduction of fuel consumed per mile becomes a reduction in fuel consumed.

THE 10% INCREASE IN FUEL ECONOMY WOULD RESULT IN ONLY A 3% DECREASE IN GALLONS OF FUEL CONSUMED. Drivers would collectively take most (70%) of the increase in fuel economy in the form of more driving. This is called the "rebound effect" by researchers.

There is some practical limit on how far the "rebound effect" would extend in part because people don't want to spend their entire lives on roads. But more efficient powertrains also enable consumers to move up to driving larger vehicles.

The larger longer term impact of hybrids will come not from greater fuel efficency but rather from a shift toward using electric power outlets to recharge vehicle batteries. The move to hybrids will create such a large demand for lighter weight, higher energy capacity, and longer lasting batteries that the development of battery technology will accelerate. This acceleration of advances in battery technology will usher in the use electric generation plants (whether nuclear, coal, wind, or solar photovoltaics) as sources of energy for transportation.

That electric powered transportation future has already begun. Some Toyota Prius owners already started converting their Priuses to pluggable hybrids that they can recharge at home. Pluggable hybrids lead us down a road away from oil. While oil demand will continue to rise for some years yet to come we are now in the beginning of a shift away from liquid hydrocarbons and toward other sources of energy for transportation. The rapidity of that shift depends on the rate of advance of battery technology. Anyone wishing to accelerate the phase out of oil should support accelerated battery research and development efforts.

Update: McManus corrects his earlier calculation and claims a rebound effect of only 30% of the increase in fuel economy.

Using 2002 as the base again, a 10% increase in MPG would reduce fuel consumption by 7%, rather than the 3% suggested by the crude model.

I stand corrected. The rebound effect would consume 30 percent of the improvements in fuel economy, rather than the 70 percent I claimed in my earlier post.

So most of the increase in fuel efficiency would translate into reduced demand for gasoline. Note, however, that there is an increase in yearly demand due to population growth. The United States population is growing by almost 1% per year.

With support from the Foundation for Child Development the Yale Child Study Center has released a study on the high expulsion rates of poorly behaved 3 and 4 year olds from preschool programs.

New Haven, Conn. — Pre-K students are expelled at a rate more than three times that children in grades K-12, according to a primary study by researchers at Yale on the rate of expulsion in prekindergarten programs serving three- and four-year-olds.

Led by Yale Child Study Center researcher Walter S. Gilliam, the study, titled “Prekindergartners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Prekindergarten Systems,” is based on data gathered in the National Prekindergarten Study (NPS). The paper reports on expulsion rates by program setting (public school, Head Start, private providers), gender, and race/ethnicity. The pre-K report also presents expulsion data from all 40 states that fund prekindergarten programs.

The study found that although rates of expulsion vary widely among the 40 states funding prekindergarten, state expulsion rates for prekindergartners exceed those in K-12 classes in all but three states. Prekindergarten expulsion rates vary by classroom setting. Expulsion rates are lowest in classrooms located in public schools and Head Start, and highest in faith-affiliated centers, for-profit childcare and other community-based settings. In classrooms where the teacher had no access to a psychologist or psychiatrist, students were expelled about twice as frequently. The likelihood of expulsion decreases significantly with access to classroom-based behavioral consultants that provide teachers with assistance in behavior management.

“No one wants to hear about three- and four-year-olds being expelled from preschool, but it happens rather frequently,” said Gilliam. “Pre-K teachers need access to the support staff they need to help manage classroom behavior problems. Without this support, we are setting up for failure both our children and their teachers.”

The study found that four-year-olds were expelled at a rate about 1.5 times greater than three-year-olds. Boys were expelled at a rate over 4.5 times that of girls. African-Americans attending state- funded prekindergarten were about twice as likely to be expelled as Latino and Caucasian children, and over five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children.

“Classroom-based behavioral consultation appears to be a promising method for reducing prekindergarten expulsion,” said Gilliam. “When teachers reported having access to a behavioral consultant who was able to provide classroom-based strategies for dealing with challenging student behaviors, the likelihood of expulsion was nearly cut in half.”

This is yet another extension of stereotypical liberal-left politically correct whining about inequality. Even preschoolers are not free from the forces of politically correctness. Bad boys are relabelled "challenging". We are all collectively turning our backs on yet another source of horrible inequity ("No one wants to hear about..."). The implication here is that boisterous out-of-control preschoolers are somehow getting discriminated against. Little boys are victimized by expulsions (never mind that they beat each other up more than little girls do). Some racial minorities are victimized while others (Asians) get even better treatment than whites. What's next? Calls for a "No Preschoolers Left Behind" legislation to complement the ridiculous No Child Left Behind law? Plus, there is the predictable claim that more experts are needed to handle the problem. Picture me rolling my eyes.

But let me stop ranting and tell you what is interesting and unsurprising about this result. Toddlers are known to be violent and uninhibited. In case you missed it go read my previous post "Humans Most Violent When Only 2 Years Old". We should expect 3 and 4 year olds to get into more trouble with "the law" than, say, 7 or 10 year olds. Why? Toddler brains are less well developed and their inhibitions against violence in particular are just not wired up yet. They try to dole out lots of physical violence. We tend not to notice this so much because most interactions that 3 year olds have are with adults and a 3 year old can't inflict much in the way of physical damage on adults. So their attempts to punch just seem cute and lame. But expect trouble if you put a bunch of them together where they can pick on someone their own size.

Fortunately toddlers are too uncoordinated and weak to do serious damage. But some of them will cause enough disruptions to make keeping them in groups with lots of others highly problematic. Attempts by "experts" to keep the more disruptive ones in groups with the better behaved seem misguided.

Also see my post "Adolescence Is Tough On The Brain". Note that the part of the brain that inhibits risky behavior does not fully develop until age 25.

Thanks to Raj for the tip.

Qualities of a baby's cry can point to a number of neurological problems.

In a research review in the current issue of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, Linda LaGasse, PhD, and Barry Lester, PhD, with the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center (BHCRC) and Brown Medical School looked at previous studies that analyzed the acoustics of a baby's cry. The authors cite the characteristics of a cry that can indicate problems in a baby's nervous system, as well as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Changes in frequency, amplitude, length of cries, and resonance provide useful information for detecting diseases and disorders.

Overall, studies have repeatedly shown that infants at medical risk (like premature babies), and infants who have been exposed to lead or drugs, cry at a higher and more variable frequency than normal, but at lower amplitude, and with short utterances. These types of cry signals point toward a capacity problem in the respiratory system as well as an increased tension and instability of neural control of the vocal tract.

High resonance combined with mode changes indicate greater risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

These results cry out for practical application. Some sound analysis software developed for a personal computer combined with a microphone plugged into a computer port would let mom check out her baby's cries for risk factors.

If the sound of a baby's cry has diagnostic value then might the same be true for the sound of an adult's conversational voice or an adult's singing voice or perhaps for a scream made to check voice quality?

This result reminds me of recent reports on the uses of saliva and breath for disease diagnosis. The development of less invasive means of testing for diseases will allow humans to be continually monitored for disease indicators without the risk of x-ray exposure, trips to doctors' offices to get blood samples, or other more invasive, time consuming, expensive, and risky methods of testing.

Johns Hopkins University scientists led by urology professor Robert H. Getzenberg have developed a more accurate test for prostate cancer using a protein called Early Prostate Cancer Antigen (EPCA).

In the first clinical study of a new blood protein associated with prostate cancer, researchers have found that the marker, called EPCA or early prostate cancer antigen, can successfully detect prostate cancer in its earliest stages.

Greater sensitivity of cancer tests allows for earlier diagnosis and treatment and therefore better outcomes. Also, greater test sensitivity enables more rapid testing of anti-cancer drugs and of dietary and other interventions designed to prevent cancer in the first place.

The new test is much more accurate than the existing Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test.

The researchers found that EPCA levels were high in 11 of 12 prostate cancer patients (92 percent) and low in all the healthy individuals. Only two bladder cancer patients and none of the other patients had elevated EPCA levels, suggesting that for this study, the test was correct 94 percent of the time. In comparison, only one-quarter of patients who undergo biopsies because they have elevated PSA values are actually positive for prostate cancer, while as many as 15 percent of those with low PSA values were found to have prostate cancer as detected by biopsy, according to Getzenberg.

Larger clinical trials are under way to further refine the EPCA test, to make it more sensitive so it can pick up even the smallest traces of the marker and to verify its usefulness for detecting prostate cancer in a larger sample of patients, Getzenberg said.

Earlier cancer diagnosis will produce an unintended and yet ultimately beneficial consequence: The total number of people walking around with known cancer will rise dramatically. Therefore more people will feel the urgent need to support cancer research. A person who gets a cancer diagnosis and is told they have 6 months to live has little incentive to support cancer research and little time in which to do so. But a person who gets a cancer diagnosis 5 or 10 years before the cancer is going to reach the terminal stage has a lot of time and energy to devote to supporting cancer research.

This same phenomenon of increasingly earlier diagnosis years before a disease kills its sufferers is being repeated across many other types of diseases. Scanning technologies such as MRI, new blood tests, saliva tests, and other tests are leading to increasingly earlier diagnoses. In some cases this allows earlier and more successful treatment. But for incurable disorders this trend is also producing a growing body of people who now live for years knowing they have a fatal disease. This focuses more minds in support of developing better treatments.

An implantable fuel cell uses glucose from blood to generate a weak electric current. (same article here)

The biological fuel cell uses glucose, a sugar in blood, with a non-toxic substance used to draw electrons from glucose, said the team led by Matsuhiko Nishizawa, bio-engineering professor at the graduate school of state-run Tohoku University.

The fuel cell puts out only 0.2 milliwatts.

The fuel cell has the size of a small coin and can generate 0.2 milliwatts of electric power.

While 0.2 milliwatts is not much power it is enough to operate, say, a blood glucose sensor or other very small implanted sensor. Given the expected future availability of implantable sensors based on nanotechnology a small power source to operate them would be valuable.

Felicity Barringer of the New York Times reports on the potential for a political deal that would restrict greenhouse gas emissions in exchange for enabling a comback for nuclear power.

In recent statements, three top environmental experts - Fred Krupp, the executive director of Environmental Defense, and Jonathan Lash, the president of the World Resources Institute and James Gustave Speth, the dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies - have stopped well short of embracing nuclear power, but they have emphasized that it is worth trying to find solutions to the economic, safety and security, waste storage and proliferation issues rather than rejecting the whole technology.

These efforts to edge away from the established orthodoxy coincide with moves by Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, to offer significant financial incentives for the development of three new nuclear technologies -each with its own corporate backer - as part of a bill he and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, are sponsoring to regulate emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The proposed subsidies are in part to fund the cost of getting the first reactor of each design through the regulatory process. The first reactor for each desgn will be far more expensive and financially risky. The cost of funding the whole design will otherwise fall on either the first buyer or each design maker. The design makers do not want to pay because they fear a politically risky environment. Regulatory barriers might go up due to shifting political winds after just a few reactors get built. The provision of the federal funds is also seen as an important risk reducer because it basically would signal a commitment of the federal government to allow new nuclear power plants to be built.

What is referred to as 3 new technologies are 3 conventional nuclear plant designs (probably all light water reactors). These are not breeders, pebble bed modular reactors, or any other radical departure from existing designs. General Electric is one of the corporations with new nuclear plant designs. The article doesn't say but Westinghouse's AP1100 is probably another design on the list. Anyone have a guess as to the identity of the third corporation with a new nuclear plant design?

The addition to the McCain-Lieberman bill, which is being circulated in draft form, would codify a new political bargain. Conservatives would support emission controls in return for liberal support for a new generation of nuclear power plants, a shift that could reshape the existing alignments on these issues.

Most of the environmental groups mentioned in the article still emphatically oppose nuclear power. But environmentalist opposition to nuclear power is now far less uniform than it has been for the last few decades. Some notable environmentalists such as Stewart Brand are thinking that nuclear power is the lesser evil as compared to carbon dixoide emissons. Whether that is a correct assessment of the situation remains to be proven, both on the risks of nuclear power and the risks from rising CO2 emissions.

I see an irony in the debate amoong environmentalists about nuclear power and global warming: If we were to wait to deal with the prblem of rising carbon dioxide until new technologies are developed (which happens to be the course I advocate - combined with a much bigger push to develop new energy technologies) we could probably reverse the carbon dioxide emissions rise in 20 or 30 years without much use of nuclear power. Within a decade or two photovoltaics might be cheap enough to compete as a source of energy. Also, advances in battery technologies will some day solve the problem caused by the inability of ground-based solar power to support electricity 24 hours a day. An attempt to substantially reduce oil, natural gas, and coal consumption with existing technologies runs flat into the fact that only nuclear power can scale cheaply enough to offer a realistic alternative today.

The people who accept the most gloomy predictions of the effects of rising carbon dioxide are therefore (rightly or wrongly) painting themselves into a corner where nuclear power suddenly becomes a contender once again. Environmentalists have stoked up the popular fear of the global warming boogeyman to the point where they now find themselves forced them to wrestle with their fear of the nuclear power boogeyman.

In my view the environmentalist groups have made a big mistake for decades by putting far more emphasis on what they are against (nuclear power, conventional pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, etc) and not enough effort to promote the development of cost effective technologies that could displace older dirtier technologies. The best way to solve the problems caused by fossil fuels burning is more basic research and technological development. Research can lead to technologies will be both cleaner and cheaper than fossil fuels. Given cheaper alternatives the market will phase out fossil fuels without expensive regulatory regimes and controversial international treaties.

The environmentalist groups which advocate for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions ought to advocate just as loudly for increased basic research in electrochemistry to produce discoveries that will enable new type of batteries to be developed. Similarly, the environmentalist groups ought to be loud advocates for higher funding of photochemistry research in order to produce discoveries that will lead to cheaper photovoltaics. Both these areas of research are underfunded and both can produce discoveries that will enable a post-fossil fuels economy.

UC Davis political scientist James Fowler mathematically models altruistic punishment.

A new UC Davis study about the origin of cooperation may shed light on why nations punish other countries for human rights violations or why people sanction those who do not vote.

Political scientist James Fowler has created a mathematical model of human behavior that suggests that "moralists" who voluntarily pay a cost to punish "misbehavers" can come to dominate a population and ensure cooperation among its members.

"This may help explain mass political behaviors like voting," Fowler said. "When individuals say, 'It doesn't really matter if I vote,' others -- programmed genetically or by social norms -- may seek to punish them, even though it means a self-sacrifice."

He believes that humans may have physically or developmentally evolved to altruistic punishment. Previous studies found that "acting the moralist" stimulates the reward center in the brain.

Some researchers have suggested that cooperation may make sense in a society with altruistic punishers -- essentially, moralists who are willing to pay a personal cost to punish free-riders.

Fowler said his theory can also be used to explain some behaviors in international politics. For instance, the U.S. advocacy for human rights in China has continued for years, despite financial incentives to ignore them. "Our security risks from China's human rights abuses are tenuous at best, but we seem to be engaging in altruistic punishment anyway," Fowler said.

The United States government is willing to have both political and economic losses from its stance because of the stable international system that has evolved so that it is dominated by the "moralists," Fowler says.

Fowler's mathematical model simulates interacting behaviors in a society over time. He found altruistic punishers can enter a population of cooperators and non-cooperators and change the dynamics of the group.

Under certain conditions, altruistic punishment is so beneficial to the population that it will come to dominate the behavior of the group and keep non-cooperators at bay.

Fowler's article, "Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation," was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

You can read the full paper in PDF format.

The full paper brings up a number of interesting points. One idea is that selection for altruistic punishment could be enhanced if the punishers punish not just violators of rules for cooperation but also if the punishers punish anyone who does not participate in doling out punishment. Make the punishment severe enough (say death) one can envision how in a small isolated group a small number of altruistic punishers could purge many non-punishers and violators.

The urge to dole out altruistic punishment must have a genetic basis. When germ line genetic engineering (i.e. genetic engineering done on eggs, sperm, and embryos) becomes feasible one of my fears is that key genetically controlled qualities of human nature will be modified by parents and governments in ways that will threaten civilization. Genetic engineering to raise testosterone levels and dominance behavior would have obvious political consequences. But the urge to altruistically punish others is another crucial component of human nature which is going to become more or less strongly felt in future generations as a result of germ line genetic engineering. See my previous posts "Brain Rewards For Carrying Out Altruistic Punishment" and "Altruistic Punishment And Genetic Engineering Of The Mind".

Use of hydrogen to transport and store enerfgy is still a distant prospect.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers conclude in an article to be published in June that it could take "several decades" to overcome daunting technical challenges standing in the way of the mass production and use of hydrogen fuel cell cars.

The article notes that "success is not certain" in efforts to develop inexpensive, hydrogen-powered fuel cells and to create the vast storage and transportation infrastructure needed for the vehicles, stressing that hydrogen's "wide-scale use is laden with potential technical, economic and societal impasses." In case fuel cells never do become practical for cars, the researchers conclude, it would be wise for the nation to "maintain a robust portfolio of energy research and development" in other areas.

"In my mind, developing practical hydrogen fuel cells for cars is definitely doable, but we must solve very daunting technical challenges," said Rakesh Agrawal, Purdue University's Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.

The article will appear as the cover story in the June issue of the AIChE Journal, a publication of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The article was written by Agrawal, Martin Offutt, from the National Research Council, and Michael P. Ramage, a retired executive from ExxonMobile Corp.

Fuel cells cost too much to build and have short operating lifetimes.

"Today's fuel cells generate power at a cost of greater than $2,000 per kilowatt, compared with $35 per kilowatt for the internal combustion engine, so they are more than 10 times more expensive than conventional automotive technology," Agrawal said. "At the same time, fuel cells have an operating lifetime for cars of less than 1,000 hours of driving time, compared with at least 5,000 hours of driving time for an internal combustion engine.

"That means fuel cells wear out at least five times faster than internal combustion engines. If I buy a new car, I expect it to last, say, 10 years, which equates to about 3,000 hours of driving time. If my fuel cell only lasts 1,000 hours, you can see that's not very practical."

Cheaper and longer lasting catalysts are needed. Plus, in order to use fuel cells to burn hydrogen the hydrogen transportation and storage problems need to be solved.

To bring down the cost of fuel cells, less expensive catalysts and membrane materials are needed, Agrawal said.

Developing an infrastructure of hydrogen storage and transportation represents other significant challenges.

"A fuel-cell car built with today's technology would cost about $250,000, but you would have no place to fill up the tank," Agrawal said.

Hydrogen is a light gas, which makes it more expensive to transport and store. Because its molecular weight is only 2 – compared with heavier gases, such as methane, which has a molecular weight of 16 – less hydrogen is contained in the same space as heavier gases, making its transport more expensive.

Agrawal sees hydrogen vehicles starting to show up on the road in the year 2020.

"I believe we can probably solve the technological problems related to making hydrogen fuel cells practical as a replacement for the internal combustion engine, but it won't be easy and it likely won't happen very soon," Agrawal said. "An optimistic prediction would be that a significant number hydrogen fuel cell cars will be entering the marketplace around 2020, and by 2050 everybody will be driving them."

But that is an optimistic prediction. A lot of problems must be solved to even start hydrogen deployment in 2020. In the meantime the market for gas-electric hybrid vehicles is going to become quite large. Many of those hybrids will be pluggable and some people will be charging them from their home outlets. Photovoltaics might drop to the point that a portion of that car battery recharging will be done using electric generated right at home.

Suppose nuclear power experiences a resurgence. Hydrogen could be generated at nuclear plants. But if superconductor technology continues to improve and battery technology does as well then superconducting power lines which suffer no resistance might deliver nuclear power to electric vehicle batteries more conveniently at home at a lower cost than a hugely expensive infrastructure for delivering hydrogen to fuel stations.

In my view hydrogen's eventual role as primary vehicle fuel is by no means assured. Future solutions to hydrogen's technological problems will not compete with today's other energy technologies. Hydrogen's supporting technologies will compete with tomorrow's batteries, superconductors, and other energy technologies. Those competing technologies will be delivering benefits decades before hydrogen begins to do so and therefore industry, academic, and government labs will continue to refine those other technologies. By the time hydrogen is ready the competiton might be too firmly entrenched and cheap to be dislodged.

Fuel cells have a future independent of hydrogen. If the cost and durability problems with fuel cells could be solved for burning hydrocarbon liquid fuels then fuel cels could be adopted much more rapidly as a more efficient way to burn fossil fuels. Liquid fuel burning fuel cells could even work in hybrid vehicles with batteries providing increased efficiency through regenerative braking.

Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor has written an article reporting on the growing coaltion on energy policy forming between environmentalists and national security hawks.

What's new is that security-minded conservatives have begun to jump on the energy-independence bandwagon too.

Last fall, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington think tank on energy, issued a plan called "Set America Free." In December, the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy released its strategy. Last month, a bevy of national-security "energy hawks," military brass, and industry officials, as well as prominent Democrats and environmentalists, published their plan under the name Energy Future Coalition.

"We believe that the United States' dependence on imported petroleum poses a risk to our homeland security and economic well-being," wrote EFC in a letter to President Bush in March signed by more than 30 military and security officials, including Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

The new found interest in energy policy among Washington DC national security types bodes well that energy policy will improve. The development of a big coalition between environmentalists and national security hawks would be hard for either major American political party to ignore. The US government doesn't spend just mere billions on defense. It spends serious hundreds of billions with the Department of Defense alone spending around $400 billion per year. Additional national security money is spent through the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security. National security types are accustomed to throwing around large sums of money.

But even if hawks can build a coalition that supports big spending on energy research and conservation efforts will they get it right, or even half right? A lot of them seem to understand that oil's days are numbered. They certainly understand the national security problems caused by the world's dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Some of them even want rapid progress and not just the distant hope of some day developing enough technology to switch to hydrogen. So they might get it right enough to speed up progress in areas that matter.

Certain options rise to the forefront when the goal becomes phasing out oil. The big problem is transportation. We either must find other ways (i.e. biomass) to generate a lot of liquid hydrocarbons or we must find ways to make cheap and light batteries. If we can solve the battery problem then the non-oil ways to power cars become wind, solar photovoltaics, nuclear, or coal. Cheap light batteries should therefore be seen as enabling technologies that open up a lot of possibilities to replace oil.

My hope is for a big increase for research into electrochemistry in hopes of finding better materials for making batteries combined with a big increase for research into photochemistry to find better materials for making photovoltaics. I'd also like to see an acceleration of nuclear energy research into pebble bed modular reactors, breeders, and reactor designs that would use a particle accelerator as a neutron source. Better reactor designs could reduce nuclear waste generation, reduce accident risks, lower costs, and make nuclear power more nuclear weapons proliferation resistant.

I'd also like to see the US government place high energy efficiency standards on itself (and its suppliers) in order to demonstrate how much energy efficiency is achievable. Lead by example.

Having one or two copies of the short version of the serotonin transporter gene prevents enough connections from being formed in the brain between the cingulate and amygdala. As a result fearful and stressful situations cause the amygdala to be too active and the neural circuitry in the cingulate lacks the connectivitiy needed to dampen down the amygdala fear response, leading to anxiety and depression.

The gene codes for the serotonin transporter, the protein in brain cells that recycles the chemical messenger after it's been secreted into the synapse, the gulf between cells. Since the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants act by blocking this protein, researchers have focused on possible functional consequences of a slight variation in its DNA sequence across individuals. Everyone inherits two copies of the gene, one from each parent, which comes in two common versions: short and long. The short version makes less protein, resulting in less recycling, increased levels of serotonin in the synapse, and more serotonin-triggered cellular activity. Previous NIMH-supported studies had shown that inheriting the short variant more than doubles risk of depression following life stresses,** boosts amygdala activity while viewing scary faces,*** and has been linked to anxious temperament. Yet, how it works at the level of brain circuitry remained a mystery.

The NIMH research team first scanned 114 healthy subjects using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Those with at least one copy of the short variant had less gray matter, neurons and their connections, in the amygdala-cingulate circuit than those with two copies of the long variant.

Next, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers monitored the brain activity of 94 healthy participants while they were looking at scary faces, which activates fear circuitry. Those with the short variant showed less functional connectivity, in the same circuit.

Nearly 30 percent of subjects' scores on a standard scale of "harm avoidance," an inherited temperament trait associated with depression and anxiety, was explained by how well the mood-regulating circuit was connected.

"Until now, it's been hard to relate amygdala activity to temperament and genetic risk for depression," said Dr. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a lead author. "This study suggests that the cingulate's ability to put the brakes on a runaway amygdala fear response depends upon the degree of connectivity in this circuit, which is influenced by the serotonin transporter gene."

Since serotonin activity plays a key role in wiring the brain's emotion processing circuitry during early development, the researchers propose that the short variant leads to stunted coupling in the circuit, a poorly regulated amygdala response and impaired emotional reactivity – resulting in increased vulnerability to persistent bad moods and eventually depression as life's stresses take their toll.

One can imagine a couple of ways that future biotechnological advances will provide ways to treat this problem. First off, cell therapies, gene therapies, or nerve growth factor therapies could be used to encourage the growth of neurons between the cingulate and the amygdala. Another more "cyborg-ish" possibility would be to implant electrodes in the brain to deliver artificial signals into the amygdala to suppress the fear response.

Note how these scientists combined genetic test results with brain scan results. Once DNA sequencing and testing costs drop by orders of magnitude brain scan tests will be comparable to all the genetic variations in the genome to find other genetic variations that influence emotions and other aspects of cognition.

University of Florida at Gainsville researchers have found that exerise in cold water boosts appetite as compared to resting or exercise in warm water.

For her study, published in February in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, White tracked the energy used by 11 UF students as they rode a stationary bicycle submerged in water for 45 minutes. The students exercised in cold water of 68 degrees Fahrenheit and warm water of 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The same students, ages 21 to 31, also spent 45 minutes resting.

The study found the students used a similar amount of energy during the exercises, 517 calories in the cold water and 505 in the warm water. Students expended 123 calories while resting.

After each exercise session and the rest period, the students were allowed into a room to measure their blood pressure and heart rates. They were left to rest for one hour in the same room and had free access to a standard assortment of food of known caloric values. However, the students didn't know their caloric intake was going to be measured.

"We found that during the recovery period when the subjects had access to an assortment of foods that significantly more calories were eaten after exercise in cold water compared to exercise in warm water or at rest," White said.

Caloric intake after exercise in cold water was 44 percent higher than exercise in warm water and 41 percent higher than in the resting periods. The students consumed a mean 877 calories after exercise in cold water, 608 calories after exercise in warm water and 618 after resting periods.

Water exercise appeals to obese people people because water reduces the strain on joints. But exercise in cold water may make weight problems even worse.

An article in The Scientist surveys the growing use of genetic testing target drug use and dosages based on genetic profiles.

Richard Hockett, medical fellow, department of diagnostic and experimental medicine at Eli Lilly, says as many as 180 genes could affect drug metabolism, including metabolic enzymes, transporters, and other proteins. By his count those genes contain at least 2,000 different variants, and a truly comprehensive metabolic genotyping panel, he says, would have to test for all of them. In March, Eli Lilly and ParAllele BioScience of South San Francisco announced the development of just such a chip. Starting this summer, the MegAllele D-MET chip will be used to screen patients in Lilly's Phase I trials. ParAllele plans to file for FDA approval of the chip later this year.

My guess is that the 180 gene count is too low a figure. As our knowledge of the human genome increases many more genes with variants which affect drug metabolism will be found.

Eli Lilly's use of genetic testing of drugs entering phase I trials will not produce useful information for doctors and patients right away. Drugs spend years going through phases I, II, and III before being approved for sale. Testing started at the level of phase I trials means that only new drugs hitting the market 5 or 10 years from now will have the clinical trials data on their genetic profiles. The existing drugs already on the market will not have as much genetic profiling information available.

Worse yet, drug companies lack economic incentives to run expensive clinical trials for existing drugs that are off-patent or nearing patent expiration. This lack of economic incentive to do research on older drugs also translates into a lack of clinical trials to test old drugs for safety problems that have surfaced in similar newer drugs. For example, experts at the FDA suspect some of the older non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) might pose similar heart health risks as those found in Cox2 inhihitors such as Vioxx.

The National Institutes of Health has a program called the Pharmacogenetics Research Network (PGRN) which collects information about differences in drug reactions which are a product of genetic differences. One of the researchers involved in the PRGN argues that all NIH trials should have tissue samples collected on all trial participants for later genetic testing to compare clinical outcomes and adverse reactions against DNA sequences.

"We think every publicly funded clinical trial should contain pharmacogenetics," says Mary Relling, a PGRN member who chairs the department of pharmaceutical sciences at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tenn. "We should be getting DNA and appropriate consent from patients on every trial that's supported by tax dollars," says Relling. "Otherwise, 20 years from now we will have made very little progress."

I think Relling is absolutely correct and would even expand on this to argue that big expensive social science research studies should have DNA samples collected on their participants for testing years from now when DNA testing costs have fallen by orders of magnitude.

Wider spread adoption of electronic medical records systems will eventually reduce the costs of comparing patient populations for drug reactions and also for differences in health outcomes due to genetic differences. However, DNA sequencing and DNA testing may well become cheap years before electronic medical records systems become widespread and mature. Therefore the collection of DNA samples from clinical trials participants should be treated as an urgent priority that has the potential to pay rich dividends when DNA testing becomes very cheap.

Lapascopically extracted cells from human ovaries can be turned into viable eggs.

Research has shown for the first time that human eggs may develop directly from cultured ovarian surface epithelium (OSE) cells derived from adult human ovaries. Oocytes derived from the culture of OSE cells developed in vitro into mature eggs suitable for fertilization and development into an embryo. These findings, published today in the Open Access journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, offer important new strategies for use in in vitro fertilization and stem cell research, and cast doubt on the established dogma on the fetal origin of eggs in adult human ovaries.

It is now well established that fetal mammalian eggs originate from somatic stem cells. More recent research of adult human ovaries has shown that oocytes and granulosa cells (the layer of small cells that form the wall of the ovarian follicle) may originate from OSE cells and assemble together to form new primary follicles – the structures that grow and rupture during ovulation to release mature eggs. However, definitive proof that new oocytes may develop in adult human females will be if they can be found to differentiate in vitro from OSE cells derived from adult human ovaries.

For the first time, Antonin Bukovsky and colleagues from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the University of Tennessee, United States, have shown that human eggs and granulosa cells) can develop from cultured OSE cells. By scraping cells from the surface of adult ovaries and growing them for 5 to 6 days in the presence of an estrogen-containing medium (phenol red) to stimulate their growth, the team was able to produce new human oocytes in vitro.

The oocytes cultured in this way are viable and went on to successfully complete the first meiotic division to become mature human eggs – capable of being fertilized and developing into an embryo. These in vitro findings support earlier in vivo studies by Bukovsky and colleagues that OSE cells are bipotent; capable of differentiating along two developmental pathways and becoming either egg or granulosa cells. The authors speculate that this bipotent differentiation may represent a sophisticated mechanism created during the evolution of female reproduction, and not seen in ovaries of female prosimians (ancestral primates) or mice carrying germline stem cells.

Women in their early or mid 20s who think they may have many years before they will have children could opt to have some OSE cells extracted from their ovaries to be used 10 or 20 years later to start pregnancies.

The ability to produce mature human eggs from adult ovaries in vitro has several potential applications in human reproduction. The technique of harvesting cells from the ovarian surface is relatively easy, can be accomplished by a laparoscopy technique, and yields more cells for use for in vitro fertilization. The ability to develop human eggs from OSE cells may help women with reduced fertility and premature menopause, who lack follicles in their ovaries, to have a better chance of conceiving through in vitro fertilization. Eventually, frozen OSE cells from younger females may be preserved for later production of fresh eggs. This may prevent the occurrence of fetal genetic alterations, which are often associated with an advanced maternal age. In addition, a colonization of premenopausal ovaries with younger oocyte and granulosa stem cells may establish a new cohort of primary follicles. This may result in a 10- to 12-year delay of the onset of natural menopause. Also, these ovarian stem cells could be used to generate several cell types used in stem cell research, and fertilized eggs produced in this way could produce cells capable of giving rise to embryonic stem cells for use in research and therapeutic applications.

Women whose ovaries are no longer producing eggs might eventually be able to use this technique to have babies. Reproduction will be extended into a woman's late 30s and 40s. Professional women who now pursue career success and delay too long to have children might finally have a biotechnological solution to their predicament. My guess is this technique will be used most heavily by highly educated career women.

Note that this technique will probably be an attractive option for women in their 30s who are still fertile. Old eggs have greater risk of genetic defects. Use of OSE cells extracted and frozen at a younger age would probably lower the risk of genetic risks. Even OSE cells extracted from a women in her 30s when she wants to have a child might produce eggs which are at less risk of genetic defects.

Any woman who has older friends who are going through menopause may be attracted to the idea of delaying menopause. Why be woken up by severe painful hot flashes? Why start feeling like you are crazy or furious or depressed or lethargic? Why lose the ability to concentrate? Why suddenly feel frigid and disgusted at the sight of your husband? ( I'm relaying stories from fifty something women friend talking about themselves and their friends going through menopause) If you can delay all that stuff you might be able to delay it till better treatments for relieving menopausal symptoms become available. On the other hand, by delaying menopause you might also increase your risk for some of the female cancers.

You can read the abstract for the research paper or the full research paper (the latter is PDF format).

Cambridge Massachusetts 2003 venture capitali start-up Helicos Biosciences claims that by 2007 Helicos will be selling a machine that will sequence a person's genome for $5000.

Helicos’s first commercial sequencing machines will be ready for sale by the end of 2006 or early 2007, says president and CEO Stan Lapidus.

Get your DNA sequenced in 3 days for $5000.

When Helicos’s commercial machine is released, says Lapidus, it will sequence a whole genome start to finish in three days and for a cost of $5,000.

Currently the cost is in the tens of millions. If Helicos achieves their goal then prices for DNA sequencing will drop by over 4 orders of magnitude.

Helicos has licensed technology developed by then CalTech biophysicist Stephen Quake's group (Quake is now at Stanford Medical School). Quake's group published a 2003 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that is probably what led to the founding of Helicos. Here is the abstract which describes a way to read individual bases (letters in the DNA alphabet) from a single strand of DNA.

The completion of the human genome draft has taken several years and is only the beginning of a period in which large amounts of DNA and RNA sequence information will be required from many individuals and species. Conventional sequencing technology has limitations in cost, speed, and sensitivity, with the result that the demand for sequence information far outstrips current capacity. There have been several proposals to address these issues by developing the ability to sequence single DNA molecules, but none have been experimentally demonstrated. Here we report the use of DNA polymerase to obtain sequence information from single DNA molecules by using fluorescence microscopy. We monitored repeated incorporation of fluorescently labeled nucleotides into individual DNA strands with single base resolution, allowing the determination of sequence fingerprints up to 5 bp in length. These experiments show that one can study the activity of DNA polymerase at the single molecule level with single base resolution and a high degree of parallelization, thus providing the foundation for a practical single molecule sequencing technology.

Solexa, which is mentioned in the original article above as planning to get to market with a DNA sequencing machine before Helicos, is also pursuing a technology for reading individual strands of DNA.

Helicos BioSciences, a tiny company in Cambridge, Mass., is beginning an ambitious effort to sequence single molecules of DNA by running them through microscopically small channels. (Other techniques generally require billions upon billions of copies of the target DNA.) So is Solexa, a U.K. company whose technique involves attaching stretches of a single DNA molecule to the surface of a chip and analyzing them via laser light and fluorescent tags that identify particular DNA "letter" sequences.

Incredibly cheap DNA sequencing will be occasion for a massive biomedical and social science project to compare the DNA sequences and large amounts of biomedical and behavioral and other information between millions of people. By comparing DNA sequences alongside large quantities to detailed information we will be able to find genetic variations for general and specialized intelligence, personality, disease risks, criminal records, career paths, other behavioral tendencies, esthetic preferences, and numerous other human characteristics.

The DNA sequence comparisons combined with detailed comparisons of other characteristics of individuals will produce results that will shatter the politically correct beliefs that now dominate academic social science. The political Left will suffer a greater undermining of their beliefs than the Right. But conservatives and libertarians will also find many of their beliefs challenged by science. Many religious beliefs about human nature will also be challenged by contradictory evidence found in our DNA. Humans will come out looking far more determined by nature. If Helicos achieves their 2007 goal then by 2010 the political debate in America, Europe, and in many other parts of the world will be irrevocably changed.

Thanks to Brock Cusick for the tip on Helicos.

Muscle cells are one of the types of cells that have lost the ability to divide. Biologists call such cells post-mitotic because normal cell division is called mitosis. Knock out of the p38 gene in rats and mice allows muscle cells to divide.

It has long been believed that after initial development, the heart muscle cells can no longer proliferate. The new findings demonstrate that by eliminating a brake that halts the division of the muscle cells, researchers can then trigger the proliferation of the cells by adding specific cardiac growth factors.

The researchers will publish their findings in the May 15, 2005, issue of the journal Genes & Development. The paper was published online on May 3.

The research team was led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Mark T. Keating at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. Keating and his colleagues collaborated with researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals in Ridgefield, Conn.

“There has been a longstanding controversy going back more than a hundred years about whether cardiomyocytes (cardiac muscle cells) in adult mammals have the capacity to proliferate,” said Keating. “While there have been occasional studies indicating this possibility, the dogma has been that they can't.” According to Keating, researchers thought that once an animal's heart has fully developed, cardiomyocytes lose the molecular plasticity that allows them to divide.

Whenever you read a scientist claim that some cell type X can't be made to do something that another cell type Y can do translate that statement into "We do not yet know how to make cell type X act like cell type Y". Cells in your body are like different computers running the same computer program. The different copies of the computer program may be in different states. But it is inevitable that ways will be found to get cells in one state to change into the state that another cell type uses. This wil be achieved for just about any pairs of cell types that exist in the body (exceptions being red blood cells that have lost their DNA and egg and sperm cells that no longer have full copies of their DNA).

The researchers accomplished their feat by knocking out a gene in rat cells for a protein called p38.

In their studies, Keating and his colleagues explored whether an enzyme called p38 acted as a brake on proliferation of adult cardiomyocytes. Although p38 is known to be involved in regulating cell division, very little is understood about its possible role in cardiomyocytes, said Keating.

In their experiments, the researchers explored whether knocking out p38 activity in cultures of rat cardiomyocytes could induce proliferation. The researchers found that knocking out p38 in the cell cultures of both infant and adult rats — in the presence of a cardiomyocyte growth factor protein called FGF1 — induced DNA synthesis, an important component in cell proliferation.

They also found other indications that the p38-knockout cells were undergoing mitotic proliferation. For example, they found that the proliferating cells dedifferentiated, meaning they temporarily lost the characteristics of mature heart muscle cells and reverted to a more fetal type of proliferating cell. Additional genetic studies of p38 inhibition showed that it regulates genes thought to be critical for cardiomyocyte proliferation.

Importantly, they found that the cardiomyocytes lacking p38 activity could continue to proliferate through many rounds of cell division in the presence of FGF1. “The fact that we could show that were multiple rounds of division is important, because clinical regeneration of cardiac muscle would require the cells to divide again and again,” said Keating.

We wouldn't want to have p38 permanently knocked out in our heart muscle cells. The heart muscle cells might grow too much and possibly even become cancerous. Also, p38 might serve some other as yet undiscovered purposes. But this result demonstrates that the process by which cells become unable to divide (post-mitotic) is reversible.

The scientists also raised mice with the p38 gene knock-out.

“As a result of these experiments, we felt quite confident that we could induce cardiomyocytes to proliferate, at least in vitro,” said Keating. “However, an in vitro system is quite artificial, and there could be many reasons why it would not be relevant in vivo.” So, in further experiments in collaboration with co-author Yibin Wang and his colleagues at UCLA, the researchers tested whether a genetic knockout mouse lacking p38 would show evidence of cardiomyocyte proliferation. Those experiments did yield significant evidence for such proliferation, said Keating.

Keating says a drug that would temporarily knock out p38 activity might enable heart repair after a heart attack. If heart cells could temporarily be given the ability to divide they could grow replacements for lost cells.

“These findings represent the first step toward showing that drugs that eliminate p38 activity could reduce scar tissue formation and enhance cardiac regeneration after cardiac injury,” said Keating. The formation of scar tissue in damaged hearts is the major reason myocardial infarctions lead to subsequent abnormalities and compromised heart function, he said.

A drug aimed at knocking out p38 might also induce regular muscles to grow. But for an old person who has lost a lot of muscle cells throughout the body due to aging such a side effect might even be a benefit. But does p38 also prevent other types of cells from dividing? If a drug that suppresses p38 activity also caused, for example, nerve cells to divide then that would be a very problematic side effect.

Adult and embryonic stem cells are the other major alternatives being investigated for replacing lost heart muscle cells. But if existing muscle cells can be induced to divide they'd offer a few advantages. Most notably, they are already located where the replacement cells are needed. Also, as compared to adult stem cells their DNA might be in better shape because they haven't been dividing for decades collecting errors on each cell division. Though muscle cell DNA does accumulate damage.

We need complete understanding and mastery of the mechanisms which govern cell division both to replenish lost cells and also to cure cancer and other diseases which are caused by excessive cell division. This latest report provides yet another piece of the puzzle.

The Genetic Savings & Clone pet cloning service so offends a California state legislator that the legislator is determined to put a stop to pet cloning even though he is willing to tolerate cloning of barnyard animals.

Cloning hurts animals, exploits grieving pet owners and is unnecessary in a state that kills more than a million unwanted dogs and cats each year, said Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys), whose bill, AB 1428, would make it illegal to sell cloned pets in California.

Further, Levine would ban the sale of genetically modified pets, which could affect a San Diego competitor's plan to create and sell allergy-proof cats: felines altered to remove a protein that causes some humans to sneeze. That company, Allerca, also plans to start selling cloned horses later this year. Levine said horses would not be covered under his bill because they are not considered pets.

Levine objects to cloning because millions of pound animals are killed each year. But based on that argument we might as well outlaw or heavily tax all intentional breeding of cats and dogs.

Levine also thinks that cloning amounts to playing with animals. But a lot of pets insist upon being played with. They can be downright annoying in their demands for play.

Animals, he said, "are not toys to be played with at our amusement."

"I'm concerned that once we start down this road, that's where we're heading," Levine said. " 'Oh gee, the cat got hit by a car, we'll just clone another one.' "

When cloning costs tens of thousands of dollars and pound pets cost little or nothing I'd say that clone pet buyers are going to be less lackadaisical than normal pet owners, not more.

Levine is afraid that hypoallergenic cats might breed with regular cats and fears "Franken-kitty". Time for Gene Wilder to do a sequel called "Old Franksteen" where he'd have a hypo-allergenic cat named "Franken-kitty".

Levine draws parallels with attempts to cross African and European bees. But am I wrong in thinking that the problem there wasn't so much the cross breeding as it was the fact that African bees are innately more aggressive? Did cross-breeding with European bees make them more dangerous or did the cross-breeding perhaps even dilute the aggressiveness? Anyone know?

What is it about pet cloning that makes it either a threat to public welfare or a threat to the ecosystem? Am I missing something obvious here?

When my Australian Shepherd was dying a few years ago friends, mindful of my interest in biotechnology, asked me if I was going to save some of his cells on the chance that the cells might be usable some day to clone him. I decided against it on the grounds that cloning him would not bring him back to life. The new dog would be a different dog without his memories and probably without some of his quirks. No matter how similar in some respects the clone would not be my good buddy and cloning my dog would not benefit my dog in any way. But if other people feel differently about it I do not see how their choices create a problem for the rest of us.

Genetic Savings & Clone says their initial clients are absolutely thrilled by their clone cats.

Dan, a 40-something investment counselor, became the second paying client to receive a pet clone when Genetic Savings & Clone officials delivered a kitten to his door on Tuesday, February 8. “Little Gizmo” is a clone of Gizmo, his mixed breed Siamese who died at age 13 in March 2004.

"Valentine’s Day is a special day for GSC, because our business is all about the love between people and their exceptional pets,” said GSC CEO Lou Hawthorne, who delivered Little Gizmo with Mike Hodnett, the company’s VP of Sales & Marketing. “With our second commercial cat clone delivery, we have again duplicated an exceptional pet, and made a certain client very, very happy.”

Dan, who requested that his last name be withheld for privacy, was among the first five people to sign up for GSC’s cat cloning service, which became available in February 2004 on a limited basis at the price of $50,000. One company client received her cloned kitten in December; the others will receive theirs within the next few months.

“There are no words to describe how happy I am,” Dan wrote in an email to Hodnett after spending time with Little Gizmo.

Company policy is to counsel clients that because behavior is influenced by environment as well as by genes, clones may not behave exactly as their genetic donors did. Nonetheless, both of the clients who have now received clones say that not only do they look like their predecessors, but their behavior is strikingly similar as well.

“She is exact, exact, exact in all of her mannerisms, habits, traits and personality,” Dan wrote of Little Gizmo’s similarity to Gizmo. Little Gizmo was born in Austin, Texas, where GSC has done most of its cloning research and development. The company’s business headquarters is located in Sausalito, California.

Phil Damiani, Ph.D., GSC’s new Chief Scientific Officer, describes Little Gizmo as yet another example of the excellent results the company is achieving with chromatin transfer (CT), the technology GSC has exclusively licensed for use in pet cloning. CT is a more advanced technology than NT, the method used to produce Dolly and most other clones. Every cat produced by GSC except CC, the world’s first cat clone, is the result of the CT process.

“Not only has chromatin transfer helped us produce healthy, normal cats,” Dr. Damiani said, “but it has also increased our efficiency, which means we require fewer mothers than we would otherwise.” The increased efficiency of the CT process is one reason that GSC today announced a reduced price of $32,000 for their cat cloning service.

Note this part about "several leading cloning companies".

Before joining GSC, Dr. Damiani worked at several leading cloning companies, coordinating research on cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and endangered species, including the Gaur, an endangered relative of the ox, which he cloned in 2000. Dr. Damiani also worked in South Africa establishing a gene bank and assisted reproduction laboratory for wild animals, and helped establish the cloning program at the Audubon Nature Institute’s Center for Research of Endangered Species (AICRES). Dr. Damiani received his doctorate in Reproductive Physiology from the University of Massachusetts, and has numerous publications, patents and patents pending.

A regular cloning industry has sprung up. Cloning is becoming routine.

So again, what is wrong with pet cloning? Is it creepy? Yeah, I guess a little. But what harm does it cause?

Maybe if some ferocious pit bull is cloned dozens of times and one of them kills a person and leaves DNA evidence behind then there will be no way to identify which clone did the killing. But I bet that problem could be handled eventually with a bit of genetic engineering to place unique genetic markers in each clone.

I don't think pet cloning where single replacement copies are made does any harm to species diversity. If pet species genetic diversity is an issue then why not ban the breeding practices of the show breeders who try to achieve perfect breed shapes and in the process radically in-breed and ruin breeds? In fact, if it had been possible for anyone to keep cloning their 1940s collies or golden retrieivers they'd have better dogs than most of the collies and goldens walking around today.

Pet animal cloning will help drive down the price of the biotechnologies used in cloning and also help identify problems and work out kinks in cloning technology. Therefore human cloning will eventually be easier as a result. Is that a reason to oppose pet cloning?

Update:An organization called United Animal Nations supports Levine's attempt to ban pet cloning and have joined with the American Anti-Vivisection Society and the International Center for Technology Assessment to set up nopetcloning.org to support Levine's bill AB 1428.

GSC has a press release answering many of the objections raised by the opponents of pet cloning.

1) Wellbeing of Clones. The results we've had with our new CT technology are extremely good — comparable to what conventional breeders experience — allowing us to offer our clients a full guarantee on health of the clones we produce. As University of Pennsylvania bioethics professor Dr. Autumn Fiester explains, “Cloning science is advancing so rapidly that the survival rates and general health of clones are beginning to mirror animals naturally conceived — so this [argument] will soon be a non-starter.”

2) Wellbeing of Surrogates. The transfer of cloned embryos to a surrogate mother is no more invasive than a common spay. Routine and effective steps are taken by a fully licensed veterinarian to prevent discomfort to the surrogate mother. During their pregnancies and deliveries, our surrogate mothers spend most of their time in the care of experienced breeders under contract to GSC who adhere to our strict animal care protocols. The facilities are professionally staffed throughout the day, and the surrogates receive individualized attention several times a day, along with a broad range of enrichment toys and human/animal as well as animal/animal socialization activities.

3) Reasonable Oversight. As the world's first pet cloning company, we operate in a fish bowl. Literally thousands of print, radio, television and internet stories are produced about our company each year. This level of public scrutiny — combined with our commitment to transparency — results in the public learning everything it needs to know about GSC's methods and operations. Given that our activities are widely scrutinized and ultimately determine our success, we have adopted the highest standards of animal welfare, scientific practice, and consumer information, far exceeding any likely government oversight. For this reason, we see no problem with reasonable oversight of the pet cloning industry, and in fact would welcome it as a way of constraining companies that do not share our commitment to best cloning practices.

4) Pet Overpopulation. Millions of animals are abandoned each year and commercial breeders produce over three million pets per year, yet Assemblyman Levine wants to shut down a company that to date has produced fewer than 10 animals. Mr. Levine is obviously unaware that GSC's operations actually reduce the population of unwanted pets. For research purposes, GSC requires large numbers of cat and dog ovaries, a waste product we purchase from spay clinics. To date GSC has paid over $350,000 to spay clinics across the country, funds they've used to spay thousands of dogs and cats. In addition, GSC has provided $315,000 to date to the University of Virginia Center for Research in Contraceptive and Reproductive Health, for development of an injectible sterilant for dogs and cats, which would greatly reduce the overhead of spay clinics worldwide.

As biotechnology advances to the point that it can do more things one problem biotechnology companies are going to increasingly face is that their product or service produces a result that is just going to seem really weird to some people. Cloned pets definitely seem weird. But if the animals look and act like normal pets then I don't expect this sort of reaction to last. Compare it to appearance-altering plastic surgery. Some stars in Hollywood have lips and other facial features that seem a lot weirder to me than pet clones. Or look at major league baseball players who have unnatural-looking physiques as a result of steroid use. Or how about those people who cover their bodies with tattoos. These all seem weirder to me than pet clones.

What do you expect people to do to themselves or to other species in the future that you expect will seem weird for a long time to come?

European mandarins think technology is within reach to make zero emissions coal competitive with renewable energy sources.

The latest advocates are former fans of renewable energy at the European Union, who say the strategy will be "essential" if the EU is to meet targets for limiting the emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2. This month, at a conference in Brussels, Europe's new commissioner for energy, Andris Piebalgs, said the EU could cut CO2 emissions while continuing to burn its native coal and lignite. And still stay economically competitive.

Notice the phrase "former fans of renewable energy". Now that the Euros have put themselves on the hook to meet Kyoto Accord carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction targets their leaders are finally looking hard at the cost of a large scale shift to non-fossil fuel energy sources and they are not liking what they are finding. Hence Tony Blair's sudden warming to nuclear power and the EU energy commissioner's embrace of technologies for clean coal. These people are beginning to sound a lot like the Bush Administration (leaving aside Bush's deal with the coal burners that put them on the slow road to cleaning up their power plants).

Solar photovolatics are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear or wind. So what is being discussed here is the idea of making extremely clean coal power that can compete with nuclear and wind power.

Cost is the big issue. CO2 has to be separated from the exhaust fumes, piped to an oil field, coal field, or other suitable deep underground formation, and then piped down into the ground. Each step has a cost associated with it. Does anyone know which of the steps is most expensive?

Note that injection of CO2 into coal can help to produce methane from coal. So part of the sequestration cost can be offset by the value of the extracted methane. Similarly, CO2 injection into depleted oil fields can be used to enhance extraction of oil from those oil fields. So again part of the sequestration cost might be offset by additional energy extracted as a result.

At an estimated current price of $40 to $60 per tonne of CO2, carbon storage and burial is still not cheap, though its proponents say it could soon compete with renewable energy.

So here is the question: In a modern high efficiency coal burning electric generating station how many kilowatt hours of electricity are generated per tonne of CO2 emitted? Does anyone know the answer? Take that number and divide the $40 or $60 by that number to get the cost of CO2 sequestration per kilowatt-hour. For coal to compete that cost must work out to at most a couple of pennies per kilowatt-hour.

This is part of a bigger question I've asked here before: Given current technologies what is the total cost (measured in pennies per kilowatt-hour) for reducing emissions from coal burning electric power stations by 99+%?

My guess is that even with technological advances achievable within the next 5 years very low emissions coal burning is going to be a lot more expensive than nuclear. Look forward 20 years and maybe photovoltaics will be as cheap as nuclear. But right now nuclear is the cheapest way to reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously producing little in the way of other immediate pollution.

A recent decision by the government-owned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to go ahead with a wind power installation in the Mojave is worth reviewing for what it says about the current state of wind power. A couple of years ago the municipally owned power generator for Los Angeles announced plants to build wind towers in the Mojave Desert for electric power.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA (February 27, 2003) — GE Wind Energy will supply 80 wind turbines for a new, 120-megawatt facility in California’s Mojave Desert that will be the first wind project for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the nation’s largest municipally owned utility.

When completed in the summer of 2004, the Pine Tree Wind Project will produce clean, renewable electricity for LADWP customers. The project is being developed by Wind Turbine Prometheus, LLC, a partnership between Zilkha Renewable Energy, LLC and Prometheus Energy Services, LLC. Wind Turbine Prometheus will utilize GE’s well-proven 1.5-megawatt wind turbines. The machines will be installed on approximately 22,000 acres of land located 12 miles north of Mojave, California.

...

According to the AWEA, California leads the United States in wind energy production, with a total wind generating capacity of 1,822 megawatts. The total installed capacity of wind energy in the U.S. at the end of 2002 was more than 4,600 megawatts, or enough to serve more than 1.2 million households.

But what is the average output of those 4,600 MW max windmills?

The "up to 120 megawatts" for the LADWP facility similarly sidesteps the question of what the project will produce on average.

The Pine Tree Wind project, which will be the largest municipally owned wind plant in the U.S., would provide up to 120 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy -- enough to power approximately 56,000 homes per year. Located approximately 12 miles north of Mojave, Calif., 6 miles west of Highway 14, the project consists of 80, 1.5 MW wind turbine generators, as well as a 10-mile transmission line and electrical substation.

Wind power is not without its environmentalist opponents. According to a March 2005 report the project now faces environmentalist objections over dangers to migratory birds.

And just when it seemed poised to go forward in advance of a mayoral election that could be decided by a handful of environmentalist votes, the Pine Tree Wind Farm has hit yet another obstacle: the defenders of the hundreds of songbirds that some ornithologists believe fly through the proposed 22,000-acre site in the Mojave Desert every year.

...

A proposed $162 million project that would supply clean energy to 120,000 Los Angeles homes, the Pine Tree Wind Farm could help the DWP meet a goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2017, as set by the Los Angeles City Council last year.

56,000 homes or 120,000 homes? Maybe it depends on how hard the wind is blowing. 56,000 on average and 120,000 when the wind is blowing hard? Anyone know?

But an April 20, 2005 report says the LADWP decided the threat to birds is minimal and the LADWP is going ahead with the wind farm with the support of a bunch of non-birder environmental groups.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Board of Commissioners approved the final Environmental Impact Report to move forward with a new energy generation facility that will provide up to 120 megawatts (MW) of wind power for the City of Los Angeles.

The wind tower site size has shrunk.

It will be located on 8,000 acres (about 12.5 square miles) in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, approximately 12 miles north of Mojave, Calif.

The birders of the Audobon Society are not mentioned in the list of environmental organizations excited about this project.

A coalition of environmental organizations -- including the Coalition for Clean Air, Global Green USA, Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, and Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles -- voiced support for the project during today's Board meeting. In a letter addressed to the Board, the group's stated that LADWP has taken appropriate steps to address stakeholder concerns about the project's impacts on the local community, wildlife and natural resources.

All these stories do not translate these costs into cents per kilowatt hour. Nor do they provide any indication of what percentage of maximum output the windmills are expected to achieve on average or how much it costs for the LADWP to maintain backup natural gas fired generators to step in and supply power when the wind is blowing more slowly.

The LADWP is a monopoly power provider owned by a government. It can make investment decisions that a power provider in a competitive market could not afford to make. Therefore the decision of the LADWP to build a wind farm can not be taken as an indication that wind power is competitive.

As near as I can tell most wind power installations are being installed because some government jurisdictions want to decrease the percentage of power they obtain from fossil fuels and they find wind power as the most acceptable way to do so. Wind currently costs much less than solar photovoltaics and the jurisdictions installing wind towers are unwilling to consider nuclear power. So wind is effectively the only game in town for them. But when wind projects are announced the expected cost in kilowatt-hours is rarely mentioned.

Are there places where the wind blows so hard and so steadily that it can compete economically with natural gas and coal? My guess is that the answer is "Yes". But one has to look at the politics behind each big wind installaton to determine what portion of all the wind installations are being installed purely based on economic considerations.

Mind you, I'm not opposed to use of environmental considerations when choosing power sources. But I'd like to see more transparency in decisions that will increase electric prices in exchange for lower emissions. What price is being paid to decrease what types of pollution? The price is more worth paying in order to avoid the higher emissions from a coal burning electric plant than it is when the other alternative is a natural gas burner. On the other hand, coal costs less in the first place. So the price difference is higher between coal and wind power.

Another point: While one can find estimates for cost of electricity from coal burning electric plants (see a previous post of mine on nuclear power costs for some comparative cost data on coal electric) I've yet to come across cost data on coal plants that are made to burn super clean. Imagine a coal plant that removed 99+% of its mercury, uranium, other heavy metals, particulates, and oxides of nitrogen and sulfur. What would electricity from such a plant cost?

Has the coal industry been so successful in delaying the imposition of tougher regulations on coal burning plants that the development of a market for extreme coal emissions scrubbing technology has been delayed? That's the way it looks to me. Are local authorities in the United States so hampered by the national government from imposing tougher emissions controls on fossil fuel burning power plants that the local authorities turning in frustration toward wind power? Again, that is the way it looks to me. Am I right or wrong in these beliefs?