It’s cover is a magnificent impression of an Archaeopteryx by Nobumichi Tamura, a creature not only stunning in its beauty, but with an unrivaled capacity to get up the noses of creationists – and therefore one of my favourite extinct animals. The article itself briefly covers the more famous controversies the 11 fossils have inspired, but primarily deals with the question of whether Archaeopteryx was the key transition species between the birds and dinosaurs, or just one feathered dinosaur amongst many.

Then we step forward to an even more controversial evolutionary step, the development of the arrogantly named “higher primates”. Annoyingly the article doesn’t define what a primate has to be to earn the adjective, so to save you checking wikipedia, I did. It turns out the higher primates are all the animals I think of as primates, that is not only apes but monkeys. It excludes lemurs, bush babies and the like (presumably also fruit-bats if the theory they’re actually primates ever gets wings.) The article discusses the way jumping genes, genes that move around the genome, drove this evolutionary development, as well as subsequent shifts in primate evolution.

Other features are an optimistic account of the provision of the bionic eye, and an explanation of how unami, or the fat taste, contributes to the obesity epidemic. Short version – it’s not what you probably think. People who are more sensitive to unami eat less, not more.

Oh and there is where to find Dark Matter, why agave could be a biofuel that doesn’t compete for food (maybe just with Tequila production) and how rammed earth could resolve the remote communities housing crisis at far more realistic prices than the products currently been used.

As for my contribution: The Cool Scientist is Robyn Arianrhod, a mathematician who spent years in an intentional community without electric power, or most other modern conveniences. She was inspired to return to maths when she finally acquired a radio, and found the connection to the outside world so powerful she started reading up in electro-magnetism by candlelight. She’s since written two books on the history of mathematics, one on two women who played an important role in disseminating Newton’s work, but have until now largely been written out of the history of science.

Browses include a piece exploring the effects of methodrone, more popularly known as the party drug meow meow has on rodent brains. After years of scaremongering about every elicit drug to hit the market it seems possible the prohibitionists have finally got one right – meow meow really may be as addictive as we’ve been warned.

Then there is a piece on the extraordinary behaviour of the eclectus parrot, which I introduced here, and some really cool findings on ways to strop the cane toad invasion.

There is also something on dolphin mating behaviour, but I think I’ll give that it’s own post.

The explanation appears to be that air pollution is making the tornadoes worse. While many factories etc now run seven days a week, the reduction in car travel etc is enough to see such events drop off once Saturday rolls around.

Daniel Rosenfeld of the Institute of Earth Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and NASA’s Thomas L. Bell have produced modelling that explains why. This is fascinating, but the work isn’t Australian, so why am I mentioning it here?

Well it ties in with a lot of other work. Rosenfeld has also a lot of research into the way aerosols and other forms of pollution interfere with rainfall patterns, and in this area one of the world leaders is Dr Leon Rotstayn of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Reaserch. Rotstayn was one of the people who blew the whistle on Global Dimming. The name is a little confusing and has led some people to think it is the opposite of Global Warming, but while these pollutants do have a cooling effect, the dimming is something else. Certain pollutants lead to less sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, which in turn affects evaporation rates, growth of plants and probably other things.

However, the most significant effect is that rainfall patterns are changed. Aerosols do not mix as well as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, partly because they are larger and partly because they stay up for much shorter periods of time. Consequently, areas downwind of cities have much larger concentrations than other regions, and the effect is to distort where rain tends to fall, increasing it in some locations and decreasing it in others.

While some areas benefit, in most cases this is bad. Natural ecosystems and human societies have adapted to particular climatic conditions. In some cases they would love more rain (or even occassionaly less) but far more often any change takes them away from their optimum. In time they will adapt, but usually far longer than anyone would like. It is likely that the horrifying droughts in north and east Africa over the past few decades, the cause of literally millions of deaths, have been driven in part by changes in aerosol patterns from Europe, thousands of kilometres to the north.

From what I can see Rosenfeld’s work has looked at this on a finer scale, looking at the way aerosols reduce rainfall over hilly areas nearby. This is of particular concern in the Middle East, where rain is so desperately scarce that lack of water is one of the driving forces for conflict in the region – as if more excuses were needed.

The obvious takehome message is that we need to slash aerosol production (some aerosols are produced naturally by the way, so it is not something that needs to go to zero). However, care needs to be taken. Since the climatic effects are largely the result of uneven distribution of aerosols there are concerns that cutting back in some places and not others could actually make things worse. Since aerosols contribute to respiratory disease, and are usually assoicated with larger particulates that contribute even more, developed nations have been cutting back by forcing the use of cleaner fuels. If this occurs while the developing world speeds up production the negative effects might be substantial, so better models that tell us where to prioritise reductions are vital, something these scientists are working on.

I also wonder whether this might not be a good way to spread the word about Global Warming as well. Tornadoes are most frequent in the US Widwest and South – the heartland (pun intended) of climate denialism. If locals there come to accept that the pollution that belches from their tailpipes and factories is driving an increased danger of being blown over the rainbow, the might be a little more receptive to the concept that other forms of pollution could be changing the global climate on a larger scale.

I’ll also throw in a note some of my readers will really hate. I have no idea where Rosenfeld stands on the question of a Palestinian State or mistreatment of Palestinians. Perhaps he has made some public statements, but more likely not. However, under some of the more extreeme versions of the BDS against Israel being hawked around collaborations such as his with Bell would be forbidden unless he has come out and denounced the actions of the current Israeli government. Although it is unlikely that such proposals will ever be widely implemented, it is appalling they are even suggested. This is true public interest research, something that could save tens of thousands of lives, and it is an area in which Israel is a very big player. To exclude collaborations would set such work back very substantially, and would be as likely to entrench the current policies as challenge them.

Although I strongly support Israel’s right to exist, I am horrified by many of the actions of the Israeli state, and these are getting more frequent and worse. Some forms of Boycott, Disinvestment and/or Sanctions may contribute to restoring some sanity, and where this seems likely they should be supported. However, the sort of broadbrush approach being advocated by many in the BDS movement is counterproductive for many reasons, and I find the motivations suspect. I rather suspect the last two paragraphs will get far more commentary than the rest of the post (perhaps than the rest of my blog), which really is not my aim, but I do think it needs to be said.

However, the point here is that, while this may be the case, we really don’t know. This could be anything from a false alarm, through a substantial but not insulable problem, to the complete end of the line. We don’t know, and probably won’t know for a while, although it’s good to see some knowledgable scientists suggesting the headlines are over the top.

If the problem is at the middle or lower end of the scale it’s only a temporary let-out. Sooner or later something is going to trigger a run-away disaster if we don’t change our course. It could be permafrost, or the drying out of the Amazon, or changes to ocean currents or something we haven’t thought of. However, it is almost certain that somewhere in the global climatic system is a tripwire we can’t afford to cross. What we don’t know is how close we are to that tripwire.

Given the difficulties we are experiencing in lowering carbon emissions it might be argued that this doesn’t matter a lot. Even if we have a couple of decades to turn things around, we won’t. It’s easy to think like that when you’re listening to the US Republicans or Australian Coalition.

Add in the fact that carbon emissions have been growing near the top of the scenarios considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it all seems hopeless.

It may be that I simply read too many high fantasy novels as a child, where the fate of this or some other world seemed irretrievably doomed before a combination of luck, wisdom and determination saved the day but I think we still have a reasonable chance of getting out of this. The full explanation would take a post many times this length, and I’ll probably do some filling in later, but here is the summation of my case:

• The world is warming primarily because the developed world is producing most of it’s energy from fossil fuels.
• Things have been getting worse recently mostly because China has been industrialising so fast, again mostly powered by fossil fuel.
• Projections generally assume that the rest of the developing world will start to use far more energy, and will similarly rely on coal, oil and natural gas.
• There is a very substantial chance that the last assumption is wrong, and that the first two points can also be turned around.

Perhaps the key point is this. The developed world and China have largely used fossil fuels because they were cheaper than the alternatives. However, this is increasingly not the case, particularly for the countries in which most future development will take place.

Even five years ago, solar power was quite uncompetitive for large scale electricity production. The West used it to a small extent because it was wealthy enough to be able to afford such indulgences. China initially diversified by using wind, not sun. However, given there was demand for panels in the west the Chinese were happy to set up a large industry manufacturing and exporting panels. Partly as a result, and partly for other reasons, prices have plunged. Solar panels now cost about half what they did four years ago, and will continue to get cheaper. The cost of an entire solar system has fallen more slowly, but it is still way, way down.

Consequently, China is now planning to install 15GW of solar power in the next four years . They may not meet this goal, and even if they do they’ll still be adding a lot more coal and natural gas-fired powerplants. Nevertheless, solar is now clearly a viable alternative, one whose costs are not much higher than fossil fuels, and with the right assumptions and locations one that may even be cheaper.

Now lets look at the countries that are next in line. One thing almost all of them have in common is that they have more sunlight than China. India, for example, gets almost double the average insolation of the more populated parts of China. Most of Africa gets more again. So the cost of solar power in these countries will be substantially cheaper than in China, let alone Europe.

On the other hand, China sits atop some of the world’s largest coal reserves. Some of the other nations that are getting to the serious energy consumption stage of industrialization stage also have plenty of coal (most notably India and South Africa). Most however do not. As coal is seriously expensive to ship around the world, this tilts the cost equation even further in solar’s favour. Some will choose natural gas instead, but in most cases this will be even more expensive, except as a way of managing peaks in demand.

Of course solar still has the problem of intermittency: what does one do at night or on cloudy days? Even this is less of a problem for the soon-to-be developed parts of the world. They’ll need to find a way to store electricity through the night, but they don’t have winters to worry about where the nights are long and the days often too short to recharge the batteries. If the cost of producing electricity from the sun is enough lower than from coal that’s a problem they’ll be willing to address.

Of course electricity is not the whole problem. There’s carbon emissions from transport, agriculture and deforestation. Hopefully I’ll get to these another time, but in short I think some are at least as likely to be solved as standing energy emissions, while others are quite a lot smaller, while still substantial problems.

Ok, you might argue, it’s great that the developing world may not end up producing nearly as much greenhouse gas as we expected, but does that matter? Aren’t China and the West producing enough to fry the planet on their own?

Well yes. But that doesn’t mean this will continue indefinitely. It’s going to be harder to shut down existing power stations than it will be to stop new ones opening, but in much of the world the trend is already in the right direction. Europe and America are using less fossil fuels than they were six or seven years ago, and the trend started before the recession. Virtually no new coal-fired power stations have been started in the developed world for 6-7 years. In the European Union the production of coal has fallen 15% in the last seven years.

There’s another factor here as well. The US, and quite a lot of the rest of the developed world is in deep recession, and this is largely a result of lack of demand. Since 2008 Americans have been saving around a trillion dollars a year because households are scared and desperately want to put away money against disasters such as losing a job. Meanwhile businesses are not investing because they don’t see opportunities, all of which leads to unemployment. What is needed is for people to find something they can invest in which costs money now but will clearly save them money in the long run. Something like solar panels for example. I haven’t confirmed it, but I was told by someone who should know that 40% of American electricians are currently out of work. If enough people, or companies, choose to stick solar panels on their roofs there will suddenly be a whole lot more people with jobs, all of whom will want to spend a goodly chunk of the money they earn, which in turn will employ a bunch more people.

In a different world this issue would be solved through the government investing in infrastructure, but all the right wing parties, and many of the left, in the developed world are determined to not let that happen. However, with it now making straightforward economic sense for millions of Americans in sunnier climates (or where their state has a generous feed-in tariff) there has to be a chance that people will start catching on, and solving the problem for themselves. Once those panels are installed, they’ll be producing power for free, and coal and gas stations, which always have to cover the cost of fuel, won’t be able to compete and will start shutting down.

Clearly we still have huge problems. Not only could the tripwires be quite close, but the use of enormously emission intensive fuels like those from the Canadian tar sands could blow us out of the water. There’s also the danger that developing world governments will decide that overnight storage of electricity is just too tricky to think about and opt for existing options instead. All of this means it is absolutely essential to get renewable energy into the field as fast as possible. I’m in the process of holding a series of fundraisers to buy solar panels for Africa and East Timor as my small contribution to addressing this.

That’s just one example of the things we can and should be doing, but won’t if we give up on hope.

The Australian Academy of Science has quantified what we all knew – enrollment in school science courses is plunging. The scale of the fall is even larger than I expected; the number of students studying some science in the final years of school is down from more than 90% to barely half in twenty years. I hadn’t realised it was ever as high as that.

Why does this matter. The reasons have been rehashed many times but here are a few:

• We need more scientists. It’s true a handful of people manage careers in science without studying it at school, but the numbers are so small as to be insigificant. How we are supposed to address the problems of tomorrow without many of our best and brightest minds going into science and engineering is beyond me.

• We need general scientific literacy. Having a basic knowledge of science is no guarantee against having the wool pulled over one’s eyes by climate change or vaccine deniers, but it certainly helps.

• Scientific education can, or at least should, stimulate us to think more scientifically. That is to approach problems with a rational mindset, rather than seeing them as being controlled by random forces or by the underpants we wore that morning.

• The world is a beautiful and fascinating place. Anyone denied knowledge of how it works is missing out on part of the richness of life.

Part of the problem here is that schools are being expected to teach a wider array of topics, most of which really are important. It’s very hard to squeeze them all in. I don’t want to get into a debate over whether it is more important students study more science or more non-English languages, for example. Likewise, I once thought we could make room for more science by making sport and PE optional earlier on in the school career, but rising obesity rates have changed my thinking on that one.

Nevertheless, the decline of science in schools is a huge problem. Ironically one reason people may not be truly shocked by the scale of the problem is the inadequate understanding of statistics in our society, something better science education might address. Look at it this way. Twenty years ago, only one in every 16 students was completing high school without at least some science training in their final years. Now that is one in two. That’s a huge proportion of the future decision makers in society with no exposure to science, and quite often a dislike (or even contempt) of it.

The report’s lead author, Professor Dennis Goodrum, notes, “What’s more, the downward trend appears likely to continue. While the decrease is slowing, there is no indication that enrolments have reached the lowest point.”

Quite a few things are being done to try to address this. The report recommends:

• Reduce the amount of content for science subjects to a realistic level
• Support science education programs that capture the interest of year 7 to 10 students
• Provide more professional learning opportunities for senior science teachers
• Develop a suite of digital curriculum resources for the new national curriculum

The last three are common sense. The first one is a bit tricky. Goodrum argues that we’er trying to fit too much into science courses at school, so they get taught in a way that tries to cram too many facts into too short a space of time, making the subject boring and off-putting. This is undoubtedly true. One the other hand, if you decrease the amount of content then the brightest students will be frustrated at how little they are learning, as well as entering university needing to know even more. In my years of demonstrating pracs to first year physics students it is quite clear that the students now know a lot less maths and science than those a decade and a half ago, which means we have to spend a lot ot time teaching them things their forerunners already knew.

I suspect the answer here is to offer more science options. The Melbourne University Physics department has a stream for the most advanced students, a stream for the bulk of physics students and one for those who are not planning to go into a related field but need to know a little for cources such as Vet Science. The last stream is also great for those who want to learn the concepts of science for interest, rather than specific career goals. Regretably we don’t get all that many students in the last category.

Similar options at high school might be valuable, but there is the clear problem that most high schools are not large enough to be able to offer them all.

Education, however, is not my speciality. What I can say however, is that this is a problem that must be addressed from multiple angles. One of those angles has to be inspiration. At the moment we largely try to address this by projects like the Science Circus, where university students come to schools and show people how much fun science can be my blowing things up with liquid nitrogen or explaining the science of slime. That’s great. It’s important that children are encourage to love science.

However, to really make a difference we need to encourage students to think “I want to be part of science” rather than “Science is cool to watch”. There have been some great initiatives in this regard. We have scientists going into schools and projects to humanise scientists such as I’m a Scientist Get Me Out of Here (BTW I really think the name needs work).

My book was written to try to address a gap in this market. Even in the days when I was at school, that is when almost everyone was studying some science, none of us knew what scientists actually did. Enthusiastic as I was about pursuing a career in science I could not have named more than a handful of living scientists. I had no idea how many jobs there were in science, let alone the diversity of activities involved. I had some awful stumbling moments when asked what being an astronomer would actually mean, particularly if one was not confident about being the next Stephen Hawking.

So far sales have been disappointing, and it is hard to tell if that is a result of weaknesses in the writing or a failure of promotion. I’m sure many criticisms of my book could be made (although so far the only ones I have heard are that it doesn’t “look” fun enough, that it should include more information about what is required to enter each field, and that the table of contents is not very useful). However, I do honestly think that anyone who reads it will come away with a sense that science is a field that requires many, many people, and if they’re young and bright and enthusiastic that could include them.

I’m not sure that is a message they’re getting many other places.

Intact Mountain Ash

The December edition of Australasian Science, now on the shelves, contains what may be the most important article I have written (subscriber only alas). I’m very keen to bring it some attention.

Professor David Lindenmayer (ANU) is already recognised as Australia’s leading expert on temperate forests. The paper he authored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may well take that status global. Exciting, yes, but unfortunately his conclusions are, in his own words, “Very, very sad.”

Temperate forests can be divided into two sorts, there are those that are fire tolerant, and those that are not. Fire tolerant ecosystems contain many plants that thrive on fire – indeed many depend on it to regenerate. Although big fires will kill individual plants, the species are well adapted to bounce back, and many have seeds that only germinate after fire. (There’s some interesting work in WA on the mechanism for this, which is quite complex, using a combination of chemicals in smoke and increased light penetration into soil as the trigger.)

Since fire tolerant species benefit from fires it is not surprising that they tend to burn easily. On the other hand those species that are not well adapted to fire tend to resist it, forming natural fire breaks.

Given the horrors of the 2009 bushfires, and the forthcoming increase in temperatures, it is very important for Victoria to promote the survival of fire resistant ecosystems. Unfortunately, that is not what we are doing.

It has been known for a long time that modern logging techniques, in which the waste left after the big trees have been removed is firebombed to get a regeneration burn, promotes the colonization of the logged area with fire tolerant species, rather than fire resistant ones. In fact this is part of the reason the techniques are used – the tolerant species include those with more valuable wood. This makes the logged area more vulnerable to future bushfires.

Despite this, the myth persists that environmentalists are responsible for big fires, in part from the perception that if we remove lots of flammable material in a logging operation less will be left to burn thereafter. This may be true in the short term but, unless you want to concrete over the land on which the logging took place, within a few years something will have grown back, and that something is likely to burn more easily than what was there before.

This is not new, but what was not known was the overall impact of logging operations. Did a patchwork of recently logged areas, mixed with older pockets enhance or reduce fires? After being challenged by a logger who claimed the Black Saturday fires were a result of too little logging Lindenmayer set out to investigate.

In collaboration with leading forest ecologists around the world he discovered that Victoria’s mountain ash forests are now in a “landscape trap”. So many former coupes have become highly fireprone, that when a fire gets into the forests it becomes very hot as it burns through these parcels, gaining enough energy to destroy even untouched pockets within the forests. Even large, hard to burn trees succumb. These are replaced by more fire-tolerant species, and within a few years the area burns again, offering no chance for fire-resistance to reestablish itself.

The combination of logging and recent fires has created a tipping point where, Lindenmayer says, “The whole landscape is at risk of being consumed by mega fires.”

Lindenmayer explains “The core process underlying the landscape trap is a positive feedback loop between fire frequency and severity and a reduction in forest age at the stand and landscape levels caused by logging.”

The same process has been confirmed in tropical forests, and amounts to one of the main reasons for the decline of the Amazon Rainforest. However, it was only when Lindenmayer teamed up with international colleagues that it was revealed that many temperate forests worldwide are either in the same situation, or at risk of becoming so.

Just 1.2% of pre-European settlement mountain ash survives. Unless we get a dramatic reduction in both logging and fire, it will soon all be gone. What is more, if areas that have already been damaged experience fire too soon afterwards they can lose the forest species entirely, becoming dominated by wattle scrub. Highly flammable wattle scrub.

Ecologically the disaster here is obvious, but there are further problems. Lindenmayer has previously shown that Victoria’s intact forests are the densest carbon stores on Earth. The replacements store very little carbon indeed. Moreover, the tall forests are part of a feedback system with clouds as they pass over the ranges, increasing rainfall that provides Melbourne’s water supply. Where the forests are lost we also lose runoff. Finally, for those with homes in the area, the choice is between bushfires that slow as they encounter huge, hard to burn trees, and those that race through damaged ecosystems at astonishing speed, gaining energy as they go.

Over the last few decades ecologists have come up with the concept of Resilience, which has proven to have considerable significance for other complex systems, such as the Internet. A system with great resilience can survive even enormous shocks, such as those produced by tropical cyclones. However, when the resilience is reduced, through repeated minor damage, exposure to such a blow can flip it into another state, from which it cannot recover without the input of significant energy.

The lasting legacy of Victoria’s mountain ash forests may be to become the text-book example of destroyed resilience, just as the importation of the rabbit into Australia has become the exemplar of the damage that can be done by an introduced species lacking natural controls.

A remarkable feature of this research has been the mass media response. Being a monthly, we almost always get to stories after other media outlets have picked over them. Some catch on like wildfire in a logged forest, while others have not been covered at all prior to my article. This one is different. The Canberra Times wrote two huge articles on it – one full page, and the ABC has also given it quite a bit of attention. Other outlets ignored the story entirely. This is particularly depressing because the work is of such public significance that Lindenmayer paid, out of his own pocket, for it to be made public access, despite publication in a journal that normally requires subscription. (The media coverage has however, been enough that Lindenmayer has received hate mail for his research).

Credit for both photos to David Blair.

I should start off by saying a few things. One is that, as usual, I am no expert on this topic at all. The second one is that I have several biases that make me inclined to favour these vaccines. I try to put these aside for rational analysis, but I admit I might not have done so successfully. What are these biases?

Well firstly I am pro-vaccine in general. Our lives are now twice as long as our ancestors. There are three main reasons for this: Vaccinnes, clean water supplies, and everything else. I have never seen an estimate of the relative contributions of the three, but if vaccines are the smallest contributors it would not be by much. So we’er probably talking more than a dozen years on the average lifespan maybe more. Moreover, unlike some medical interventions, they give us good years, rather than keeping us alive when we might not wish to be. Of course that does not mean that every vaccine is good. Each needs to be assessed on its merits, but with so much good, and so little harm, behind them a new vaccine has an impressive heritage.

Secondly, I’m pro-Australian science. You can debate just how large the UQ contribution to these vaccines’ development was, but it was certainly big. I like seeing Aussie scientists come out ahead, and if Ian Frazer’s virus-like particles prove safe and effective they’re going to be one of the success stories of 21st century science.

Thirdly, part of the opposition to these drugs is simply appalling. Although HPV can be transmitted through mechanisms other than sex it is generally seen as an STD.  So some people think we should allow it to spread, in order to put people off having sex. My friend and business partner Charles Richardson put it better than I could, back in 2006:

A team led by Australian of the year professor Ian Frazer has developed a vaccine against the viruses that cause most cases of cervical cancer.
But [Senator Barnaby] Joyce and others are concerned about using it in case it “would promote teenage promiscuity.” According to The Australian, Joyce “said he would be ‘personally very circumspect’ about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of s*xual activity.”

Just think about what that means. These people are saying that teenage girls need to be scared off having s*x by the threat of getting cancer.
Not just that teenage promiscuity is bad – reasonable people can disagree about that – but that it’s so bad that cervical cancer is an appropriate punishment for it.

And they have the gall to call themselves “pro-life”?’

It is quite clear that some of the reports of negative reactions to Gardasil are coming from these forces, although others are picking up the meme and, well, transmitting it.

Finally, I’m aware of something most people engaged in the debate are not: HPV may be about much more than cervical cancer. There is evidence of varying strength linking HPV to a range of other cancers. Most of these are quite rare, but I’ve interviewed researchers who think HPV causes a substantial portion of breast cancers. Given how common breast cancer is, if the vaccine cuts rates here even slightly it will have a huge impact. The researchers suggested it is possible the vaccine will save more lives through preventing breast than cervical cancer. There is a deep irony to this. Republicans in the US attempted to styme research funding for cervical cancer ostensibly because breast cancer should be the higher priority but really because, well see above. There was a marvelous episode of the West Wing on this.

Nevertheless, all that does not mean the vaccine is safe. Even really wonderful vaccines can sometimes have serious side-effects in a minority of cases, and sometimes these effects might be such that the vaccine should be withdrawn, or at least come with a warning.

The problem is that some people do get sick, and it’s natural to look around for a source. People who have been injected with a new vaccine not long before are likely to blame it, which is where the title of this post comes in. The Latin phrase means “This came before that, so therefore this caused that“. I’m not sure if the Romans used it ironically, but that is certainly the preference these days.

For the individuals involved it’s understandable. A friend of mine has been stricken with a terrible disease, so unusual the doctors are not sure what it is. At first they thought it was MS, but since it seems to be improving they’re now edging towards an unusual form of chronic fatigue. She’s sure a Gardasil shot a couple of weeks before is the cause, and is suing. She’s part of a class action, and unlikely to be the only one. However, with 40 million doses it’s hardly surprising there would be a few people struck down by odd things shortly after being injected. Another friend of mine has somewhat similar (indeed worse) symptoms, and got them before either drug was even being tested. People have been getting odd diseases long before vaccines, the question is whether they are now getting them more often.

We already know Gardasil and Cervarix can cause Guillain-Barre syndrome at a rate of a few every hundred thousand doses, and more minor effects such as temporary dizzyness and sore arms are much more common. If there are other side effects we need to know, and that is where VAERS comes in (Australian names vary by state). The idea here is that whenever a doctor sees a patient who has recently had a shot, and there is the slightest possiblity whatever ails them could be the result of the vaccine he or she is supposed to report it. Epidemiologists can then examine the data to see if any conditions are turning up more frequently in the recently vaccinated than the rest of the community.

It’s been claimed to me that doctors are reluctant to report cases to VAERS because “it might be caused by something else”. If so they are probably not good doctors. The whole point of VAERS is that everything on a long list of symptoms is to be reported. In most cases something else will have caused it, but only by getting a very large sample size can we work out whether there is a statisically significant association with the vaccine.

I have no idea how well doctors are doing in reporting the effects they should be, but unless the underreporting really is chronic the evidence suggests the risks from these drugs are far below the benefits.

If anyone has been affected by the vaccine they deserve compensation. I’d prefer to see this through a national no-fault disability scheme, but until that longed-for day, I’ll take a system for taxing manufacturers to create a fund for such cases. But that is no reason to put the lives of hundreds of thousands of women at risk by leaving them exposed to a disease we can stop.

Many people will have already heard of the discovery that the dolphins of Port Phillip Bay and the Gippsland Lakes are a new species, Tursiops australis. This explains the previous confusion as to which of two much more widespread species the dolphins the Bay representatives belong to. There is no evidence the dolphins are in decline, and so far they don’t appear to have been affected by the dredging of the Bay, but they are rare enough that they’re almost certainly vulnerable, purely through lack of genetic diversity if nothing else. BTW, the print edition contains a truly magnificent photograph taken by PhD student Kate Charlton-Robb, who made the discovery. It’s so good my editor couldn’t believe it was taken of the Bay dolphins, thinking it must be some iconic dolphin image.

Amongst my pieces there are two rather controversial ones. For those committed to renewable energy the idea that the industry is receiving a boost from the military creates some qualms. However, the light, thin and flexible SLIVER cells produced in Idaho but based on work by the ANU’s Prof Andrew Blakers have great appeal to the department of defense, who are sick of lugging heavy batteries around when soldiers are in the field. The military are notoriously unconcerned about cost savings, so while the quantity of such cells will be small they could provide a significant source of income to the SLIVER manufacturers, as well as the ANU research team, increasing the viability of cells for peaceful uses.

The other article is more tricky for me to write. A/Prof David Austin of Swinburne University has claimed that survivors of an epidemic of Pink Disease are much more likely to have autistic grandchildren. The problem here is that Pink Disease was caused by exposure to mercury in teething powders. Austin suggests the link is that people with certain gene variations are particularly susceptible to mercury poisoning and this caused them to be affected by Pink, while their decedents are more likely to have the same genes, and can have autism triggered by mercury exposure. Austin carefully did not suggest vaccines as a source of mercury, but the tricky thing here is that the suggestion of a mercury/autism link is usually confined to the anti-vaccination movement, despite the fact that mercury has now been removed from infant vaccines. Austin’s work has been pilloried online, and while some of the criticism may be overly harsh, there are some serious questions about this work, and ones with huge ethical implications. A 400 word article is not a good place to explore these issues, but I did try to make clear that this work should not be accepted at face value.

A scientific controversy of interest, but more modest social impact, is the question of when during the history of the Earth did the atmosphere and oceans become oxygen rich. The great age of much of the Australian continent means that many of the best clues lie here. A combination of Australian and American scientists have concluded the process was a much more drawn out one than previously thought. While much evidence has been produced recently suggesting the atmosphere became oxygenated earlier than previously thought, a paper in Nature suggests it took almost two billion years for the oxygen to change the chemistry of the deep oceans. Personally I have trouble getting my head around that.

The Cool Scientist for the month is more controversial than usual as well. Dr Kirsten Heimann is an algal expert, and has recently made significant progress is breeding large amounts of algae by feeding them carbon dioxide. Her work has potential to turn the waste gasses from power plants into algal growth which can then be turned into food of fuel. Heimann’s process is both safer and more realistic than geosequestration, and she is adding some impressive touches, such as using local algal strains to avoid environmental problems if her holding tanks leak. Nevertheless, the process is open to the criticism that it provides cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting while suggesting work such as hers will save us.

I’ve also got a long feature on the challenges facing the peer review process, particularly the concern that bad papers are getting through because reviewers now lack the time to consider them in the detail they should.

Amongst the other articles my favourite is one rewriting our ideas on how Antarctica transformed from a warm forested environment 34 million years ago to the icebox we know today. There are also pieces on renewed hope for an HIV vaccine, how children respond to trauma and the processes that led to the creation of the Universe. You know, little topics.

However, while most people likely to read a blog on science would be opposed to bigotry against same-sex sex other forms of prejudice are more acceptable. By her own admission my friend Liz Conor over-generalised in her recent article in The Age about how humans are not really suited to long term monogamy, but the furious  responses are indicative of how resistant many people remain to the idea there might be viable alternatives to monogamy (particularly ones that don’t involve men having mistresses but women being expected to be monogomous, because that’s how gorillas do it so it must be “natural”).

Now let me be clear, one needs to be very careful of the crude socio-biological view that human behaviour has a purely evolutionary basis and we can simply extrapolate from animals to justify everything some humans do. There is so much complex social and cultural interaction built upon human’s biological background that being too simplistic about our actions can be a betrayal of our capacity. It matters not at all whether what male mallard ducks do to females (to quote one famous example) can be considered rape – rape in humans is not justified one iota.

Nevertheless, I think there is some significance in the extent to which sexual behaviour deemed “unnatural” and “kinky” in humans turns up remarkably often in animals. Evolutionary biologists are still struggling to explain why homosexual behaviour is so common, but it is. Some other forms of “kink”, such as group sex in garter snakes or transvestism in cuttlefish have obvious explanations, but the causes of bondage amongst redback spiders is, as far as I am aware, unexplained. (I am willing to tell each of these stories in detail if requested in comments but I’m not spilling them unrequested – I’ve got to keep something for parties).

I was prompted to write about this by a story I’m working on for Australian Science. The eclectus parrot has been discovered to be only the third species, after humans and antichinuses, to engage in sex selective infanticide. As the scientist researching this notes, “infanticide itself is weird”. Nevertheless some species do go to the trouble of giving birth to young only to kill them, but only in these three cases does there seem to be a process where one sex or the other is killed, but not both. The antichinus situation is a bit hazy*, but with the parrots we now seem to understand the evolutionary basis for the behaviour.

The eclectus parrot always lays two eggs, and the females grow faster, and are able to leave the nest earlier. Unlike most bird species the sex is visible from hatching, and a mother with a poor nesting site, and therefore low prospects of raising her young to independence, may have better odds if she concentrates all her energies on a female rather than dividing it between both hatchlings if she happens to produce one of each. Instead of letting the male starve and being troubled by its cries, she will kill it soon after birth. Mothers with better nesting sites will raise both young, as will mothers that lay two male or two female eggs.

These actions make evolutionary sense, as long as so many parrots don’t have bad nests that the population becomes skewed with too many females. The same cannot be said for sex-selective infanticide in humans. The cultural undervaluing of girls that leads to this appalling practice makes no evolutionary sense so, fascinating as the parrot may be, it doesn’t tell us much about ourselves.

At least in regard to the infanticide. The parrot has another unusual characteristic however. It engages in polyandry, where the female has multiple mates but the male is largely monogamous. Amongst vertebrates this is relatively rare, but I wonder whether researcher bias may not have made it seem rarer than it is. The parrots practise it because nesting sites, even bad ones, are so rare. A female with a nesting site is in a position to take what she wants, and if that is four mates she can often get it. All her mates will provide her with food while she guards the eggs and hatchlings, even though some of them are not the fathers. Presumably they don’t know which of her harem fathered the young, and paternity tests indicate that if a male hangs around long enough he will usually get to father at least one offspring. I wouldn’t want to jump to any human parallels here, but it should certainly give pause to those who think male promiscuity and female monogamy is ordained by genetics.

In a similar vein I came across a recent media release explaining how polyandry can benefit female mice. It seems that when Minnie has sex with many Mickeys her male offspring have healthier sperm. This hardly proves such is the best route for humans given the complex emotional factors we deal with, but maybe the men who aggressively posted on Liz’s article about the disastrous consequences for children of “mum bringing home boyfriends” should take a look. (Although I suspect this is exactly what they are worried about.)

I don’t suggest we should all take our dating behaviour from any particular species, but one thing a survey of the biological world does indicate is that long term mutual monogamy is pretty rare. That doesn’t mean people should just give up on it, if that is what they want. However, anyone expecting it to be automatically better, let alone easy, needs to justify their case. Judging by the responses to Liz, they’re a long way from that.

*And frankly antichinuses have such a bizarre sex life anyway, who knows what is going on?

When one talks about the topic of food in the medium to long term there are two main schools of thought. One argues that we are now better fed (or at least have the capacity to be better fed if we didn’t prefer junk) than any previous generation. Famine still stalks regions of the world, but they’re decreasing regions. Optimists project this to continue.

On the other sider are the problems we have to overcome. The world population will increase by around 50% over the next few decades. As regions like China become wealthier demand for meat will rise, requiring the use of many times as much grain to feed the animals as the meat actually produced. All this in a world with decreasing ground water, more polluted surface water, increasingly erratic weather and degraded topsoil.

Given the way I’ve set this up you can probably tell I agree with neither. I think there is a very great chance that we will see much more famine in future years, with the decades either side of the millennium looked back on as a golden time, when starvation was relatively rare.

But if we do, it won’t be so much because of the issues mentioned above, but because another, much older reason for famine. Indeed the main reason for famine for many centuries: Inequality. Once people starved because a bad season meant there was not enough food. The poor may have starved first, but if a region was isolated and did not produce enough everyone would suffer. That hasn’t really been the issue for a long time. During the Irish famine grain was exported to England under armed guard. There was enough food, but the poor could not afford it. The situation has been similar more recently.

The danger for the world is not that we will not produce enough, but that we will waste it, either feeding it to animals because they taste better than what we feed them, or simply buying too much and throwing it out. If we actually used our crops efficiently we could feed many times the world’s population. Even if the ratio drops in future, I doubt we will ever produce less than the amount needed to feed everyone.

The rate of productivity growth has fallen for food production, but a couple of new technologies could change that. One is the idea of producing meat in a test tube, which got a lot of publicity a couple of months ago after an article in New Scientist. Less known is the idea of using algae as a food source. My next Cool Scientist is Dr Kirsten Heimann. She’s investigating capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and feeding it to algae to encourage them to grow. Besides removing CO2 (at least until the algae breaks down) this can be used to produce biofuels, but Heimann says that some of the algae she is working with taste like “salty tofu” and are even higher in protein and omega-3s.

Programs like second harvest address the second issue, and although this is just at the margins it may grow. The problem of meat consumption is being confronted, not only by rising vegetarianism, but by the improving quality of meat substitutes. I ate a meal of imitation chicken tonight, and while it didn’t taste quite like the real thing, it was a lot closer than what was available when I first became semi-vegetarian.

The problem is that if inequality rises we may see ever more of the world’s resources devoted to making endlessly exciting dishes for the jaded palates of the super-rich, making it a lot harder to feed everyone else. Trends in global inequality are debateable, but there is no doubt that within the developed world things have got much worse. Whether or not the Occupiers of Wall St represent the 99%, they’ve got the stat right, with 1% taking most of the gains in American wealth in recent years. If this trend spreads worldwide we’ve got a real problem.

A problem whose fix is inevitably, and almost entirely, political not technical.

Yes, yes, there are lots of links I should included and have not got to. Might have to do that after Blog Action Day.

However, I’ve had a small compensation with David Solomon’s winning of the Prime Minister’s Science Prize, Australia’s equivalent of the Nobel, although granted across all the sciences. Solomon is mainly famous for inventing the polymer bank notes used in Australia and quite a few other countries. While some countries have adopted these for bad reasons, as a result of bribery (in which Solomon is in no way implicated) there really isn’t much question they are the best option available.

However, his achievements in polymer chemistry are far more extensive. He’s currently working on producing polymers that will stretch across large areas a single molecule thick. These could be placed on top of reservoirs to reduce evaporation. At one molecule thick, even if one drunk them the quantities would be so small they are unlikely to cause any harm, but the potential is there to cut evaporation rates in half. Solomon noted to me that Queensland loses as much water from its dams to evaporation as it actually uses, so any significant reduction in evaporation rates, achieved at a reasonable cost, could transform water issues in hot climates.

If Solomon manages to get this to work he may indeed end up with a Nobel Prize, but it’s as likely to be for Peace as for Chemistry.

BTW, I don’t know Prof Stuart Wyithe, winner of the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for the physical sciences, but I did cover Dr Min Chen’s astonishing discover of the first new form chlorophyll in over 60 years. I’m a bit sceptical on how useful the discovery will be for building new solar cells, as some have claimed, but for sheer fascination it doesn’t do too badly.