Iraq War Costing $720 Million Each Day. Painful, isn’t it?

The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.

The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group’s analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.

That works out to $8,000 every second. But hey, its ok. Its for national security! Don’t you feel safer, knowing we turned an entire country into a black-market playground for individuals that hate America? And I’m sure we’ve converted half the population of Iraq from neutral individuals just trying to get by in life to anti-western extremists. Hell, if someone occupied my country I would feel the same way. Good work, US government!

What a day. Wow. Imagine your first kiss. Remember the odd mix of terror and excitement? Fast pulse and racing thoughts? That was me today, except I wasn’t kissing anyone.

Today was my first day working in the lab on real-world research. I can assure you it was nothing like the labs we had for my cell biology class. I don’t think I have ever felt so utterly overwhelmed and yet so completely excited before. Today was a day of simultaneous terror and ecstasy.

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Experiencing racism apparently fatigues that hunk of meat in your head.

The problem is that we have limited cognitive resources, so when we are solving one problem, we have difficulty focusing on another at the same time. Some psychologists reason from this that subtle racism might actually be more, not less, damaging than the plain antipathy of yesterday, sapping more mental energy. Old-fashioned racism — a “No Negroes Allowed” sign, for example — is hateful and hurtful, but it’s not vague or confusing. It doesn’t require much cognitive work to get it. But if you’re the most qualified candidate for a job, and know it, and still don’t get the job for some undisclosed reason — that demands some processing.
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It did, at least for blacks, and more than the overt racism did. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, black volunteers who had witnessed unfair but ambiguous hiring decisions did much less well on the Stroop test, suggesting that they were using all their mental resources to make sense of the unfairness. Interestingly, white volunteers were more impaired by overt racism than by the more ambiguous discrimination. Salvatore and Shelton figure this is because whites rarely experience any racism; they do not even notice the subtle forms of racism, and are thrown off balance when they are hit over the head by overt acts. Many blacks, by contrast, have developed coping strategies for the most hateful kinds of racism; it’s the constant, vague, just-below-the-surface acts of racism that impair performance, day in and day out.

“Your results are only as good as the fitness function”

This is generally the difficulty in genetic algorithms. Evolution is a funny thing and capable of coming up with all kinds of wacky solutions to whatever problem is at hand. In a simulated environment where there is a distinct goal, you only want the wacky solutions that pertain to your problem at hand. The fitness function evalutating your gene pool must be very specific. Any loopholes in the fitness function can, and will, be exploited by the simulation. This is one of the greatest difficulties in working with genetic algorithms - creating a tight fitness function that drives evolution towards the solution that you want.

This makes for an interesting situation when your goal is to evolve intelligence. How do you create a fitness function for that? Thoughts on the subject after the jump.
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Its time! BPR³ icon contest is just about over. We just need you all to go vote on your favorite.

Secondly, Shelly at Retrospectacle is conducting a survey on the impact of science blogging. She, and other bloggers, will be compiling the results into a manuscript. The survey only takes a few minutes so you are highly encouraged to participate. It is intended for everyone that reads science blogs. What are you waiting for, go!

A vaccine for Alzheimer’s? New research uses vaccines to break up amyloid beta clumps in the brain. These deposits are made of a protein called beta peptide. The lab isolated an antibody to beta peptide and injected it into early onset Alzheimer’s patients monthly. As the body is exposed to the substance, it builds an immune response against it. This is the same principle that works when you get sick from everyday bugs like strep or the flu.

At the end of the trial, levels of beta peptide dropped in the cerebral spinal fluid, indicating that the vaccine was working. The results were a bit shakier:

Although brain, or cognitive function improved only slightly in four patients, it did not worsen, which would have been expected after six months. Also, mental tasks improved in three patients and stayed the same in the other two.

Don’t get your hopes up yet. Although the vaccine appears to work well in animal models and is quite promising for humans, it does have some problems to iron out. Another, larger trial experienced some unfavorable side effects due to the vaccine.

Unfortunately, although the vaccine appears to clear some of the protein from the brain, a substantial minority of participants in the trial developed a serious complication called encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), with two people dying.

Does anyone else feel that unraveling the “neural code” is counterproductive and barking up the wrong tree? New articles, journals and theories come out daily regarding the “neural code”, likening it to a language that we don’t understand yet. As if neurons in the brain “talk” to eachother using a sophisticated language. The theory goes that by studying this language, usually in the form of neuron spiking, we can eventually learn what the neurons are saying.

And I think thats just plain wrong. Thoughts and arguments after the jump.
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Next time you get sick from the virus Delta 24 RGD, don’t get angry. Well, don’t get anything, you can’t actually get sick from Delta 24 RGD. But it could save your life some day. Researchers recently modified Delta 24 RGD to attack brain tumor stem cells.

A tailored virus destroys brain tumor stem cells that resist other therapies and cause lethal re growth of cancer after surgery, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reports in the Sept. 18 edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Fueyo and colleagues developed Delta-24-RGD to prey on a molecular weakness in tumors and altered the virus so it could not replicate in normal tissue. They showed in a JNCI paper in 2003 that the virus eliminated brain tumors in 60 percent of mice who received injections directly into their tumors. The virus spreads in a wave through the tumors until there are no cancer cells left, then it dies.

Pretty nifty stuff. Glioblastoma multiforme is a particularly nasty form of cancer with incredibly low survival rates. As mentioned in an earlier post regarding glioblastoma multiforme, the 5 year survivability rate is around 3%, with the average being about 14 months. It is resistant to most forms of conventional treatment. The treatment looks fairly safe, ignoring the tiny odds of an unsafe mutation. I concede there is something inherently scary about releasing a virus designed to shred cells into your brain but I guess the alternative is no picnic.

The virus looks for a special protein marker, retinoblastoma, that is only expressed on tumor cells. Portions of the virus DNA that target normal cells were deleted. Upon entering a tumor cell, the virus begins making vesicles around important organelles and structures. It then devours whatever is inside. The tumor cell literally eats itself alive.

Clinical trials should be…interesting. Lets hope they get all the kinks worked out by then.

Between taking 19 credit hours and being a member of a fraternity, free time is rare. Whats the obvious solution to this problem? Join a lab and do research on the side, obviously!

While my free time will now be nonexistent, I’m quite excited to finally be doing some real research. I was going to do research with this particular professor over the summer but chemistry courses got in the way. We met a few days ago to hammer out the details to my Undergraduate Research Proposal (which forces RPI to pay me, always a plus). He also showed me the new scope they just bought from Zeiss. It one very sexy, very expensive machine. =)

All in all, I’m excited to start working. After I slog through a few hundred pages of literature to write this proposal I’ll start doing benchwork. Who needs free time anyway?!

Unlike babies, embryonic stem cells thrive when shaken

Georgia Tech and Emory researchers discovered that moderate and controlled physical movement of embryonic stem cells in fluid environments, similar to shaking that occurs in the womb, improves their development and suggests that different types of movement could some day be used to control what type of cell they become.