Whilst I've largely been focused on hurricanes during the last week it doesn't mean there's been no fine science writing around these parts. To that end, I wanted to call your attention to some excellent non-hurricane content on Cosmo.Sphere. Justin...

... door bell ringing in the middle of the afternoon. Either a neighbor in trouble or trouble for whomever is bothering me....

I look through the peep hole and see two young men in white shirts and dark pants. Bloody Mormons.

Vaguely curious as to how they are going to identify themselves, (since Mormon has become a dirty word these days) I swing open the door with far more force than necessary.

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Next edition of Berry Go Round, the carnival about all things related to plants, will alight here at A Blog Around The Clock tomorrow (probably late afternoon), so please send your submissions tonight by midnight EDT to: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com

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Glasses embedded with a telescope promise to make it easier for people with impaired vision to drive and do other activities requiring sharper distance vision.

read more

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, and its remarkable acuity, astronomers were able for the first time to witness the appearance of a shell of dusty gas around a star that had just erupted, and follow its evolution for more than 100 days.

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Anyone suffering sweltering heat this summer will be interested to know what’s going on in Alaska.

The state is on pace to have the fewest days on record reaching 65 degrees. The current record for fewest 65-plus-degree days was 16 in 1970. So far, with summer half over, there have been only seven. The forecast is for continued cool weather through July.

The cool weather is being blamed at least partly on La Nina, which has been in place most of the past year and involves cooler-than-average temperatures off the coast of South America and, in turn, tends to generate cool temperatures in Alaska (among other large-scale effects).

We certainly live on a planet of extremes. Some trivia to pursue …

• Continental Records Quiz
• 101 Amazing Earth Facts
• Gallery: Living in Antarctica

Text messaging and walking at the same time, it turns out, can be hazardous to both the Blackberry-wielding pedestrians and passersby.

An article in The Wall Street Journal today describes several mobile mishaps. For instance, Mike Munoz, a 44-year-old car-dealership manager in suburban Portland, Ore., describes walking smack into the bride at a wedding while he’s texting.

“Who would miss someone wearing a white dress and an 8-foot train?” Munoz tells the newspaper. “She didn’t get hurt or tear her dress, and I didn’t get kicked out of the wedding for almost killing the bride.”

Then, there’s Bryan Fuhr, who was walking his dog in Manhattan last summer (while tapping away on a mobile device) when he stepped into a road in the path of a biker, who ran over Fuhr’s foot, knocking him to the ground and leaving him with scrapes, bruises and two broken toes, the newspaper reports.

The texting injuries have landed several in the emergency room, according to James Adams, Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s chairman of emergency medicine.

Portable this-and-that’s have helped businesspeople and teens alike to not only ditch excess baggage, but also to carry a technological tether wherever they go. The wireless connection can be a positive (the ability to call for help in an emergency and keep in touch with friends) to a negative, as bosses expect employees to be reachable 24-7, come hell or high water, vacation or staycation. Plus, work productivity can decrease as we all stay oh-so-connected, and technological addictions abound.

To counter the injuries, however, Blackberry enthusiasts have come up with some prevention tips. For instance, the WSJ article notes an Internet forum called crackberry.com, in which Blackberry users trade tips on how to safely navigate busy streets while texting.

“U gotta walk with ur chin @ about 45 degree angle, n u won’t bump into nothing,” reads one post from a user named JBEL. “Trust me it works.”

And in London, a directory-services company called 118 118, operated by The Number UK Ltd., started placing padded bumpers on lampposts in the East End to cut down on injuries to texters. (The padding was also a publicity campaign.)

With cell phones and PDA’s becoming an everyday accessory, many people will not stand for even a short walk without the ability to reach out to others wherever they may be (yeah, public restrooms are not off limits!).

Gravity cannot explain how a newly discovered exoplanet is so well synchronised with its star, says a UK astronomer

An electricity storage system that combines features of batteries and fuel cells packs in more energy than a tank of gasoline

The idea of using carbon sequestration to reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels has been bandied about for years, I vaguely recall writing about it when I first freelanced for New Scientist in 1990. It struck me then as a ludicrous approach to tackling climate change akin to sweeping the problem under the carpet. Now, a press release from another journal for which I once wrote on a regular basis, Chemistry & Industry (published for the UK’s Society of Chemical Industry) is suggesting yet another madcap approach to climate.

The “open source” concept being put forward by cquestrate.com and reported in C&I suggests that we could reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels and so ameliorate anthropogenic global warming by heating millions of tonnes of limestone in the world’s deserts to release its locked in CO₂, ship the resulting lime to the seaside and dump the rock into the oceans where it will apparently absorb twice as much dissolved CO₂. It’s backed by multinational petrochemical giant Shell.

Now forgive me for being uber skeptical but isn’t there something just a little hypocritical about an oil company looking to macro scale chemical engineering to manipulate the environment. The C&I article quotes Tim Kruger, formerly of Shell, and now consulting on the project for Corven as mentioning Australia’s Nullarbor Plain as being a prime location for the process. Lots of energy from sunlight to heat the abundant limestone to calcify it. And, presumably excess energy to sequester the huge volumes of CO₂ released at source.

The mention of Australia reminds me of another particularly crass attempt by humanity to control the environment that went badly wrong - the cane toad. The cane toad was introduced into Queensland, Australia, en masse, in the 1930s in an effort to control the cane beetle that was ravaging the sugar cane industry. Of course, cane toads are now one of the most widespread and biggest pests in the region, with no obvious way of controlling their numbers, other than introducing an exogenous, but unidentified predator species.

I suspect that, overall, dumping lime
into
the oceans
will be as
successful as
dumping cane toads
into sugar cane plantationsdumping lime into the oceans will be as successful as dumping cane toads into sugar cane plantations. There will be unknown after shocks that will cause more harm to the environment and global ecosystems overall than anyone could predict.

First, off, there’s the problem of what to do with the CO₂ released from the limestone mined in the deserts that serves as the raw material for the process. Secondly, the huge tonnages involved are going to be so big that this project really will never work, especially as shipping all that lime from the desert to the oceans will require energy and release its own huge quantities of CO₂ before dumping even begins. But, more than that there will be enormous, unforeseen environmental effects of dumping this material into the oceans on such a scale.

The idea of using even “stranded” energy to release CO₂ from limestone, ship the limestone to the oceans, where it will apparently absorb dissolved CO₂, has to be fundamentally flawed. There are issues of pH, absorbancy, equilibria, and marine ecosystems to consider. Surely, it would be simpler and more efficient to find a way to tap the stranded energy and supply it to population centres directly, thus cutting our dependency on fossil fuels without attempting to tamper with the oceans. Several macroscale engineering ideas have been bandied about and some, such as iron seeding and nitrogen control, have even been trialled, with little success and evidence of detrimental environmental impact. Let’s not add lime to the list.

I interviewed Kruger for the August issue of Intute Spotlight in which I will cover this topic in more detail.

a

Muddled Environmental Meddling

I've just received the rather troubling news that I am doomed to be unhappy in later life. Or at least that's what a study published in the cheery sounding Journal of Happiness Studies implies.

The researchers claim that women start their adult lives happier than men, but from the age of 48 onwards are more glum.

Anke Plagnol, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, and Richard Easterlin, an economist at the University of Southern California, compared survey responses from two separate data sets – one containing information on aspirations and attainments, and the other on satisfaction and happiness.

They concluded that the mid-life changeover in happiness levels comes down to unfulfilled desires.

Apparently, women are happy with their lot earlier in their lives, whereas men have bigger financial goals and tend to be unfulfilled during their 20s, both financially and in their family lives, which makes them miserable.

But by middle age, men have fulfilled their financial and family life goals and have cheered up, whereas women are more likely to be unfulfilled and unhappy.

The authors think a major factor underlying this is the shift in the proportion of men and women in relationships: men are more likely to be single in their 20s, and women are more likely to be alone in middle age.

They admit that this rests on the assumption that being married actually makes people happy, but they point out that if marriage is something you really want (and they found that 90% of both genders did), then being single might get you down.

There's also the point that people in relationships are likely to be better off financially.

Of course, it's quite possible that family life just suits men better than women, who often get the bulk of the childcare responsibility and often have to somehow fit in a job as well.

It is pretty amusing that, despite the fact that the research found men to have at least as much money, if not more, than women throughout their lives, they still had lower financial satisfaction. There's no pleasing some people!

These findings tie in with previous reports that, despite having more, recent generations are less satisfied with their lot than previous, poorer generations.

So perhaps the moral of this story is set your sights low and you won't be disappointed.

Tamsin Osborne, New Scientist contributor

Want to know who will be the next US president?

Allan Lichtman, a political historian who teaches at American University in Washington, DC, says he has the means to predict it.

There are 13 questions, each with a "yes" or "no" answer. Lichtman calls these the 13 keys to the White House.

"Yes" answers favour the incumbent party, "no" answers favour the challenger. If five or fewer answers are "no", the incumbent party stays in the White House; if six or more are "no", the challenger wins.

While there is obviously more to leadership than these questions, Lichtman says he has successfully predicted the last six presidential elections with this method.

Here are the 13 questions:

1. Does the incumbent party hold more seats in the House of Representatives after the midterm election than after the preceding midterm election?
2. Is there a serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination?
3. Is the incumbent-party candidate the current president?
4. Is there a significant third-party or independent candidate?
5. Is the economy not in recession during the campaign?
6. Does per capita economic growth during the term equal or exceed mean growth for the preceding two terms?
7. Has the administration effected major policy changes?
8. Has there been major social unrest during the term?
9. Is the incumbent administration untainted by major scandal?
10. Has there been a major military or foreign policy failure during the term?
11. Has there been a major military or foreign policy success during the term?
12. Is the incumbent-party candidate charismatic or a national hero?
13. Is the challenger not charismatic or not a national hero?

Not all of the questions have been decided; some are arguable. For example, question 5 could be answered "no" if people believe a recession is looming, and some would argue that economic booms and busts are not necessarily a bad thing. Question 13 seems to favour Obama, but charisma is a subjective quality.

On balance, Lichtman says, Obama has enough keys to win.

Rowan Hooper, online news editor

Somewhere on the wall of every high school chemistry lab hangs a Periodic Table of the Elements. I need only close my eyes to summon up the Periodic Table that hung in my own high school lab -- a giant, colorful thing with the symbols of the elements printed in bold black letters on sturdy fabric, published by Welch Scientific, if I remember rightly.

I was not an enthusiastic student of chemistry, but when I looked at the Periodic Table I knew I was in the presence of a fundamental mystery. The way the elements fell into place, in ranks and rows according to their properties -- well, it was like music.

Why should the stuff of which the world is made be replete with patterns, harmonies, and cadences? On the left, in column 1, the alkali metals -- lithium, sodium, potassium, and their heavier cousins (keep them away from water, our teacher stressed). On the right, in column 18, the noble gases -- helium, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon (safe and sane, completely inert). And bracketed between, like substances neatly arranged on a pharmacist's shelves, the 92 naturally occurring elements, and a partial row of unstable heavier elements added by those modern alchemists, the nuclear physicists.

There were puzzles aplenty in the table to intrigue the curious student. Why did the gaseous elements cluster at the upper right of the chart? What was liquid mercury doing down there in the middle of the chart surrounded by solids? Why did copper, silver, and gold, among the few elements known since ancient times, have a column of their own?

In short, what was the magic behind the music? What was the instrument whose tuning made the harmonies? The mysteries were soon unraveled by our teacher, who introduced us to the theory of atomic structure and chemical valency. It would be hard to describe the excitement that accompanied the realization that the amazing diversity of the world of matter -- the reactiveness of the alkalis with water, the inertness of the noble gases, the slipperiness of mercury, the solitariness of gold -- all of this and more, could be explained by a theory of almost childlike simplicity.

I'm genuinely curious about the global warming views of my readers. Generally the comments here run toward skepticism. However, this being a science blog, one might just as easily assume a silent majority that wholeheartedly accepts the IPCC reports. To...

Look for a step forward in creating an international network of science gear to be planted on the Moon.

The stage is set at NASA’s Ames Research Center for some seven to nine nations to sign a Statement of Intent today to work together on putting a geophysical network across the Moon - one that could gather data from locations on both the nearside and farside of our celestial companion.

Early candidate devices include seismometers, laser reflectors and heat flow equipment. Working groups have been busily sorting through ideas of what core geophysical instruments each country will contribute to the automated network, as well as formats, data rates, and other communication needs. A future working group will begin the process of where the constellation of nodes that make up the network would be positioned on the lunar landscape.

The International Lunar Network would carry out high-priority science explained Jim Green, Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters. “There’s a lot of work to do…but we’ve started the process,” he told me at this week’s NASA Lunar Science Institute meeting, held at the space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

July 24, 2008: Selected content from volume 27, numbers 5-6, of Reports of the National Center for Science Education is now available on NCSE's website, featuring reports on a disastrous excursion for "intelligent design" in Oklahoma, developments in the Answers in Genesis schism, and t ...

The title of this post is another phrase from the poet Pat Boran. It struck me, I suppose, because of the way readers sometimes refer to this blog as "the porch." (I forget who first suggested the image; was it you, Theresa?) A lovely image, evoking friends in rocking chairs sipping ice tea or gin-and-tonics on a drowsy summer night. Out there in the darkness lightnin' bugs flash their sleepy semaphores. Somewhere afar off heat lightnin' illuminates the horizon. Our language drifts into the dark. We have words too for stars, for black holes and quasars, for the cosmic microwave background radiation. Our words leak off the porch into the summer darkness, bringing some small part of the darkness into our circle of light. And so we sit and sip and talk, and our language eases back the darkness, hallows an interval, makes "a dwelling in the evening air,/ In which being there together is enough."

We sit and we sip and we are content to let the darkness embrace us. No, we are more than content. The darkness is a positive presence, a soft and fragrant backdrop for our conversations. Without the darkness there would be no lightnin' bugs, no heat lightnin', no stars. We rock and sip and the darkness enfolds us like a shawl.

There are a those who are less comfortable with the darkness. They want language to light up the darkness to the farthest horizon, to the beginning and end of space and time, turn night to day. They shout into the dark -- "God," "Father," "Person," "Friend." The miracle of language becomes the language of miracles. "I am the Light of the World, I expel the dark."

Well, fair enough. But here on the porch, in our circle of friendship and faint light, we rock and sip and talk. And the lightnin' bugs flash, and the stars come on one by one, and now and then, afar off, the horizon shimmers with a soundless light. And we talk, with measured voices. And our words drift off into the darkness. And sometimes they never come back.

The National Weather Service out of Brownsville, Texas and South Padre Island, Texas is reporting news of extensive damage. Damage includes downed trees and powerlines and roofs ripped off homes and hotels. These reports are significant but it may end up being the immense rain totals that end up causing the most damage and loss of life.

At 530 PM CDT, weakening Hurricane Dolly had slowed to a crawl and was centered over western Willacy County. The southwest side of the center continues to produce torrential rains which are quickly adding up from southern and southwestern Willacy County continuing into much of Cameron County, with heavy rains now heading into eastern Hidalgo and southeastern Brooks County. As the night wears on, the locally heavy rains will continue, with an additional 3 to 7 inches possible in these areas and the likelihood of 2 to 5 inches stretching into the western Lower Rio Grande Valley and Rio Grande Plains as Dolly weakens to a tropical storm but continues to spread heavy rains and gusty winds. Minor damage is still possible especially in eastern Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron County. Such damage will include more downed tree limbs, power lines, and minor structural damage. Extensive damage reports in Willacy, as well as across eastern Cameron County and especially from Port Isabel to South Padre Island, continue to trickle in. A brief summary of reports so far is listed below.

Considerable freshwater flooding may continue well into the night from eastern Hidalgo through Cameron County, with structures threatened in some areas along with potentially high waters in poor drainage areas with life threatening conditions possible! Residents are urged to remain indoors until conditions begin to improve sometime on Thursday. Significant flooding has been reported in Harlingen as of 530 PM. State Officials reported two feet of water in portions of downtown, with water in homes near Jackson Streeet. Police reported flooding on Polk, Taylor, Pierce, Filmore, and Commerce Streets. Meanwhile, streets in subdivisions on the north side of the city had up to six inches of water covering the ground. Estimated rainfall between 5 and up to 12 inches in Cameron County have caused widespread flooding of poor drainage areas from Brownsville to Port Isabel and South Padre Island. Numerous roads are covered in water, with poor drainage locations impassible.

Extensive damage reports continue to trickle in to the NWS office from South Padre Island. Dozens of roofs have been reported torn off of residences and businesses, and a large amount of debris was noted on roads. Included landmarks were the Radisson Resort, the Holiday Inn, and the Sea Ranch Restaurant. One person was reported sucked out of a doorway on a 7th floor condominium where he fell and was injured. Hundreds, if not thousands, of trees and limbs have been damaged throughout Cameron and Willacy Counties. Extensive property damage has also been reported along State Highway 186 between Raymondville and Port Mansfield, where the southwestern eyewall continued to wreak havoc. Stay tuned for updates later this evening.

The flash flooding problems will persist as Hurricane Dolly is tracking very slowly westward. The Weather Channel's Stu Ostro has a detailed blog post about the storm. He pulled these flood reports from the NWS.

...SEVERE FLOODING REPORTED IN HARLINGEN...

HEAVY AND PERSISTENT SHOWERS...ASSOCIATED WITH THE EYE OF WEAKENING HURRICANE DOLLY...ARE CAUSING MAJOR FLOODING IN THE CITY OF HARLINGEN THIS EVENING.

A TEXAS STATE OFFICIAL REPORTED TWO FEET OF WATER IN PORTIONS OF DOWNTOWN HARLINGEN...WITH WATER IN HOMES IN THE JACKSON STREET AREA. THE HARLINGEN POLICE DEPARTMENT REPORTED FLOODING ON POLK... TAYLOR...PIERCE...FILMORE...AND COMMERCE.

For more local reports on Hurricane Dolly try the Brownsville Herald, KIII TV, Newschannel 5 and KVEO 23.

Hurricane Dolly was downgraded to Tropical Storm Dolly with the NHC's 10PM CDT advistory. However, the flash flooding problems will continue as Dolly continues to drop copious amounts of rain.

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The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), which is responsible for higher education in the UK, is seeking feedback to help it develop its new science strategy. The DIUS has put together a website for this purpose: interactive.dius.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/. There, you can read its latest report, comment on various sections of the report, or provide general feedback. I think that it's great that the UK government is seeking this sort of feedback, so if you're interested and have some time, go participate in this worthy endeavor.

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For those of my readers in the UK (or anywhere else where you have access to Sky News), I'll be appearing live on Sky News at about 10:30 11:30 BST this Friday to talk about Barack Obama's visit to the UK and his support among Americans living abroad. I'm not sure if the video will be posted online afterward, but if it is, I'll post a link to it here.

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My recent article on the subject of an unnatural approach to diabetes led to some quite intriguing comments from readers especially as I suggested that it would make sense from a safety perspective to bring herbal remedies under the same regulatory umbrella as regular pharmaceutical products.

Eric W a chemistry teacher from Minnesota who goes by the online monicker of “Chemgeek” pointed out that the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) had attempted to do this several years ago (it’s something that has been mooted in the European Union too), but in the US at least all that happened is that products now have a warning such as: “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA…” Which is obviously a rather weak stand to take on products that can be potentially lethal in combination with the wrong disease or other medication.

The problem as I see it, is that if any given herbal product has potent physiological activity, then it is too all intents and purposes, a medicinal drug, and should be tested and labelled as such so that consumers can be warned of contraindications. If the herbal product has no physiological activity, other than perhaps to provide some spurious antioxidants for which our needs are not known, then it is little more than a placebo.

Stef Levolger, aka Slevi, is a Dutch medical student with an interesting observation on the issue. “It’s not like [herbal is] all that different from our own basic medicine. Take for example willow bark, sold as a herbal treatment and advertised with [various] uses by the Chinese, by [several] companies and others since the ancient Greeks. And, how do you get it home? Right, you get a bottle filled with pills. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was even produced in the same pharmaceutical factory as where regular aspirin comes rolling down the line, just got a price tag twice as high slammed on it,” he says.

I think Slevi is on to something, certainly a huge number of our so-called modern pharmaceuticals have natural product origins while many so-called natural herbal products are manufactured on neighbouring production lines by a division of the pharma companies.

Canadian blogger Mina Isabella Murray of Weird Science strongly disagrees with the idea of bringing all herbal remedies under the pharma umbrella. “That’s not to say I don’t support the notion of thorough research, safety, monitoring and accountability, but to compare the vast majority of herbals to pharmaceutical preparations is misguided and excessive,” she says, “I vote stricter regulations but ones that are separate from current pharma protocol/guidelines.”

She suggests that the issue is not black-and-white. “The vast majority of herbal preparations aren’t viewed to treat disease in the way that pharmaceuticals are presented nor are they presented as ‘cure alls’, she says, “Sure, we all
know
the stories
of dangerous herbs
and dubious advertisingwe all know the stories of dangerous herbs and dubious advertising but I don’t think that warrants all mainstream herbal preparations being subject to the same testing required for pharmaceuticals. She cites cranberries as an important preventative for urinary tract infection that, of course, cannot displace antibiotics should someone contract a full-blown infection.

But, I’d argue that the efficacy of such a “natural” remedy is dubious at best, but other products, may have genuine effects and so can interfere with the metabolism of certain medications. St John’s Wort is probably a case in point. This product widely used to treat mild depression is contraindicated for anyone with thyroid problems. But, buying St John’s over the counter, off prescription as it were, does not provide the necessary warnings.

I asked chemical consultant Hamish Taylor of Shinergise Partners Ltd how he felt about regulation of yet another area of his broader industry. “I think the answer should be YES,” he affirms, “but perhaps a sensible step is part-way i.e. strong warnings on possible side-effects and a cautionary ‘there is no clinical trial which demonstrates absolute efficacy’.”

Such an approach would allow the placebo effect of “it’s natural, I believe in it, it does me good” to shine through, which is probably no bad thing. “Feeling good is pretty much proven to make people healthier and certainly happier,” Taylor adds. He says that some degree of labelling would however prevent some of the nastier side-effects that can occur.

“By going to this quasi-interim step, it may even encourage manufacturers to undertake proper clinical trials to demonstrate effectiveness and therefore encourage greater use,” Taylor says. Of course, it is not as if the manufacturers have not investigated the potential. “The problem is that if the more popular herbal remedies were indeed 100% effective the drug component would have been isolated and purified by now!” adds Taylor.

Steve Bannister, Scientific Director & Principal Consultant at Xcelience, LLC, a drug development company based in Tampa, Florida, suggests that really the question we should be asking is what level of regulatory resources can we afford?what level of regulatory resources can we afford?

“Natural products have long provided leads for drug discovery,” Banniester says, “In modern natural-product drug discovery, activity-guided fractionation (often using an isolated receptor) identifies an active molecule and a single molecular entity results from semisynthetic improvement of the phytochemical’s drug properties. The drug-regulatory process includes guidelines for determining safety, efficacy, and quality, as well as for setting acceptance criteria for each.”

However, some herbal products may have efficacy as a result of a combination of components, additionally adverse reactions to such a product may be due to a different combination. “To pass through the current drug regulatory process, a product specification, including identification of the specific active components and their requisite levels, along with identification and limits for the unsafe impurities, is needed,” adds Bannister. He further explains that this specification must be defined in terms of safety and efficacy in humans. “This is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, and if required, would prevent herbal products from reaching approval,” he says, “This, combined with the fact that some herbals really do work, is the principal reason for a different different set of regulations.”

One has to consider what is an acceptable level of risk and how it is managed? What risks are associated with adulterated products, what are the adverse reactions, and to what extent does lack of efficacy lead consumers away from different, effective, treatments.

As it stands, the fully implemented US Good Manufacturing Practices for herbals are meant to control adulteration but can only do so if there is adequate compliance inspection. Of course, evidence of a significant incidence of adverse reactions is sufficient to lead to a product being banned but again this requires significant surveillance resources. Also, disease-treatment claims can be made only for approved drugs, so consumers may have been led to a particular herbal for their symptoms through hearsay or lifestyle magazine “evidence”. Monitoring of such claims for herbals, such as the neurochemical effects of St John’s Wort also requires surveillance resources. It all costs.

Delano Freeberg, Chief Technical Officer at API Purifications Inc, suspects that the devil is in the details. “In special cases, increased regulation may be beneficial,” he says, “I believe public health is not served by increased regulation. In fact, I believe we will benefit from the application of well-understood scientific and medical criteria for the reduction of regulation. The benefit of this approach to the public is the timely availability of lower-cost drugs. I believe this can be accomplished with no effect on safety.”

He points out that regulation is not required for extracts. “Many herbal remedies are known to have efficacy, even in a crude extract. The composition of this extract often does not differ much from that of the starting biomass (natural herb). If the herb being used is “GRAS” (generally regarded as safe), there is good scientific foundation for believing the extract will likewise be safe,” adds Freeberg, “An important caveat: “Natural” does not imply “safe.” Hemlock extract (Conium maculatum) is 100% natural but also 100% deadly.”

He also suggests that regulation should depend on potencyregulation should depend on potency. “Traditional over the counter pharmaceuticals contain a single active component. Natural remedies usually contain several compounds of known efficacy. Green tea, for instance, contains high concentrations of around a dozen different catechin antioxidants. The traditional pharmaceutical OTC preparation must be held to a higher standard of regulation because of the higher purity and potential potency of the active ingredient,” he says.

Regulation should also depend on drug type. “I feel the FDA over-regulates and does not take into consideration scientific findings that provide a basis for reduced regulation,” says Freeberg, “I provide one example. Synthetic statins have moderate to severe side effects in 5% of patients. Cholesterol can be equally reduced by the intake of policosanol (One recent study found no efficacy; however, dosage levels may not have been appropriate), a group of long-chain alcohols from beeswax. Side effects of policosanol were mild - no worse than placebo.”

There is certainly a scientific basis to demonstrate that many natural compounds have little adverse physiological effect, even in high-purity forms. This can be determined from structure-activity relationships and historical clinical and toxicological data.

Florence Leong, an Investment Director at ATP Capital Pte Ltd, believes the answer lies not in regulation but in consumer education. “Consumers need to be educated on the difference between OTC herbal remedies and pharmaceutical products,” she says, “Not all natural products are safe, the reason why OTC have fewer listed side effects as compared to pharmaceutical is because OTC products are not as thoroughly evaluated. Often the long list of side effects in pharmaceutical drugs frightens the consumer and the cursory listing of side effects gives consumer the false perception of safety.” Unfortunately, she adds, consumer education is a long and tedious process and regulation is consider the efficient ‘quick fix’.

She echoes my own earlier sentiment regarding efficacy claims where OTC products are not as robustly proven as pharmaceutical products. “This is an area where regulation should be tightened as many manufacturers of OTC products do try to push the limits by making specific efficacy claims in non-print advertisements. And often they do get away with it,” she says.

The active constituents of pharmaceuticals products are consistent, which ensures reliable efficacy and, on for established products, predictable side-effects. In contrast, efficacy of OTC herbal medications can be variable due to natural variations of the chemicals in different batches of raw materials, contamination, and manufacture unscrupulousness. This means herbal products can swing between no effects and no side-effects, via those that work and have their own side-effects to the wildly hazardous batch of mercury-laden dessicated ordure.

a

Regulatory Placebo

I say it again: the spirit loves
the flesh, as the hand the glove.

A few lines from the Irish poet Pat Boran. A great truth we have always known but work so hard to deny.

Let us admit that the spirit is flesh, but more than flesh.

The spirit is the brain, of course, that neuronal web of almost infinite complexity. We could explore those tangled corridors for a thousand years and not exhaust their contents. For one thing, the contents change, more quickly than we could possible complete an inventory. The spirit is fleet, a master of metamorphosis.

The spirit is more than flesh. The spirit is flesh in interaction with a universe of even greater complexity. The windows of the flesh are thrown open to the world. The spirit is a wind of awareness, a pool stirred by angels.

The spirit is all this and more.

And some part of the spirit will linger after the flesh is gone, as memories in other flesh, as words, music, science, art -- a fleshless hand that retains the shape of the glove.

But this is the great truth: A self is hand and glove. Spirit and flesh. There is no self without the glove. "We are biological and our souls cannot fly free," writes Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, summarizing what science has taught us about ourselves. He adds: "This is the essential first hypothesis for any consideration of the human condition."

So let us begin there, hand in glove. Let us learn to think ourselves good, flesh and all. Skin, teeth, tongues, genitals, the soles of the feet -- that supple kidskin glove, the body. And let us learn to love this world, the world outside the windows of the flesh. For in truth there is no other world, no other world for us except the world we inhale like a deep, deep breath and seal into our soul.

July 22, 2008: In a statement submitted to the platform committees of both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, the Anti-Defamation League reiterated its position on creationism and intelligent design: Creationism, creation science and ...

I mentioned yesterday that the average cloud cover for New England is about 60 percent. Although the percentage varies widely depending on location and season, 60 percent is about average for the entire globe.

But what if the number were 100 percent? How would the intellectual history of humans have been different on a cloud-covered planet? No part of the natural environment is so clearly marked by regular periodic phenomena as the heavens. Anthropologist Alexander Marshack argued that certain regular markings on bone artifacts of Ice Age humans record the changing phases of the moon, and that these are the earliest examples of symbolic notation. Historians of science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend contend (in a book called Hamlet's Mill) that all of the great myths of the world have their origin in the regular behavior of celestial bodies. Other commentators have stressed the connection between the heavens and the development of scientific thought.

As Jacob Bronowski pointed out, the stars might seem improbable objects to have aroused such curiosity. The human body is closer at hand and a more obvious candidate for systematic investigation. But astronomy advanced as a science before medicine, and early medicine turned to the stars for signs and omens. The reason is clear: The regular motions of the heavens lent themselves to mathematical description. Behind the apparent chaos of terrestrial experience, the stars proclaim the rule of law.

On a cloud-shrouded Earth the rise of the human species to civilization would almost certainly have been delayed. Delayed, but not forestalled forever. The survival value of science and technology is such that sooner or later the inhabitants of the White Planet would have developed vehicles to lift themselves above the clouds. We can imagine their first view of the universe beyond the clouds -- the beckoning stars, the Milky Way, the luminous orb of the Sun, the changing Moon, planets and comets, solar and lunar eclipses -- celestial rhythms at last laid bare, the rule of mathematical law, so laboriously learned in the terrestrial environment, in the heavens made crystal clear.

NASA has no current plans to buy Japanese space freighters for cargo runs to the International Space Station (ISS) despite recent media reports contending the contrary, the U.S. agency said Monday.

A Sunday report attributed to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri and later picked up by other media outlets suggested NASA was unofficially in talks to purchase flights of unmanned H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to haul future U.S. cargo to the space station.

But NASA said the reports were erroneous, with no talks - unofficial or otherwise - under way to buy such flights.

“NASA is committed to domestic cargo resupply to the space station and does not plan to procure cargo delivery services from Japan,” NASA officials said in a statement.

An artist’s interpretation of Japan’s HTV cargo ship arriving at the International Space Station. Credit: JAXA.

Japan’s HTV cargo ship, a 16.5-ton cylinder about 33 feet (10 meters) long, is slated to make its launch debut atop a Japanese H-2B rocket next year. It follows this year’s first flight of Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, also unmanned, and would join Russia’s unmanned Progress cargo ships and the crewed NASA shuttles and Russian Soyuz vehicles already in the station’s flotilla of service craft.

NASA’s human spaceflight workhorse, a fleet of three U.S. space shuttles, is set to retire in 2010 after the construction is complete on the International Space Station. While NASA is facing a gap between shuttle fleet’s end and the first operational flights of its successor - the Orion crew capsule and its Ares I booster - the agency is banking on private firms like California-based SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, Corp., of Virginia, to provide unmanned cargo service to the space station in the future.

The agency also has a $700 million contract in hand to use Russian spacecraft for space station support.

While NASA has no current plans to buy Japanese spacecraft, it does already have agreements in place with JAXA and the European Space Agency to include U.S. cargo on its partner’s spacecraft as compensation for the shared costs of operating the $100 billion International Space Station, the U.S. agency said.

• Video: Grand Opening for Station’s Kibo Lab
• Video: Moving Day For Station’s Kibo Attic
• Video: Shuttle Discovery’s Space Station Victory Lap

Like sunscreen and ocean air, the scent of a freshly mowed lawn is one of those quintessential summer smells in America.  And there is a lot of lawn in America.

An article by Elizabeth Kolbert in last week’s New Yorker traces the evolution of the American lawn from the days when only the wealthy could afford to keep such a luxurious expanse of green to today, when Americans spend an estimated $40 billion on keeping up their grass. According to satellite data from the Department of Defense, Kolbert writes, turfgrasses take up an area of the United States the size of New York State.

The most interesting part of the article covers the burgeoning “anti-lawn movement,” a rag-tag assortment of individuals and groups who are calling for an end to the lawn as we know it, favoring replacing it with trees, gardens or more natural meadow.

How is grass not natural, you might ask? Well, as Kolbert discusses in the article, most of the grasses covering American lawns, including Kentucky bluegrass and Bermuda grass, are not native to North America. They’re also effectively grown as a monoculture (like so many other plants and crops), which makes them more vulnerable to pests.

Herbicides and synthetic fertilizers make it possible to grow the grasses into the intensely green expanses we see today, by boosting their growth and keeping out “weed” species. Of course, these chemicals have side-effects: Herbicides and other pesticides can kill birds and other native species, while excess fertilizer can run off of lawns into streams and rivers, and eventually into the sea, where it creates a “dead” zone where marine species can’t survive.

Lawns also require water; a third of all residential water use in the United States goes to landscaping, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Another study cited by Kolbert estimated that watering lawns in the United States uses up 200 gallons of water per person per day.

What proponents of the anti-lawn movement suggest is ditching all the chemicals and mowers and maintenance and just letting nature take over — whatever nature happens to be in any particular region of the country, be it prairie, forest or scrub. This is already done to a certain extent in the Southwest. On my trip to Tucson to cover NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission earlier this summer, the lack of lawns in favor of pebbles and desert flora certainly stood out. It stood as an example for me of how normal we consider lawns in the eastern United States, and how arresting it can be to see anything else in front of a house.

Others propose using the lawn space for more productive purposes, such as growing food in the space that now supports grass. Kolbert cites a book, “Food Not Lawns,” that says that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. (Growing food in our front yards would also do a lot to localize food production, though that’s a blog for another day.)

While the anti-lawn ideas are intriguing, and personally, I think, preferable, to the large lawns prevalent in some suburbs now, I doubt the green is going away anytime soon. I think Kolbert’s article gives pause for thought though – it might be worth pulling up a little of that sod and planting a vegetable garden, or letting nature reclaim a little of the lawn.

Remote arsenic assessment - A topic I’ve come back to again and again since I first covered for The Guardian the breaking news of arsenic contaminated tubewells on the Indian sub-continent in 1995. Now, an informatics approach to surface data could allow geologists and environmental scientists to identify regions of the world where people are at risk of exposure to arsenic in their drinking water without the need for widespread sampling to be undertaken. More…

Listening to tomographic tales - Researchers in the USA and The Netherlands have pieced together a picture of the most exquisite of molecular machines using electron-microscopic tomography. The team has for the first time obtained a three-dimensional structure of the gossamer-like filament of proteins found within the inner ear that gives us our sense of hearing and balance. More…

Atmospheric NMR - Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy has been used to study the kinetics of atmospheric pollutants in the gas phase for the first time. The method provides an empirical correlation between the atmospheric lifetimes of atmospheric pollutants and their relative reaction rates with chloro radicals at ambient temperatures. Read on…

Ebola spiked - An X-ray structure of the surface spike of the Ebola virus could explain how this lethal pathogen infects human cells and may help researchers devise preventative measures to stop the virus spreading during an outbreak. Full story…

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Atmospheric, Spectroscopic, Arsenic

A NASA Lunar Science Conference is being held here at the NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, a major confab of Moon experts brought together by the space agency’s new Lunar Science Institute.

A public day was held on Sunday, July 20th - marking the anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic mission of human exploration of the Moon way back in 1969.

Meanwhile, NASA’s 21st century Vision for Space Exploration — the Moon, Mars and Beyond mandate — was set in motion by President George W. Bush in January 2004.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is touted as the first mission in that vision, kicking off a series of robotic treks to the Moon starting no later than 2008, as called for in the Bush push.

But the word here is that LRO is being delayed until February 2009 - kind of reaching its own escape velocity in terms of calendar date and sticking to the vision script of action items.

In another Moon memo, it was announced at the meeting that the world’s first astronomical observatory bound for the lunar landscape will be a joint venture between the International Lunar Observatory (ILO) Association and Google Lunar X Prize contender Odyssey Moon.

Odyssey Moon is one of several groups vying in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition.

The ILO would be delivered to the Moon aboard the second lunar lander that Odyssey Moon intends to fly early in the next decade. The association consists of a consortium of scientists from, to date, Canada, China, India, Europe, Japan and Hawaii/USA.

In Moon-breaking news, it was also noted that Space Age Publishing Company — the ILO Association’s commercial affiliate, intends to broadcast its Space Calendar weekly and Lunar Enterprise Daily via the International Lunar Observatory.

I have now been here on the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland for over a month, and we have had but one starry night. Mind you, it was cloudy when I went to bed, and cloudy when I got up in the morning, but when I rose in the middle of the night for a glass of water -- there they were, blazing in all their glory against a backdrop of inky darkness. I stepped out into the garden and feasted. Jupiter chasing the Teapot across the southern horizon. Arcturus scraping the top of Mount Eagle. The Milky Way pouring out its riches overhead.

It is hard to imagine that for three-quarters of a century the largest telescope in the world was in Ireland. During the 1840's, William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse and master of Birr Castle in the center of Ireland, constructed an iron-hooped monster more than six feet in diameter, hoisted between massive Gothic walls, with ladders and viewing galleries. Visitors to the castle liked to have their pictures taken (by the earl's wife Mary, a pioneer amateur photographer) standing in the gaping maw of the great tube. Astronomers from as far afield as the United States, Australia and Russia came to Birr to see Lord Rosse's leviathan of the cosmic deeps. One wonders how many of them managed to get a look at the stars -- or went away cursing the Irish weather.

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "how men would believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown. But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile." Every night? Not quite. In Emerson's New England the average cloud cover is about 60 percent. Here in the west of Ireland we are grateful for one cloudless night in ten. Or twenty. Still, our rare glimpses of the heavens have something of the effect Emerson was talking about. I step out into the midnight dark, stand in my bare feet in the dewy grass, and gape. Gawk. Bowled over. Dazzled. A city of God made all the more spectacular by its rarity.

The National Hurricane Center is very bullish on a wave that hasn't even exited Africa. The vigorous wave could quickly become the next tropical depression. The season is already off to a quick start with three storms this month - Bertha, Cristobal and Dolly. Dolly could become a hurricane and threaten the Texas or Mexico coast later this week.

Here's the strongly worded Tropical Outlook from the NHC about the next wave to watch.

A VIGOROUS AND WELL-DEFINED TROPICAL WAVE IS LOCATED OVER WESTERN AFRICA A FEW HUNDRED MILES EAST OF DAKAR SENEGAL. THIS SYSTEM HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A TROPICAL CYCLONE VERY QUICKLY AFTER IT EMERGES INTO THE EASTERN ATLANTIC ON TUESDAY.

If this next wave becomes a TD it will be TD5 and if it gets a name it will be Edouard.

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I had to think about what I was going to write here. I don't have to think about breathing. I can think about not breathing -- for a few seconds. Sometimes unwanted thinking interferes with what should happen on automatic pilot, like falling asleep when I'm tired. And sometimes... Oh, never mind. See this week's Musing.

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, we tripped over the hill to the annual races on Beal Ban Strand, an afternoon of thundering excitement up and down the tide-washed sand, sleek and powerful horses ridden by young jockeys in gaily-colored silks. A good time was had by all, but I couldn't help but think of the events that occurred on those cliffs you see in the background of the photograph, just above the head of the jockey in white.

In the year 1580, six-hundred Catholics -- Spaniards, Italians and Irish, including women and children -- were besieged on a fortified promontory called Dun an Oir, the Fort of Gold, by Protestant troops of Queen Elizabeth I, under the command of Lord Grey of Wilton, assisted by Walter Raleigh. Recognizing that they had no chance of escape or relief, the Catholic forces agreed to surrender their arms, with a promise of mercy. They placed their weapons beyond the outer breastworks. Raleigh called the Irish out, and marched them away to where gallows had been erected to hang the lot. Then, he sent his swordsmen onto the crowded promontory. Blades flashed among the defenseless Spaniards and Italians. When it was over, five hundred severed heads were piled high in a field outside the fort, and in the English camp a hundred Irish men and women hung from beams in a long terrible row. These grisly spectacles would be left to rot when Grey and Raleigh departed, as a salutary lesson to the Papist rebels who would challenge the authority of the English Queen.

When word of the massacre at Dun an Oir reached London, Elizabeth wrote to Lord Grey, "I joy that you have been chosen the instrument of His glory."

There was, of course, more going on at Dun an Oir than religious antagonism, but religion was the armature on which hung the various political rivalries and alliances of late-16th-century Europe. Ireland has had a long and bloody history of religious strife. Only now, as an increasingly secular populace realizes that they have more in common to unite them than to divide them, do they turn their competitive instincts to such entertaining amusements as the headlong horse races on Beal Ban Strand.

China Radio International this week added some interesting bits of information regarding this October’s projected Shenzhou 7 mission - that nation’s third human-carrying space trek.

Six taikonauts have been divided into two groups - one group of three will fly the mission, the other three will be the backup team.

Shenzhou 7 will orbit the Earth for five days, with a one-hour long spacewalk to take place during the flight, as well as the launching of a small satellite. Also, during the trip, the taikonauts will do experiments using new satellite communications technologies.

The spacecraft has been transported to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Technicians there are busily checking and double-checking the readiness of the craft.

Regarding the spacewalk, the Shenzhou 7 has been outfitted with two air-lock doors in a special module imbedded between the craft’s return module and its orbital module. According to the radio report, the taikonauts will seal the first door and discharge air pressure in the orbital module. When the air pressure inside and outside that module matches, then the spacewalk can proceed. A reverse procedure will permit a spacewalker to reenter the module.

For the spacewalk, Chinese space engineers have readied two kinds of spacesuits. One design makes use of China’s own technologies…the other was purchased from Russia. Space program officials will make the final suit choice as the Shenzhou 7 mission draws closer.

The radio report explained that the upcoming mission will be the first flight of a second phase human space program. Establishing a space station is the next step for China’s space planners.

Meanwhile, the Xinhua news agency in China reported July 19 that the Long March 2F rocket to be used in the Shenzhou 7 sendoff will be sent to the launch center in a few days. An official with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) said that the group of 200 launch team members are dedicated to having a safe and successful launch of the Shenzhou 7.

Intellectual property, copyright, creative commons, copyleft, open access… These are all terms high on the science and other agenda these days. For example, public-funded scientists the world over are calling for research results to be available free to them and their peers for the public good and for the good of scientific advancement itself. Librarians likewise are also interested in the fullest dissemination and sharing of knowledge and information, while user-creators and the new breed of citizen journalists that are the result of the Internet Age are also more liberal in their outlook regarding the proprietary nature of creative works.

On the other hand, traditional publishers, database disseminators, and the commercial creative industry consider the investment they put into the creation and distribution of works as a basis for the right to charge readers and users and for profit-making. Meanwhile, adventurous organisations that are not necessarily beholden to shareholders, to other commercial concerns, and to learned society memberships, are experimenting with alternative business models with varying degrees of success.

One aspect of copyright that arises repeatedly in any discussion is what is considered fair use and what kind of usage warrants a cease & desist order from the owner of copyright in their works.

Now, Warren Chik, an Assistant Professor of Law at Singapore Management University, is calling for a reinvention of the general and flexible fair use doctrine through the simple powerful elevation of its legal status from a legal exception to that of a legal right.

Writing in the International Journal of Private Law, 2008, 1, 157-210, Chik explains that it is the relatively recent emergence of information technology and its impact on the duplication and dissemination of creative works - whether it is a photograph, music file, digitised book, or other creative work - that has led to a strengthening of the copyright regime to the extent that it has introduced “a state of disequilibrium into the delicate equation of balance that underlies the international copyright regime”.

Copyright holders have lobbied for their interests and sought legal extension to the protection over “their” creative works. But, the law in several countries has undergone a knee-jerk reaction that is not necessarily to the benefit of the actual creator of the copyright work or of the user. Chik summarises the impact this has had quite succinctly:

The speedy, overzealous and untested manner in which the legal response has taken has resulted in overcompensation such that the interests of individuals and society have been compromised to an unacceptable degree.

For some forms of creative works, such as music and videos, there has emerged a protectionist climate that has led to the creation of double protection in law the form of the digital rights management (DRM) system and anti-circumvention laws that allows copyright owners to prosecute those that attempt to get around such restrictive devices. This, Chik affirms, has “inadvertently caused the displacement of the important fair use exemptions that many consider the last bastion for the protection of civil rights to works.”

Chik points out that this tightening of the laws run counter to the increasing penetration of electronic forms of storage and communication, the borderless nature of the Internet and the invention of enabling technologies such as the so-called “Web 2.0″. This in turn is apparently leading to a general social shift towards more open collaborative creativity, whether in the arts or the sciences, and what he describes as “the rise of a new global consciousness of sharing and participation across national, physical and jurisdictional borders.”

Whether that view is strictly true or not is a different matter. At what scale will those who like to share a few snapshots among strangers or a small-scale collaboration between laboratories realise the need for a more robust approach to their images and data? For example, if you are sharing a few dozen photos you may not see any point in protecting them beyond a creative commons licence, but what happens when you realise you have tens of thousands of saleable photos in storage? Similarly, a nifty chemical reagent that saves a few minutes in a small laboratory each week could take on global significance if it turns out to be relevant to cropping a synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. Who would
not
wish to
receive full credit
and monetary
compensation for their
creative works in such
cases? Who would not wish to receive full credit and monetary compensation for their creative works in such cases?

Chik proposes not to destroy or even radically overhaul the present copyright regime, instead he endorses a no less significant reinvention of the general and flexible fair use doctrine through the simple powerful elevation of its legal status from a legal exception to that of a legal right, with all the benefits that a legal right entails. This change, he suggests could be widely and rapidly adopted.

Currently, he says, fair use exists formally only as a defence to an action of copyright infringement. But, DRM and other copyright protection threaten this defence and skew the playing field once more in favour of copyright holders. “Fair use should exist in the law as something that one should be able to assert and be protected from being sued for doing,” Chik says.

Such a change will render copyright law more accurately reflective of an electronically interconnected global society and also acknowledge the importance and benefits of enabling technologies and its role in human integration, progress and development.

Chik, W. (2008). Better a sword than a shield: the case for statutory fair use right in place of a defence. International Journal of Private Law, 1(1/2), 157. DOI: 10.1504/IJPL.2008.019438

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Fair Use Rights

It has been a cold, rainy summer so far, which is about par for the west of Ireland. Which means lots of fires in the fireplace -- Irish peat, Polish coal, and furze from the field -- and lots of hours gazing into the companionable flames.

Humans would appear to be the only fire-using animal. I've heard that cheetahs and hawks will sometimes position themselves to attack animals fleeing from naturally-occurring fires, but this hardly qualifies as "the discovery of fire." Exactly when humans figured out how to retrieve fire ignited by volcanoes or lightning and keep it alive is unknown. The earliest evidence I recall is charred animal bones from the Swartkrans cave in South Africa, dating from about 1.5 million years ago. Perhaps the deliberate use of fire is as good a criteria as any other for defining that moment when hominids can be said to be human. Certainly, as I sit staring dreamily into the dancing flames I am intensely conscious of being conscious.

Once campfires were common for warmth, light and protection it would not have been long before our ancestors discovered that cooked meat tasted good and took less effort to chew. Anthropologists ascribe all sorts of cultural significance to fire. The requirements of tending a fire presumably led to a more settled lifestyle. The hearth was a place for communal life, and therefore for new kinds of communication -- dance, storytelling, and decorative and symbolic arts. In the most imaginative of these flame-lit scenarios, happy bands of early humans sat next to a fire, swapping yarns, cooing to infants, sharpening spears, sharing tidbits of roasted meat, and taking from the hissing, crackling flame, and from the smoke curling heavenward, new ideas about life, death and immortality.

As I sit here musing in front of the hearth, I have a grim little fantasy, for which (as far as I know) not a shred of evidence exists: A little band of hunters of the species Homo erectus come to the cooking cavern where their fire, tended by the weaker members of the band, is protected from wind and rain. On the menu at one time or another is antelope, zebra, warthog, baboon, and -- depending on availability -- an occasional Australopithecus robustus, from whom Homo may have diverged only a million years earlier, roasted to perfection, thereby hastening our smaller, less erect, tool-making cousins toward eventual extinction.

Texas state officials gave the nod today to the largest wind-power project in the country.

The project, to cost at least $3 billion, will include significant new transmission lines to get power from windy areas, where the turbines will be, to urban areas. Texas electric customers will pay about $4 more per month on their electric bills to help cover the costs of investment.

State officials aren’t just blowing hot air.

According to MSNBC: Texas is already the national leader in wind power, and wind supporters say Thursday’s move by the Public Utility Commission will make the Lone Star State a leader in moving energy to the urban areas that need electricity.

“We will add more wind than the 14 states following Texas combined,” said PUC Commissioner Paul Hudson. “I think that’s a very extraordinary achievement. Some think we haven’t gone far enough, some think we’ve pushed too far.”

Meantime, one town in Missouri is entirely powered by wind.

Not everyone is hot on wind. Some argue the giant turbines (not windmills anymore) are noisy and can kill birds. And one study suggested the drag o turbines could actually alter the climate.

• Whatever Happened to Wind Energy?

I haven't noticed the same phenomenon in the States, but here in Britain/Ireland there has been a roaring spate of books recently with "wild" in the title: Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, Roger Deakin's Wildwood, Jay Griffith's Wild, Richard Preston's Wild Trees, Christopher Somerville's Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places, Kate Rew's Wild Swim, and Daniel Start's Wild Swimming, to name just a few of the most popular.

What's up? Why the headlong rush to wilderness? What is this hankering for wild places, and in these British Isles, where you would think wildness has been long extinct. "Rural," yes. "Countryside," of course. The Brits, especially, have always had a place in their hearts for the leafy lane and windswept fell. But this new gush of books seems to go a step beyond.

I can't say what's at work here. Are we fed up with being connected? Has the mobile phone (as they call it here) chased the wild into the farthest corners of the landscape? Is it a breath of privacy we're after, a moment of repose? Thoreau said, "It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves." Maybe what we are looking for is an opportunity to turn inward and explore the last remaining shreds of wildness in our souls.

Maybe. I have this vision of Kate Rew, say, stripping to dip in a wild Highland loch. The moment she sinks blissfully into the icy water a ring-tone chimes from within a pocket of the piled clothes on the bank. Does she scamper out to answer? Or does she dive deeper into the silent water?

I venture a new definition of wildness: Any place near or far beyond the reach of a mobile call.