Redux: How I learned to stop worrying and love the radioactive spiderwebs

By: | April 21, 2014

This was first published on December 23, 2011.  But microbes seem hot these days so we hope this will add to your knowledge about their manifold hotnesses — which apparently encompass radioactivity (hot? get it?) and spiders. Maybe not spiders.  Anyway, the post is now, somewhat reliably, UPDATED.

Last week, the Augusta Chronicle reported that a whitish, spider-web like material had been found growing all over the nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy lab in South Carolina. In the 1950s, nuclear materials were readied here for weapons deployment. Now the site is a research lab. The web-like strands were found in the L Basin, where the spent nuclear fuel is stored.

Unlike the term suggests, however, “spent” nuclear fuel is actually so irradiated that it can no longer be reliably used. So it needs to be contained in vast pools of cooling water usually doped with boron, which acts as a protective measure against the fuel rods’ radiation. The assemblies themselves, however, remain furiously hot.

This makes the prospect of any living thing growing not just near them but directly on them incredibly exciting. It’s not yet clear whether the stuff is actually alive, however. In late January, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board will start the process of testing the growths to see whether they are biological. Could these be microbes? Better yet, could these cobwebs be the home of some awesome new breed of radioactive superspider? Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 19, 2014

Suitsu_jõgi_MatsalusApril 14 – 18

Our boy, Abstruse Goose, becomes as one with his electronic devices.  Truer than he knows.  Well.  I don’t know what he knows.  Truer than you might think, anyway.

Poor Jessa, age 35, thinking about losing her math abilities.  And yes, mathematicians do have the reputation of topping out young.  But Jessa, you’ve got a long way to go before you hit Downhill.

Spring is auction season, everything has its price; and jump-bidders and snipers, Cameron’s got your number.  Turns out auction fever goes better with a little wine.

The kid who won an Olympic gold for Russia was — as is Michelle — from White Salmon.  And what did White Salmon do about this? asked for his autograph.

Cassie finally finds a simple declarative unqualified sentence she can write about medicine — colon cancer screening saves lives — then, sorry, nope, not even that.

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Photo by Abrget47j, via Wikimedia Commons.  It’s unrelated to any post, but it was just so beautiful.

 

Colon Cancer Screening Saves Lives?

By: | April 18, 2014

8158888029_3d071d3fde_b“Colon cancer screening saves lives.” That’s how I began my latest article for Nature Medicine. The news story was about new non-invasive tests that aim to make screening a lot more pleasant. The lead wasn’t great. You could probably find a dozen other stories that begin the same way. But it at least seemed solid. Science is all about qualifiers and caveats, and I was delighted that, for once, I didn’t have to add an “appears to” or a “perhaps.”

When I fact checked the article, I didn’t really stop to question that line. Colon cancer screening saves lives. Of course it does. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t devote time and money to screening. Duh.

But then a few days ago I received an email from a reader. “I am puzzled by your opening statement in your recent Nature Medicine article, that colorectal screening saves lives,” she wrote. And then she quoted the National Cancer Institute: “Based on solid evidence, screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) reduces CRC mortality, but there is little evidence that it reduces all-cause mortality, possibly because of an observed increase in other causes of death.” Continue reading →

A Hometown Hero, A Foreign Flag

By: | April 17, 2014

Vladimir_Putin_and_Vic_Wild_24_February_2014Last Saturday, my daughter and I went to the opening day of Little League season. In our small town of White Salmon, Washington, it’s a day for classic Americana: The players chase their coaches around the bases, the Boy Scouts raise the Stars and Stripes, we sing the Star-Spangled Banner, and a local celebrity throws the first pitch.

This year the pitcher was Vic Wild, a White Salmon native who won two gold medals in snowboarding in Sochi. When the announcer called his name, Wild, in dark sunglasses and a flannel shirt, jogged to the pitcher’s mound. He grinned and shrugged, then wound up and let loose a pretty good pitch. The crowd went crazy.

What nobody mentioned—not the announcer, not the kids, not the smiling parents—was that Wild, who graduated from the local high school and trained on nearby Mt. Hood, didn’t win his double gold for Team USA. He won it for Russia, and there are photos of him with Vladimir Putin to prove it.

How did our town come to celebrate a Russian champion? Continue reading →

Going Once, Going Twice

By: | April 16, 2014

423286736_06177b6366_zSpring is in the air, and with it comes the cha-ching of candy-bar sales. Of jogathons. Of hordes of students (and their parents) trying to raise money for books, for field trips, for the art program that’s on the chopping block, for scholarships.

In some places there are also auctions. Here, we have themed auctions where you dress as gypsies and aging rock stars. We have silent auctions, in which you hover around sheets of paper in front of gift baskets, writing down your bid. We have live auctions, where you—well, I’ve never been to one, but I imagine people start by demurely raising numbers into the air and then, as the night wears on, hollering uncontrollably at the auctioneer. This isn’t Sotheby’s, after all. This is preschool. Continue reading →

Losing My Math

By: | April 15, 2014

transit of venus

In playwright David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work Proof (later adapted into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal) there’s an exchange between a young mathematician and the daughter of his recently-deceased mentor. They’re at a party and discussing the use of amphetamines by older mathematicians:

Hal: There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around twenty-three and it’s all downhill from there. Once you hit fifty it’s over, you might as well teach high school.

Catherine: That’s what my father thought.

Hal: I dunno. Some people stay prolific.

Catherine: Not many.

Hal: No, you’re right. Really original work – it’s all young guys.

That was in Act I, Scene III. What was it Anton Chekhov said? According to Ilia Gurliand’s memories, it was “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one, it should be fired.” Right on cue in Act II, Scene II, we see the weapon used. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Electronic Man

By: | April 14, 2014

i_sing_the_gadgets_electricAG’s mouseover says, “When I forget to charge my phone at night, my existence feels incomplete in the morning,” meaning I guess that he’s become as one with his electronic devices.  But as I know because I’ve been writing an interminable story about insomnia, AG’s identity as an electronic device is just the God’s truth.  You don’t sleep — it’s called “nonrestorative sleep” — you don’t recharge. I read once that our bodies’ cells are powered by breaking down a molecule called adenosine tri-phosphate into, first, adenosine di-phosphate and then adenosine mono-phosphate until we’re left with nothing but adenosine.  And (huge logic gap here) those ravelled sleaves of adenosines and phosphates get knitted back up only during sleep.  I suspect I’m making up most of this but wouldn’t want to let facts get in the way of a good story. I mean, something like this must happen, right?

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http://www.abstrusegoose.com/561

The Last Word

By: | April 12, 2014

CraigChildsLeafApril 7 – 11, 2014

This week we say a sad but temporary ciao to Sally and a delighted ecco! to Craig Childs, and no, I don’t have a clue what he’s doing in that photograph.

Sports programs measuring themselves by winning instead of by kick-ass players who also know how to lose are, says Christie, purely missing the point.

Craig goes to the back of the frozen beyond and meets, of all people, a lost, hungry, and maybe even stupid Japanese tourist.  He suspects this has been the case for centuries.

Just quit arguing about evolution vs creation, says Erik.  Your opinion doesn’t matter and you know the whole thing is best as entertainment anyway.

Helen turned out to have nailed the date of peak bloom of the DC cherry trees.  Oh spring, you’ve been gone so long, we missed you so much, and you’re such a blessed sight for sore eyes.

I watch Garwin: the Movie; in the opening scene, a precise old hand spills out a pillcase next to a keyboard and in the sky, the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds.