Everyone’s Poop


Nate Blakeslee:

“Down the drain, off the brain” is how most people think about it, but human waste—or effluent, as the professionals call it—has a lot to tell us about how we live, what we eat, and who we are.
They say that shit runs downhill. This is commonly understood to mean that the world is an unfair place, except among those few people who actually work with the substance, for whom it is considered something of an article of faith. This is because municipal sewerage systems are powered almost entirely by gravity, which means that when working properly, they move millions of gallons of sewage a day across considerable distances with only a minimum expenditure of energy, a feat of efficiency virtually unparalleled in the annals of engineering. When sewage stops running downhill, as it inevitably does from time to time, very bad things indeed can happen, as they did on Pecan Springs Road, in the Austin neighborhood known as Windsor Park, one morning last September.
I was spending the day with an Austin Water Utility emergency-response crew when dispatch got a call from a woman reporting that two rooms of her house were flooded with sewage. Our crew consisted of a TV truck, piloted by a twenty-year line-maintenance veteran named David Eller, and a flusher truck, driven by another longtime utility employee, named Dale Crocker. At the house, Eller, who wears wraparound sunglasses and looks a little like the country singer Dwight Yoakam, unspooled a thick red cable from the back of his truck. On the end of the cable was a camera about the size of a roll of quarters, which Crocker shoved down into a PVC clean-out pipe near the curb in the front yard. The woman leaned on a walker in her driveway, looking worried.

Excellent Article.

Nikon’s Small World Gallery


Mark Anderson:

Since 1974, Nikon has sponsored a yearly photo competition for images that delve into the worlds beyond the reach of the unaided human eye. The camera maker feted the photographers who made the top 20 “photomicrographs” in Nikon’s annual Small World competition at New York’s Explorer’s Club. The winners were drawn from a pool of 1,709 submissions.
The dozen images collected here (the top 10 images, plus two Wired News picks) capture facets of living organisms that have a technical meaning to the trained specialist, but appear to be pure art to the layperson. The striking images convey something both strange and alien that could almost be sold as the first glimpses of extraterrestrial life. Yet, many of the objects presented here could not be more mundane or down-to-earth: A piece of ivory, a typical aquarium fish, a drop of sea water.

Sputnik 50: A talk with the BBC’s Reg Turnhill

Rob Coppinger:

Reg Turnill was working for the BBC in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the World’s first orbiting artifical satellite.
Turnill went on to cover the space race and travelled to the Soviet Union for the press conference following cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight and eventually was based in the US to cover NASA’s Moon programme.
He got to know the German rocket engineer Werner von Braun, who had developed the Nazi V-2 weapon, and also came to know many of the US astronauts.

Video

Your DNA, Please

The Economist:

Rapid advances in genetic testing promise to transform medicine, but they may up-end the insurance business in the process
“IF YOU can make a good soufflé, you can sequence DNA.” That assertion sounds preposterous, but Hugh Rienhoff should know. When his daughter was born about three years ago, she suffered from a mysterious disability that stunted her muscle development. After many frustrated visits to specialists, Dr Rienhoff, a clinical geneticist and former venture capitalist, decided to sequence a specific part of her genome himself. He discovered that her condition, which most resembled a rare genetic disorder known as Beals’s syndrome, was probably due to a new genetic mutation. “Without a lab and for just a few hundred dollars, you can contract or outsource almost all the steps,” he explains.
What a well-connected and highly motivated scientist in California can do today the rest of the world will be able to do tomorrow. Indeed, a number of firms are already offering tests for specific ailments (or predispositions to ailments) directly to the public, cutting out the medical middle-man. Dr Rienhoff, for his part, will soon launch MyDaughtersDNA.org, a not-for-profit venture intended to help others to unravel the mysteries of their family’s genes in the way that he unravelled those of his own.

Author of nation’s toughest global warming law to speak April 25

The author of the nation’s strongest global warming law tells us how California is responding to climate change and how she gained the political support to get it done …
“Leading the Way on Climate Change”
a free public lecture by Fran Pavley

3:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 25
Memorial Union (see “Today in the Union” for room)
800 Langdon Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Fran Pavley has served three terms in the California State Assembly, where she is known as one of the most effective legislators in Sacramento. The former Mayor of Agoura Hills and long-time public school teacher is the author of landmark legislation (the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006) on global warming that has become a model for other states and countries. She is also author of the first regulations on vehicle carbon dioxide emissions. Eleven other states and Canada have modeled their laws after Pavley’s Clean Car Regulations. She has been selected as one of Scientific American’s Top Technology Leaders in Transportation and received the 2006 California League of Conservation Voters’ Global Warming Leadership Award along with former Vice President Al Gore.
This event is co-sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW-Madison. For more information, please contact Steve Pomplun at the Nelson Institute or call Steve at 263-3063.

State ready for energy research lab

This column by Tom Stills, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, ran in the Stevens Point Journal:

A joint proposal was filed Feb. 1 by the UW System, UW-Madison and Michigan State University to open a federal energy research lab in Madison. Molly Jahn, dean of the UW-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has described the proposal as a strong fit with faculty, staff and student projects related to bio-energy. Those projects are taking place in disciplines that encompass biology, agriculture, engineering, natural resources and the social sciences. . . .
It will be months before the next phase of the federal selection process begins, but the collaborative effort should merit a hard look in Washington. If Wisconsin is successful, it could mean several hundred jobs and tens of millions of dollars within five years.

Requiem for Magic Bullets

Steve Silberman:

The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.


By 1950, 40 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, which is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic, is responsible for the majority of tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in U.S. hospitals alone.



Bacteria develop immunity to antibiotics by rapidly evolving genetic defenses against the drugs or by acquiring pieces of DNA and RNA from organisms that are already resistant — even from other bacterial species. Bacterial pathogens that have learned how to survive in hospitals have an evolutionary advantage, because there are plenty of other resistant organisms in the environment from which they can borrow resistance factors.

$100 Million Tourist Trip Around the Moon

John Schwartz:

NASA brought the shuttle Discovery back from low Earth orbit, now a private company plans to announce a more audacious venture, a tourist trip around the Moon.
Space Adventures, a company based in Arlington, Va., has already sent two tourists into orbit. Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station.
A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million.

Christopher C. Kraft, a former director of the Johnson Space Center, said his feelings about the enterprise were mixed. “I think it would be a fantastic journey,” he said. “I could see why, if I had the price of the ticket and could use the money that way, that it would be tempting to go.”
But Mr. Kraft added that the flight would be cramped and probably extremely unpleasant. With three people in a small Soyuz craft for an extended trip, he said, “I imagine that you could endure that, but, man, it would be tough.”