ASC Update

Science Daily has an interesting group of updates in the status of adult stem cell therapies.

1. Using donor T-cells to suppress rejection of donor bone marrow stem cells (in humans)
   
2. Using a drug to prevent side effects in children receiving donor stem cells
3. A better method of removing T-cells from done bone marrow stem cells (in humans)
   
4. A better method for growing different blood cells from adult stem cells (tested in mice)

More Global Warming

As I mentioned, global warming is heating up in the news (hah!)

Now Science Daily is adding fuel to the fire (hehe! oh, it's too easy!)

"the Earth's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated"

This sort of thing would be an embarrassment in microarchitecture models (oops, yea our old performance model was off 30-50%, but the new one is good, trust us!). Somehow, in climate models, being less hugely off is a big improvement.

"We found that, given the concentrations of carbon dioxide prevailing three million years ago, the model originally predicted a significantly smaller temperature increase than that indicated by the reconstructions"

Now we come to one of the big points that causes my skepto-meter to spike. If you are correlating data in your model against events from millions of years ago, you are feeding data that is almost certainly wrong into it (since the earth is, very likely, only thousands of years old).

Bringing bad assumptions (which makes bad models), and feeding in bad data is going to drive you into circles of bad decisions.

Making wild predictions ("the world as we know it will end unless we shut down our economies!") doesn't help.

ESC and NIH

It's funny how angry atheists are about the selection of Francis Collins (an avowed Christian) as the new head of the NIH.

It's also sad what Albert Mohler has discovered about Dr. Collins and his stand on embryonic stem cell research.

Quoting Dr. Collins:

"I am happy to say that we now have human embryonic stem cell lines eligible for use by our research community under our new stem cell policy. . . . In accordance with the guidelines, these stem cell lines were derived from embryos that were donated under ethically sound informed consent processes. "

There is no ethical process by which one person can elect another to be murdered. That is evil.

Speed of Evolution

One of the most interesting points of contention in the evolution/creation controversy is the "speed of evolution" (or more precisely, the rate of speciation - the time required for one species of animals to become two).

Creationists actually have the more stringent requirement.

For us to observe all the species we have today, starting from the limited "kinds" taken on the ark - speciation must happen pretty quickly (relative to "geological" time scales).

Of course, the evolutionist gets hit coming and going on this one. If evolution is fast, then we should be able to observe transmutation of species (cats becoming dogs) - which we don't. If evolution is slow, then we should not even observe speciation (wolves becoming chihuahua and St. Bernards - not quite different species, but close).

Observations repeatedly show that speciation can happen quickly (latest from Science Daily).

ASC and Heart Attacks

A lot of work going on using adult stem cells to treat the heart. In addition to my last summary, we have a report from a human trial from Science Daily.

This is different in two ways:

1. The cells appear to be taken from different people
2. The cells are administered through an IV

ASC and Bone Fractures

Exciting news from Science Daily. Adult stem cells (from bone marrow) have been used in humans to treat bone fractures.

The Science of Global Warming

It's been a while since I last covered global warming. With the upcoming Copenhagen talks, it is back in the news...

The leading proponents of anthropic global warming (AGW) constantly plead with us to listen to the science. Of course, science is an abstract noun. And abstract nouns hate it when you anthropomorphize them.

And then, they don't even tell us the science. They just tell us to trust them. Like this article from Ars.

So, I have dug into the science for myself. The basics are pretty straightforward, and we can see where the difficulties lie:

It all starts with the Sun.

The Sun is a huge nuclear furnace (operating at almost 16 million degrees K). Inside, hydrogen becomes helium, with small amounts of matter converted to energy. This energy spills out into the outer layers of hydrogen, until it reaches the surface (at a temperature of about 6 thousand degrees).

The Sun can be modeled as a "black body", one which is in equilibrium (emitting as much energy as it receives). This gives us an idea of the sort of light coming from it, and allows us to calculate the energy received by the Earth (intensity of about 1.4 KW/m^2).

Modeling the Earth is much more complicated. If the Earth were a true black body, the surface temperature would be about 278 K (5 C, or 41 F - pretty cold).

Actually, the surface of the Earth can be modeled fairly well as a black body (or actually, gray body with some albedo/reflectiveness).

The trouble comes in that the energy emitted by the surface is not radiated directly into space.

We calculate the wavelength of light emitted based on temperature. For the Sun, with its high temperature, the light is what we call "visible" - short wavelength. The Earth, with its lower temperature, emits infrared light (long wavelength).

The atmosphere passes visible light (low absorption), but absorbs infrared light. This creates the "greenhouse effect". The atmosphere acts like a blanket or insulator, reflecting some of the infrared back to the Earth, before passing any out to space.

Modeling the effects of this blanket is the hard part...