In Ferreting Out Science’s Secrets, There Is No Room for Censorship

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Ferret photo via Wikimedia Commons

On Tuesday afternoon, the Washington Post announced that the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has officially asked two scientific journals to censor portions of manuscripts that are pending for publication:

The federal government on Tuesday asked two science journals to censor parts of two papers describing how researchers produced what appears to be a far more dangerous version of the “bird flu” virus that has circulated in Asia for more than a decade.

/snip/

After weeks of reviewing the manuscripts the board recommended their “general conclusions” be published but “not include the methodological and other details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm.”

The board — 23 scientists and public-health experts from outside the government, and 18 from within — cannot stop publication. Its advice goes to the Department of Health and Human Services, whose leaders will ask the journals — Science, published in Washington, and Nature, published in London — to comply.

The folly of the board’s request is monumental. First of all, it’s already too late for the workers to “not include the methodological and other details that could enable replication of the experiments”. Read more →

Russia’s Description of Sodium-22 in Bag Headed for Iran As “Work of a Nuclear Reactor” Misleading

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In a cyclotron, the magnetic "dees" accelerate ions to very high speeds in an outwardly spiraling path before they hit the target. (Diagram from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Radioactive sodium-22 has been found in a bag checked at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport that was headed for Tehran. The earliest reports on this finding were quite misleading, as the initial statement from Russia indicated that the material “could only have been obtained as the result of the work of a nuclear reactor“.

The problem with the Russian statement is that sodium-22 is in fact produced in a device called a cyclotron and not in the type of nuclear reactor containing uranium that most folks think of when they hear that term. Cyclotrons work by using very strong magnetic fields to accelerate ions (atoms stripped of one or more electrons so that they have an electric charge) to very high speeds before they are slammed into a target. The name “cyclotron” derives from the fact that the path traveled by the ions is circular (more accurately spiral).  In the case of sodium-22, the ions are deuterons. Deuterons are ions of heavy hydrogen, known as deuterium, which contain one proton and one neutron (and thus have a net charge of plus one), rather than just the solitary proton found in normal hydrogen.  When deuterons are accelerated to very high speeds and then made to slam into a target of magnesium, the normal magnesium-24 atoms absorb a deuteron and then quickly eject an alpha particle (a helium nucleus with two protons and two neutrons), turning into sodium-22.

Sodium-22 emits both a positron (this is the antimatter form of an electron, or an electron with a positive rather than a negative charge) and high energy gamma ray (like an X-ray), with a half-life of 2.6 years. It can be used in biological experiments as a “tracer”, buts its most common use in medical technology appears to be for calibration of an instrument known as a gamma probe.

The earliest reports on this story only included the Russian statement that the radioactive material only could have come from a nuclear reactor, but later reports are clearing up parts of the misleading nature of that statement. For example, at the time of this writing, the Reuters story, which has been evolving rapidly, characterizes sodium-22 as “an isotope that is used in medical equipment but has no weapons use”. Further, the story says:

Sodium-22 can be used for calibrating nuclear detectors and in medical equipment, nuclear experts said.

“There is no weapons aspect to this (material),” said Research director Lars-Erik De Geer of the Swedish Defense Research Institute.

It is not clear at all why Iran would need sodium-22 from an outside source, since Iran has registered a cyclotron with the IAEA (pdf, see page 167) that is stated to be used in the production of medical-related isotopes and is capable of producing high energy deuterons. Since Iran does have over 100 nuclear medicine departments, it would be reasonable to expect that there is demand for sodium-22 in calibration of equipment.

The sodium-22 in the luggage was in steel containers:

“Eighteen metallic objects of industrial origin were found, packed into individual steel boxes,” it [the Russian statement] said.

It is also not clear why this material would be shipped in airline baggage rather than through normal medical/industrial channels. Since sodium-22 is not used in weapons work, it would seem that there would be no prohibition on its importation into Iran. Reuters notes that the passenger shipping the luggage was an Iranian national and left Russia, presumably on the flight for which the bag was checked.  Russia has started a criminal investigation.

Update:  Here is Iran’s side of the story, from Mehr News:

Iranian ambassador to Moscow has said that Russian customs officers’ decision to temporarily hold an Iranian dental student at one of Moscow’s main airports was the result of a misunderstanding.

According to Reuters, Russia’s customs service said on Friday it had seized radioactive sodium-22, an isotope that is used in medical equipment but has no weapons use, from the luggage of an Iranian passenger planning to fly from Moscow to Tehran.

The material triggered an alarm in the airport’s radiation control system and a luggage search led to the discovery of 18 pieces of the radioactive metal packed in individual steel casings, the report claimed.

“Over a month ago, a dental student in Moscow, (before) flying to Iran, was (found) in possession of a material related to his work, which caused a misunderstanding for customs officials. Later, it turned out that it was not a special case, and the student continued his trip,” Ambassador Reza Sajjadi said.

Obama: “As the Father of 2 Daughters” I Want the Government to Ignore Science

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Barack Obama, who was educated in the country’s most esteemed universities, has implied that having daughters has convinced him the government should ignore science.

His anti-science justification came in response to questions about HHS’ decision to override the FDA’s recommendation that Plan B be made available over-the-counter. He justified his support for the decision on the fact that he has daughters.

President Obama said today that “as the father of two daughters,” he supports his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of the Plan B “morning after” birth control pill to girls under 17 years of age.

He also appealed to that classic anti-science “wisdom”–common sense–as rationale to ignore science.

“I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,” Obama said during an impromptu news conference at the White House.

I find it troubling not just that Obama wouldn’t see the wisdom of making it possible for young girls to avoid unplanned pregnancies that might otherwise present a much bigger health risk to them. But I find the appeal to fatherhood as justification for ignoring science even more troubling.

Because, of course, Obama has ignored the scientists before, most notably when he decided to let his and everyone else’s daughters breathe dangerous levels of ozone for several more years so as to appease big business. It’s science that shows Obama ought to reject the Keystone pipeline for the good of his daughters. It’s science that shows if we don’t take climate change more seriously immediately, Obama’s daughters’ and the rest of their generation will face a calamitous future.

Obama’s daughters are not my business, and in any case they seem well-able to see past the bullshit of their father’s job.

But when a highly educated person decides all of us should put aside science out of the pretense that his daughters will be safer because of it–that’s highly dangerous. It’s precisely because he has children that Obama ought to make sure all government decisions are governed first and foremost by the science.

Update: Emily Douglas makes almost the same point here.

Update: See also this excellent post from Kaili Joy Gray.

Dr. Sludgelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Junk Shotting And Love Teh Bomb

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Maybe those wacky Russians had it right and the best chance at actually shutting off the bleeding earth below the once and future Deepwater Horizon platform is to bomb the damn thing shut. From Jeremy Hsu via CSM:

Using a nuclear explosion to try to plug the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico might sound like overkill, but a Russian newspaper has suggested just that based on past Soviet successes. Even so, there are crucial differences between the lessons of the past and the current disaster unfolding.

The Russians previously used nukes at least five times to seal off gas well fires. A targeted nuclear explosion might similarly help seal off the oil well channel that has leaked oil unchecked since the sinking of a BP oil rig on April 22, according to a translation of the account in the daily newspaper Komsomoloskaya Pravda by Julia Ioffe of the news website True/Slant.

Weapons labs in the former Soviet Union developed special nukes for use to help pinch off the gas wells. They believed that the force from a nuclear explosion could squeeze shut any hole within 82 to 164 feet (25 to 50 meters), depending on the explosion’s power. That required drilling holes to place the nuclear device close to the target wells.

Yeah, yeah I know …. oooooh spooky nukes! But we have a whole catalog of conventional bunker busters, couldn’t one of these mothers of all bombs (MOABs) do the trick? I don’t know, I am not a deepwater oil well implosion expert. But you know what hasn’t worked? The big top hat, the little top hat, the giant sippy straw, the blow out preventer, toxic dispersant sold by a BP subsidiary and the top kill and junk shot BP blathers about are laughable on their face. The solution ideas to date have been straight out of the Wile E. Coyote Acme School of BP Profitology. And the Ferengi like addiction to oil profit is exactly the issue as BP has clung to every bone headed idiotic play available that will keep their precious oil well viable for production; all the while bleeding out its black death to the Gulf. BP would literally rather kill the Gulf and screw the citizenry than destroy its investment.

Now I first mentioned the bomb idea about a week ago, kind of tongue in cheek, in some of our backstage discussions (the theory is now known as the “bmaz bomb”). But I am not alone. Oh no, not alone at all; there are legitimate people going there too. Christopher J. Brownfield is a former nuclear submarine ranking officer in the US Navy and has a subsequent academic background in international energy policy. Brownfield has the same thought I have regarding the possibility of using conventional explosives to shut the well off:

But there could be be a third option that Obama might bring to the table, once we recognize that BP is just as concerned about salvaging its precious asset as it is about stopping the spill. Our military could potentially use a carefully placed combination of conventional explosives to collapse the well. Our technology is much better than that of the Soviet Union in 1966, so we should be able to make this work without having to go nuclear. I’m confident that the U.S. Navy, the Army Corps of Engineers, and some private-sector organizations could come together and make this happen. The only question is whether Obama will be bold enough to take charge of this problem at the risk of his presidency slipping down the deep, dark well.

Would it work? Heck, I dunno. But it sounds a little more plausible than hair brained schemes BP and the government have put their collective heads together to produce so far. I know this, out here in the west they use explosives to seal off mine shafts all the time, and quite effectively. You would think that the right experts could devise a solution that would close off a sufficient portion of the narrow well hole here to seal it permanently.

There is a lot of experience in controlled implosions under a variety of circumstances. Would it be harder a mile under the sea? Sure, but if we have the technology to be drilling there and two miles further down from the sea floor, then we ought to be able to figure this out too. If it destroys BP’s precious well, that is just an extra benefit; they don’t deserve it anyway.

As profound nukulur scholar Major King Kong would say, “Wahoooooooo”. Bomb the sucker!

[graphic by the one and only twolf and thanks to Eli for some terminology help]

T. Boone or not T. Boone

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h/t www.thewindturbines.com/

h/t www.thewindturbines.com/

We have had quite the go lately here at the FDL Borg Hive over the automaker bailout and, more specifically, the most pressing of which is GM. For the moment though, I want to touch on a corollary to the future of the American auto industry, and that is the transition to clean and green that needs to occur for long term sustainability of Deetroit wheels.

If we could flip the switch on a perpetual motion device, heck even the Chevy Volt, tomorrow, that would be wonderful. But we cannot. The path back to health and profit prosperity for American auto will be a process that takes time, and it is going to take intermediate steps while the new technology comes on line, gets refined and evolves into maturity.

The guy, for better or worse, that has been out front making noise about the transition from oil to clean and green is none other than the infamous, and legendary, Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens. Transition is the key word regarding the Pickens Plan as it relates to our topic de jour, automobiles. Because the Volt is not scheduled for release until 2010, and even assuming GM and its Volt makes it that far (which is no given), it will take a while for plug in technology to become deeply rooted. And, of course, a massive shift all at once to electric autos would crash our strapped and deteriorating power grid.

Pickens’ main point on internal combustion transition is that natural gas should be a, it not the, transition fuel for cars, and, more significantly, fleet vehicles.

Pickens’ Plan proposes that the natural gas that is currently used to fuel power plants could be used instead as a fuel for thousands of vehicles. Ken Medlock says that the US will continue to use natural gas for electric power generation. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, making it an increasingly popular fuel for power plants. Gas plants also produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

The technology needed for Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) vehicles such as City buses, fork lifts and passenger cars with CNG drivetrains is available now. Honda sells the Civic GX, with a 170-mile range. In addition, it is possible to convert vehicles to run on CNG in addition to leaving the conventional fuel injection intact, allowing the driver to switch back and forth at will. Kits are available for the do-it-yourselfer. Read more →

Sarah Palin: Gibberish We Can Believe In?

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Energy is supposed to be Sarah Palin’s strong point, right? After all, she is the Governor of Alaska, and more to the point, was the chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the agency that is supposed to "protect the public interest in exploration and development of oil and gas resources, while ensuring conservation practices, enhancing resource recovery, and protecting the health, safety, environment, and property rights of Alaskans." But when she was asked about ensuring that the fruits of domestic oil drilling would go to the domestic market, her answer was complete gibberish. By now, most of you have seen the video or read the transcript of her answer:

Read more →

Syriana

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Aurora Borealis (ionization of the upper atmosphere)(While I have been trying to find a resolution to MI’s DNC delegation in the last few days, the Admin put on their nukes in Syria dog and pony show. Partly because I didn’t have the time to do the Syria presentation justice, and partly because Professor Foland–whom you know from his great comments–has a lot more expertise on this area than I, I asked him to do a post assessing the presentation. Thanks for the really informative post, Prof! -ew)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of this Administration, it’s that if Dana Perino one day announces that the sky is blue, I will be forced to assume that an alien invasion has commenced with the total ionization of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

With that in mind, there’s an awful lot of cognitive dissonance for me in analyzing the evidence on the raid (apparently named "Operation Orchard" by the Israelis) on a Syrian desert site (apparently named "Al-Kibar"). Having started my own blog motivated by "the incredible amount of lies & hyperbole on the Iran situation of early 2006", I don’t find it easy to accept anything this Administration puts forth as evidence. I’m having all this difficulty because the pictures they showed last Thursday are clearly pictures of a nuclear reactor.

In what follows, I will lay out the history of what we’ve known about Operation Orchard and al-Kibar, what the latest photographs show, and what questions we should probably be asking.

Read more →

Who Let The Dogs Out? The Hounds Of Hatfill and the Federal Rules of Evidence

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On Marcy’s most recent Hatfill post, I made a mostly flippant comment on the dogs in the Hatfill case:

What if Hatfill is just a pig and leaves pizza crusts around everywhere he goes and the dogs are smelling that? What are the customary industry standards for certification of anthrax sniffing dogs anyway; and who sets and regulates them? Or is this just some “wonder mammal” like Lassie or Flipper or something? Was there video of the searches with the wonder dogs? Because there sure should have been. Or are these yet more video items of evidence that have been “misplaced”? What was the nature of the dog’s response? Did it emit a “plaintiff wail” like Nicole Simpson’s Akita? (Great trivia: Nicole’s Akita was named “Kato” too). I don’t see how the dog(s) here meet any evidentiary standards for admissibility or reliance by a court.

Despite it being mostly in jest, that comment had what I consider to be a critical, if not the critical, point in it. From what it appears, the only bit of "evidence" (and I use that descriptor loosely here, and in the generic sense, because I don’t think there was any proper evidence at all) against Hatfill that served as the basis for identifying him was that the dogs had alerted.

We all saw, in the tragic case of the late Richard Jewell, the horrendous and deleterious effects of a defective identification on an individual for an infamous crime. It is simply unconscionable to hang such a collar on someone without substantial credible hard evidence. And, quite frankly, the aura and implications of the anthrax case were, and are, far worse that the Atlanta Olympic park bombing. An entire nation was brought to a standstill and was trembling from a terrorist act that was capable of being repeated anywhere, at any time, in the country via the mail. So the United States government better have a pretty strong case before it implicates someone such as Hatfill in such a crime.

What substantial and credible hard evidence was the identification of Hatfill based on? Well, as has been previously discussed, he had worked in the bio-agent/anthrax field, had the technical expertise and, according to profilers, the personality to do the anthrax deed. The government indicates that he may be one of 50 or fewer people who had the skills to do it and had access to the strain. Then you add in allegations of violence in his past and ties to South African apartheid militias, and you can certainly understand why he was being looked at. While such information is not all entirely innocuous background, it is certainly nothing more than circumstantial and does not inculpate Hatfill; the only alleged link of Hatfill to the actual crime with the anthrax letters, at least that we are aware of to date, was the dogs. That’s it; there is nothing else. What are the standards for admissibility of dog scent Read more →

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