Large-Scale Disasters (a quiz)

What with the Transformers 3 filming going on near my office building, I've seen and heard a whole lot of explosions this week. Although the fireballs were real, the disaster was not. But some fiery catastrophes are all too real.

1. BP finally got a cap on the well, which may or may not have paused the leak. But another leak, which BP couldn't plug, revealed that:

a. BP has been doctoring some of the photos it releases.

b. CEO Tony Hayward doctored his resumé before BP hired him.

c. All BP interns belong to an elaborate "hot or not"-style internal social networking site.

d. BP is at serious risk of bankruptcy.

2. Two exploded pipelines caused a large oil spill (relative to most, anyway) off the shore of:

a. Canada

b. Chile

c. China

d. Croatia

3. Dick Cheney recently had surgery that left him without:

a. a heart

b. a pulse

c. scruples

d. a spleen

4. Experts are carefully evacuating hundreds of eggs containing super-adorable baby sea turtles from the shores of the Gulf. After hatching, the turtles are released off the eastern coast of Florida. The risk in this feel-good plan is that:

a. the oil will travel around Florida and get the turtles anyway.

b. the turtles' internal navigation systems, calibrated for the Gulf, will get them lost and/or eaten.

c. high levels of Disney World-related pollution will make the turtles ill.

d. hurricane season will, um, hurricane them.

5. The state of New York is planning to "eliminate" 170,000:

a. squirrels, due to a Manhattan rabies epidemic.

b. deer, to reduce car accidents.

c. frogs, due to noise pollution.

d. Canada geese, to prevent plane crashes.

Answers are in the comments. And here are two guys who are totally unconcerned about potential disasters (unlike me, after realizing this was going on under my office window).

This dude is so relaxed, he's taking a nap.

"Doing the Happy Dance"

Have you heard this week's big news? No, not about Lindsay going to jail, or whatever's leaking or not leaking out of the oil well. I mean the news from South Africa about a gel for women that can cut HIV infection rates in half.

"Boy, have we been doing the happy dance," says researcher Salim Abdool Karim. Here's why:

Ever since it was discovered in 1984 that HIV causes AIDS, scientists and government officials have been swearing a vaccine is just a few years away. But the virus has proven to be more squirrely than anyone expected. An exciting vaccine was tested on humans starting in the mid-2000's, but researchers had to stop the trial early: not only was the vaccine failing to prevent infection, it seemed to increase the risk of HIV.

In Africa, there are 3.5 million new HIV cases every year, and women are disproportionately affected. As the study notes, "behavioral messages on abstinence, faithfulness and condom promotion have had limited impact," especially in the sub-Saharan region. Some schoolgirls are so desperately poor that they have "transactional" unprotected sex with older men in exchange for financial support.

The new gel is inexpensive, and women can use it without the cooperation (or knowledge) of their partners. It contains a drug called tenofovir that attacks retroviruses (like HIV). And in this trial, women who consistently used the gel cut their risk of HIV infection in half.

More, and larger, studies will have to be done before the gel can be made publicly available. But the 900 women in this study provided better news than the AIDS world--which is to say, the world--has heard in years.

Autism and Automatons

Robots, robots, I love robots, robots are so great, I love, I love, I love robots because they are so cool... *starts singing weird chant about robots*

That's a comment on my magazine's web site from a girl who goes by Mango. A lot of our readers love robots, and they write in to tell us so. I would guess that a lot of them, or at least a decent pie-slice, are also on the autism spectrum. Several of them wrote in to say so after our autism-themed issue. Here's Mango again:

I am a person with Asperger's and proud of it! I go to a gifted school, go to Lego League, and all in all feel pretty smart.

So I was intrigued by this New York Times article about robots in classrooms, especially robots designed to interact with autistic kids. A bunch of labs are working on versions of classroom robots right now. Some of them are not specifically aimed at autistic kids; South Korea, for example, is putting into its classrooms hundreds of robots that will play with the kids and act as teacher aides.

Though a robot is extremely patient and has a great head for facts, none of the robots, so far, are meant to replace teachers. Some give foreign language lessons (I'm sure they're vocabulary whizzes, but how are they with idioms?). Some just hang out with preschoolers, at an age where basic social interaction is the lesson. The article describes one robot that popular with the kids when it first entered a classroom, but had its arms yanked off by the end of the day. Its programmers cleverly rewired it to cry when kids pulled its arms. The result? Over-aggressive kids first backed off--then came back to give the crying robot a hug.

A robot can read your facial expressions and respond accordingly. It can use artificial intelligence and speech recognition to have a conversation with you. And with autistic children, it can conduct a kind of therapy.

In recent experiments at a daycare center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

"The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up," said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, "you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with."

The story quotes an 8-year-old with Asperger's who practices karate kicks with a robot. "I just love robots," he says, "and I know this is therapy, but I don't know--I think it's just fun."

On the one hand, it seems counterintuitive to treat autistic children, whose chief difficulty is interacting with humans, by having them spend time with a robot instead. But autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, Sacha's cousin) speculates that autistic children find robots more appealing than people because robots are more predictable. He says that autistic kids "find unlawful situations toxic...They can't cope. So they turn away from people and turn to the world of objects."

So researchers have been working on robot buddies for autistic children for years. They avoid creepy androids in favor of cutesy machines. This little guy, for example, is tiny and squishy. But its young autistic friends are happy to give the robot a kiss, or feed it imaginary medicine when it has a Band-aid on its head.

Of course, the robot also has cameras in its eyeballs. But if this is what the future of artificial intelligence looks like, I think I can get behind it.

Make sure you watch this video of the little guy dancing to Spoon before you disagree.

(Images: nytimes.com, popsci.com)

Oktopus Orakel

What would his decision be? On a live television broadcast, the rugged young celebrity considered his options one last time. The audience members watched him with bated breath, each with their own loyalties at heart. Whichever team he chose would be feeling the reverberations for years. Finally, with no more hesitation, he plunged his eight tentacles into the box on the right and devoured his mussel reward.

No, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write about octopuses and sports twice in one week.

Paul (what kind of a name is that for an octopus, by the way? It's like when someone names their golden retriever Katie, and when they call for it in the park you think they've lost their child) is a 2-year-old octopus living in an aquarium in Germany. He has correctly predicted the outcome of all six World Cup games that the German team played this year. In 2008, he went four for five in predicting winners of the European soccer championships.

For each game, Paul is presented with two clear plastic boxes. Each box holds a tasty mussel and displays the flag of one of the two teams. The box Paul dines from first is supposed to represent the winning team.

When asked to choose between Germany and Spain before Wednesday's game, Paul initially sat on top of the German box for a moment--then dove decisively into Spain's box. After his prophesy came true, the octopus's countrymen turned on him. Several German newspapers called for him to be thrown in a frying pan, even offering recipe suggestions.

Meanwhile, a Spanish-American chef removed octopus from his restaurant's menu in honor of Paul. And PETA, true to form, demanded that the captive-born animal be sent back to the ocean. "It is extremely thankless, imprisoning the intelligent octopus in order to use it as an oracle," said a PETA marine biologist. (A spokesperson for the German aquarium responded that, intelligent as Paul is, he would probably die if left to fend for himself.)

This morning, Paul made his most anticipated pick yet, choosing Spain over the Netherlands to win the World Cup finals.

His handlers have already noted that Paul is a "Germany expert," and his predictive powers for other nations are less well established. Will his prediction come true? If not, will Spain continue to be so adoring toward the cephalopod ? (After Paul received cooking threats this week, the Spanish prime minister joked that he was "thinking of sending him a protective team.")

Paul does add another layer to the question of which team you're rooting for. Maybe you're hoping to see Paul crash and burn. Personally, I don't have strong sports loyalties or any known genetic ties to Spain or the Netherlands. I picked Argentina to win it all in my knockout pool (though my picks were, possibly like Paul's, largely random). So in the absence of another reason to root for someone, I'm going to have to cheer for the octopus. Viva el Pulpo Paul!

Thwok!

Did you know Wimbledon ended? I totally missed it. But what's not over is the World Cup. BVVVVVVVvvvvvVVVVVVVzzzzzzzzzVVVVV! (That's how you say "Woohoo!" in Afrikaans.)

In Zulu, "to celebrate" is jabulani, which is also the name of this year's new soccer ball. While a normal soccer ball is made of 32 panels--a mix of hexagons and pentagons--the Jabulani has only 8 panels. And instead of being stitched together, which creates deep grooves, the panels are thermally bonded. This means the surface of the ball seems to be smoother, overall, compared to the classic black-and-white ball.

But apparently, a bumpier surface is better. That's why golf balls have dimples: they cause the air flow to hug the ball tightly, which reduces drag and makes the ball fly straighter. With a smooth surface, the air flow kind of zips off from the ball and creates a wide wake behind it. You can see this in the video from Caltech that I screen-grabbed above. Instead of hugging the back of the ball, the air is shooting away from it. Researchers say that this might make the new soccer ball fly in an unpredictable way. I'm sure that British goalie will be eager to agree.

In other sports news, did you know that Wimbledon had its first official poet this year? Matt Harvey wrote a new poem for every day of the competition. In honor of the three-day Mahut-Isner marathon match, he wrote (inevitably, it seems) a haiku:

high performance play

all day yet still no climax

it's tantric tennis

His sound poem called "Thwok!" is both ridiculous and pretty awesome.

bounce bounce bounce bounce

thwackety wackety zingety ping

hittety backety pingety zang

wack, thwok, thwack, pok

...Actually, you should just listen to him reading the whole thing, because the British accent makes it better.

By the end, Harvey admitted he was "losing it slightly":

so Serena really oughta

fear a Vera Zvonareva

upset--she knows she could not get

a more ominous opponent

But isn't some silly rhyming a nice foil to the usual earnestness of Wimbledon? I'm sure Ogden Nash would have thought so. And he certainly would have wanted me to balance out all the seriousness on this site with some lighthearted poetry. So here's Ogden, commenting on--what else?--the inkfish.

The Octopus

Tell me, O Octopus, I begs

Is those things arms, or is they legs?

I marvel at thee, Octopus;

If I were thou, I'd call me Us.

Your Cell Phone Isn't Killing You (Despite What You've Read)

I promise I wasn't looking for another New York Times columnist to argue with. Maureen Dowd just fell right into my lap today* while I was checking the news online. Number one on the Times's "most e-mailed" list right now is: "Are Cells the New Cigarettes?"

I thought, "Ooh, stem cells!" and clicked on the story. There's been some news recently about a woman with kidney disease who died after receiving an experimental stem-cell treatment in Thailand. A group called the International Society for Stem Cell Research is cracking down on clinics that offer unproven stem cell treatments to desperate patients.

Disappointingly, Maureen Dowd didn't mean cells, she meant cell phones. (But I understand the temptation to choose snappy alliteration over clarity.) San Francisco is going to start requiring cell phone retailers to display how much radiation each model emits. There is already a legal limit to how much radiation phones can emit, and you can find the numbers online somewhere, if you're a dedicated Googler. But in San Francisco, the "amount of radio frequency energy seeping into the body and brain" will now be displayed.

Dowd commends the mayor for "caring about whether kids' brains get fried." Personally, I'm against brain frying of any kind. But do cell phones fry your brain? Or, more specifically, give you brain tumors?

The rumor has been out there for a long time, and a lot of time and money has ben put into investigating the question. The National Cancer Institute cites about 30 studies on the subject. The conclusion? "Research studies have not shown a consistent link between cell phone use and cancer." Studies have focused on various types of brain cancer, how often people use their phones, and even what side of their head people talk on, and found no solid evidence of brain frying.

There have been a few studies, though, that claimed to find some connection between cell phone use and cancer. One difficulty of these studies is self reporting: If you ask a person with a terrifying brain cancer, "Say, did you use your cell phone especially often--before you got that tumor in your head?" what do you think they're going to say? Overall, there was no increase in brain cancer in this country between 1987 and 2007.

Cell phone towers, as opposed to the phones themselves, have also been rumored to cause brain frying. But a recent study found they were perfectly safe.

Of course, most of us have been using cell phones for less than 10 years. It's possible that they're causing slow-developing tumors, and in another 10 or 20 years their effects will be obvious. But it's worth asking how they would cause cancer at all. Cell phones emit radio waves, which are non-ionizing radiation. That is, unlike UV rays or X-rays, cell phone waves can't mess up your DNA. I'm no physics expert, but the NCI makes it pretty clear: "There is currently no conclusive evidence that non-ionizing radiation emitted by cell phones is associated with cancer risk."

The San Francisco mayor is just worried about people's safety. "You see all these kids literally glued to their cell phones," he says.** But with so many actually dangerous things out there, I wish people wouldn't fear-monger about dangers that are speculative. Besides, I have observed my 19-year-old sister using her cell phone in her natural habitat. Though she is capable of sending a hundred text messages in one day, I don't think I've ever seen her talk on the thing.

*Not literally.

**Not literally.

Don't Panic! (a quiz)

Did anyone else in Chicago experience an earthquake tremor and tornado sirens in the same day this week? Maybe this is a good time to review disaster preparedness!

1. In the event of a tornado, which of the following does the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOT recommend?

a. Staying in your car

b. Covering yourself with a mattress

c. Sitting in the bathtub

d. Taking the locations of upper-floor pianos and refrigerators into consideration when choosing your safe spot

2. If you're riding the subway and it catches fire, what should you do?

a. Panic

b. Get on the floor (watch out for urine!) to avoid the smoke

c. Pull that red emergency handle above the door, then leap from the train

d. Re-enact Tobais's "Oh my God, they're having a FIRE!...sale" audition from Arrested Development

3. Which of the following is NOT true about invasive Asian carp?

a. One was found downstream of Lake Michigan this week

b. They can weigh 100 pounds and jump 8-10 feet in the air

c. They can break through underwater electric barriers

d. Luckily, they don't reproduce very quickly

4. The tiny earthquake tremor you might have felt on Wednesday came from a 5.0 earthquake in:

a. Juneau, Alaska

b. Toronto, Ontario

c. San Diego, California

d. the Atlantic Ocean

5. This afternoon, children participating in Mayor Daley's "Fishing Chicago" program on the Chicago River could be heard shrieking in terror because:

a. They saw an Asian carp leaping out of the river

b. Someone fell in

c. A guy dressed in a creepy Subway sandwich costume approached them

d. Someone finally caught a fish, and once it came out of the water they all realized it was kind of gross looking

Answers in the comments. Photo: USFWS