Atomic Nerds

Via Jay, a CNN article and a video about a researcher who has managed the rather mind-boggling feat of keeping small animals in suspended animation for hours through extreme oxygen deprivation, and reviving them without apparent consequence.

Obviously, this is awesome, and both the article and the video focus on the wide-ranging and extremely positive implications this would have for medicine. A great number of emergency conditions are emergencies because they must be solved before the patient runs out of oxygen and starts losing cells en masse; if you could put someone with, say, a rupturing aorta into suspended animation, what would have been a case of rapid death turns into a fairly simple repair just because “the patient’s blood is mostly in places that are not his blood vessels” ceases to be as pressing an issue.

So yes, it’s very awesome. They’re having trouble replicating the trick with larger animals, which if I had to guess is likely due to surface-area-to-volume ratio issues with distributing his oxygen-blocker throughout tissues before the chemical cascade that leads to cell death can be triggered (which itself requires SOME oxygen), but that’s the problem: I have to guess. Because CNN won’t even begin to explain how it’s being done. Both the article and the video occasionally range into the territory of elucidating why oxygen isn’t inherently critical for life, and how the good doctor is accomplishing the trick of keeping an energy-greedy creature like a mammal in a state of suspended animation without it, but every time they start to they shy violently from the subject like startled deer and go back to the implications of the potential results.

As is glancingly mentioned but not elucidated, in a lot of biological senses oxygen isn’t so much a godsend as it is a toxin. Like other elements in its neck of the periodic table, oxygen has a habit of forcefully mugging other atoms for their electrons; in fact it is so good at it that the basic chemical reaction of electron loss is called “oxidation”, as early views of chemistry thought that the general class of effects were all caused by oxygen*. When life first evolved on the planet, oxygen was as violently toxic to it as flourine- one of the few more vigorous oxidizers than oxygen- is to us; any contact with oxygen would rip apart delicate biochemical structures like a molecular buzz saw. This is still true for the relatively few remaining obligate anaerobes of this world. When the earliest cyanobacteria stumbled across an incredibly energy-rich metabolic process for using light for energy and taking their carbon from their atmosphere (photosynthesis), it was a planetwide ecological catastrophe because the waste gas was the very toxic oxygen.

Most of the existing diversity did not survive, and most of what did only could because of a series of adaptations that created biochemical defenses against oxygen; any life form that doesn’t react to oxygen like the Wicked Witch of the West did to water has one or more enzymes to disarm it. Catalase** and superoxide dismutases are the near-universal, with a couple of unusual bacterial twists on the theme, but overall, if you want to be exposed to oxygen and live, you need some powerful anti-oxidant capabilities in your biological chemistry set. Surviving oxygen necessarily preceded using it, evolutionarily speaking.

When a doctor refers to respiration, he generally means the act of breathing- muscles, lung tissue, and all. When a microbiologist refers to respiration, he’s probably thinking on the cellular level- whatever set of reactions is used to play electron tennis and use the energy released by the rearranging chemical bonds to convert larger molecules into a form of energy storeable and usable by the cell. Since oxygen has such a pull on electrons, it makes for an extremely efficient driver of one of these processes; a respiratory pathway that uses oxygen as the final acceptor of an electron is “aerobic” respiration. One that uses some other molecule is “anaerobic”. The key point of this now-getting-way-too-extended biochemistry lecture is that the distinction is made not just because oxygen respiration is the most common pathway, but because it yields much more energy with much greater efficiency than any other; if you want to be more than one cell big and you want to breed fast, you’d better be able to perform aerobic respiration. The only places where any organism that depends on an anaerobic pathway dominates are places where there is no or very, very little oxygen, for the same basic reason as why horse-drawn buggies aren’t competitive in NASCAR.

Humans, and other animals, can perform anaerobic respiration; you do it any time you exert yourself enough to get short of breath. You develop an oxygen debt, in which you dump your stored fuel and burn it inefficiently until you either run out of storage and are forcibly stopped, or can get the chance to stop and pant for awhile. The issue here, and why I want to throw things at CNN, is that this is inherently brief and unsustainable; we just have too high an inherent demand for energy, especially as mammals, for anaerobic metabolism to sustain us without an oxygen supplement, and even with some aerobic respiration still going it’s not sustainable for very long. They did a decent job of answering why cell death due to the sudden drop in oxygen doesn’t occur (by stopping the destructive reactions that require some level of oxygen to happen in the first place), but not how the suspended-animation state is possible to maintain.

In the linked video, Dr. Gupta goes one teetering step further than the article in explaining, and says Dr. Roth uses “ketones” as the new “fuel”. This is actually MORE confusing, because ketone bodies are themselves a form of stored energy that needs to be biochemically unpacked and turned into something usable in specific tissues- it’s one of those metabolic backup tools the body squirrels away in case it runs completely out of the stored and circulating carbohydrate that is faster and easier to burn. Worse than that, even if very high amounts of ketone were administered in order to make up for the loss of the energy from oxygen, that would be a problem in and of itself- it would throw the pH of the organism’s blood completely out of whack, which is a Large Problem as many enzymes have small ranges of pH in which they’ll work. Acidosis from excess ketones is what actually causes a dangerous “diabetic coma”, not the excess of blood glucose itself.

So the questions of how Dr. Roth is keeping his subjects supplied with enough usable energy to keep their cells going even in that minimal-energy state, how he manages to get their metabolisms to shift gears so drastically in the time needed (which in itself costs energy), and how that suspended animation capacity is even retained as a response in a group of complex organisms that have been obligate oxygen-respirers for a billion years are left a mystery. I suppose I can’t complain too hard as CNN is pitching to an audience that’s mostly scientifically illiterate, but couldn’t they at least leave a few more cookie crumbs for those of us that aren’t?

*Gaining electrons is called “reduction”. And with this pair of counterintuitive terms for a very basic class of reactions, a chemistry student’s long nightmare begins.

**Ever used hydrogen peroxide to break up a bloodstain? That fizzing reaction is the remaining catalase in the blood reacting with the peroxide, which are even more aggressive oxidizers.

After a prolonged period of much hectic activity and general excessive hustle and bustle, some sort of break was downright necessary. Conveniently having suffered oxygen deprivation induced memory loss lost some of my earlier impressions of how Mike is prone to charging up vertical surfaces the same way Bugs Bunny does to evade Yosemite Sam, the notion of a grouse hunt came up to take care of some R n’ R for everybody.

As it turns out, grouse are actually mythical creatures, which exist only in tales of fantasy. Legends of their existence in Los Alamos are, at least given Sunday’s outing, greatly exaggerated, and the term “grouse”, as Mike pointed out his own self, can be used interchangably with the term “snipe.” Also, living and exercising at 7000′ elevation doesn’t really help as much as you would expect at 9000′-11000′, but we’ll get to that.

This hunt, fortunately, started off much better than the last go round. Rising at a much saner hour than is necessary for elk (the sun was already up and everything!), LabRat and I set about gathering a lunch, water, and the other basic supplies for a day out in the peaks around town. Mike called in a few minutes behind schedule, so we even got to do this at a more leisurely pace than already planned. All signs were thus far pointing to a good day.

We arrived at The Location. You don’t get to know The Location. If the waveform on Schroedinger’s Grouse ever collapses into an actual grouse at The Location, I would prefer the first crack at it, if only to study it and figure out how to become a probability wave myself, so I can travel without having to bother with TSA anymore. Mike outlined the plan, head up a fairly easy looking hill to near its crest, then follow the border of huntable land for a while. There was a reasonable clump of trees between us and the ridge line, which should have been a warning sign. Off we set into the hills, Mike explaining ins, outs, whys, hows, tricks, tactics, and tips along the way. Still, so far so good.

Then we cleared the grove of trees. The hill veered sharply upwards, and the ground was covered with large lumps and clumps of grass, making the process of finding good footing somewhat tricky. Metaphorically dropping into four wheel drive, we kept on up the hill, still looking for the elusive head of a creature designed to look like a fallen log with a curious knot sticking up. Unbidden, passages from Pat McManus’ essay “Doing the Chuckar Chuckle” popped into my head, what with chasing birds up unpleasantly steep hills and such. I pushed the thoughts from my head, rationalizing that we weren’t actively chasing the birds, we were only looking for them, and once we found them things would be simple.

A bit of puffing and gasping, and a few slightly rolled ankles later, we reached the crest. From there, the walk did, in fact, become quite pleasant and easy. The view was spectacular, and even if the wind was a bit stiffer than anybody would have liked, it was still overall a gorgeous day, and worth the trip on its own.

Pressing on, we continued to not see any grouse. Circling back to our starting point, things began trending downhill, in more ways than one. LabRat has never been posessed of what one could call an excess of grace and coordination. In years past, rolling her ankles rather badly had been something of a tradition, brought out at least once a year just for good measure. The lumpy and unstable hillocks of grass began to remind her of this fact, as the downhill portion was pocked with rather deeper pockets between the grass than the uphill, making for even more precarious footing. Then the food poisoning kicked in.

This seems to be a pattern. And I don’t like it.

By the time we reached the bottom of the grouseless hill, her ankles were pretty well shot, and her intestines were reported to be making threats against freedom and happiness. President Obama apologized to her intestines for good measure, but to no avail. We broke for lunch. Mike and his lovely bride Amelia broke out a spread that Escoffier would praise. I pulled out a ham sandwich. I don’t think the clever napkin trick to make it look like I actually had a 47-course tasting menu worked. Have I mentioned that Mike smokes one hell of a salmon? Just sayin’. LabRat’s intestines began enriching uranium. President Obama praised their peaceful intentions.

After a random idiot paraded through and let his dog attack Mike’s Chessie and our supposed bird-flusher Booker (Booker was prepared to rofl-stomp the other dog, despite the handicap of being leashed), we debated the plan. Booker was given a stern lecture about taking his duties flushing grouse more seriously and spending less time investigating gopher holes, and we headed to a nearby spot with higher odds of finding birds. LabRat opted to stay behind to ensure her intestinal uranium facility did not violate any international treaties.

Setting off into the woods again, I was pleased to find our approach to the new area was by, of all miracles, a trail. A nice, simple trail, with only moderate uphill sections. We motored along at a decent clip. After a half mile or so, we reached the pasture in which Mike claimed grouse frequently collapsed their wave-forms. I looked at the pasture. I looked at Mike. I looked at the trail back to the truck and prayed I had some rope, climbing pitons, and oxygen tanks. Mike explained the planned route. I searched for a Sherpa.

Setting off into the now-hated grass clumps, we climbed. Mike charged up the hill, pausing only to flush some rather nice deer. I paused to look for them, and discovered I was standing in the remains of their lunch. We climbed. While Amelia and I measured our progress with pride in ten-step increments (give or take), Mike gobbled vertical yards faster than Lindsay Lohan can gobble vodka. At this point, I was also beginning to suspect that thirty year old mil-surp might not make an ideal daypack, as the hand-me-down ALICE pack I had used *coughmumble* years ago in Boy Scouts began to turn my shoulders into a knot of solid ache. Stupid thing worked fine in Scouts, I guess the straps must have started to rot or suffer metal fatigue or something in the intervening time. Mike did a few laps up and down the mountain to check on us.

Eventually, ankles and shoulders voicing no small displeasure with me, we reached the peak, still grouseless despite Booker’s best efforts in the tree lines. I ducked as a communications satelite passed over and stopped to catch my breath. I thought about asking whether Mike’s mother was really a Peruvian mountain goat and if his father was a Polaris or a Yamaha ATV, but could neither think of a politic way to bring it up, nor capture sufficient oxygen in my lungs to work my vocal cords anyway.

Having exchanged high-fives with the crew of the International Space Station as they passed by, we turned and worked along the treeline along the top of the ridge. The Satan-spawned grass hillocks continued to assault my ankles, and I was quietly grateful that LabRat had stayed behind, as at this point we almost certainly would have had to build a travois to haul her out, picking up tiny splinters of bone from the field her joints would have spread themselves over. The grouse continued to exist only in potential, stubbornly refusing to be observed and solidify in our reality. Thankfully, we were moving more or less at constant elevation, and I was now able to remain only mostly out of breath.

The ridge itself was lovely. We found where some elk had been hanging out, I stepped in their breakfast, and we swapped stories of the ridiculous when we managed to catch a spare oxygen molecule, such as the idiot family of a man who was killed by a tree falling in the woods that was suing the forest service for not warning people of this unforeseeable danger. We menaced the trees to make sure they didn’t get any funny ideas. Never turn your back on an aspen.

Three hundred and sixty two miles later, we angled down hill, still sans grouse. Booker had lost faith and was investigating every gopher hole we could find, which slowed us down some as there was apparently a gopher convention going on, and every furry little digger this side of the prime meridian was busily burrowing in our “grouse meadow.” My pack had ceased turning my shoulders into knots, and was now using the knots to attempt to shatter my vertabrae. I fished a bone chip out and tried to lighten the load some by drinking more of my water. Re-shouldering the pack, I noted glumly that it had absorbed half the rocks on the hill during its brief contact with the ground, and now weighed 14,000lbs more than when I took it off. I vowed to burn it when I got home, in case it was a witch.

The spot we angled downhill was thankfully nowhere near the vertical assault we had taken to climb the mountain. The walk turned surprisingly easy, given the abuse I’d inflicted on my ankles and the fact that my shoulders were conducting a clinical trial on pain infliction. The wind had died some, and the bitter chill inflicted earlier by standing on the edge of space had abated, with the sun warming us pleasantly. The grouse milled about by the tens of thousands, cleverly standing directly behind us and pivoting around to stay there any time we tried to spot them.

We picked the trail back up to head out, Amelia staying out a bit with an unloaded gun, trying to tempt the grouse into at least obeying Murphy’s law, but they didn’t take the bait. Gotta hand her points for enthusiasm. I meanwhile was considering amputating my shoulders, and had decided that burning my pack was too good for it, and that as soon as I got a reactor up and running, I would toss it into the glowing core and then burn the ashes.

As trails are wont to do, this one had of course lengthened when we weren’t looking. We exchanged friendly greetings with the Lewis and Clark expedition. We changed time zones fourteen times. I realized that burning the irradiated ashes of my pack wasn’t a good idea, and might anger the thing further. Instead, I would attempt to chop it into tiny pieces, burn those, irradiate the ash, and ship them via UPS to several small third world countries and a couple of Senators and Congressmen. Mike continued to cover yardage faster than most forms of motorized transport I’ve encountered. I considered the possibility that Mike was a witch.

Eventually, we arrived back at the trucks. LabRat looked grim, but intact. My shoulders looked grim, and not particularly intact. My pack looked smug. Booker and Amelia looked ready for a good rest. Mike looked contemplatively at a nearby peak. Collectively we looked for rope to restrain Mike. Guns and gear were stowed, and the beer came out. Lies were swapped, recipes traded, you know the drill. Slightly rested, full of ache, and empty of bird, we parted ways and headed home, thoroughly battered and worn out (except for Mike).

Can’t wait to do it again.

The always wonderfully geeky Roberta X has taken note of some rather… unexpected reactions to NASA’s latest effort to dodge around the miles of red tape and crippling bureaucracy that have hampered them for so long and actually increase our knowledge of the solar system and things generally Not Here.

They bombed the moon.

Why they bombed the moon is to study the matter ejected by slamming the upper stage of the LCROSS launch vehicle in at high speed. They bombed the moon rather successfully, hitting their target dead center on, and exactly on time.

Ms. X observed rather charitably that the witless were less than impressed. To steal another of her hard-found links, I’d go so far as to say that some of them are too fucking stupid to live. Ms. X covers very nicely why these slack-jaw simpletons deserve scorn, and heaps a nice, sizable pile on them while she’s at it. (And by the by, she’s got some really cool personal heros, too. I’m kinda partial to Edwin Hubble, bastard that he was, but Chandrashekhar is nobody to shake a stick at either.)

I know that by and large I’m preaching to the choir with this post. Most who wander by here are broadly of the position in some degree or another that science rocks. No, all this build up is for a different point of “How cool is THAT?!”

First, some quick facts. The main impacting slug is 2m x 2.6m give or take a little. The moon itself is on average roughly 380,000km from Earth (356,334km at perigee, 405,503 at apogee). The diameter of the moon is 3476km. We’ll give NASA the easy shot, and use their required target accuracy of hitting a spot 10km in radius. The thumbnail math works that out to 314 square km of bullseye out of 9489632 square km of possible target area facing us, or 00.00033% of the available surface to count as a hit.

Given the range of 380,000 km, 1 minute of angle works out to a spot 4155730.5″ across or roughly 65.5 miles- just a skosh larger than the 10km (6.2 mile) target radius. So even using the sloppy targeting accuracy, NASA just made a shot that works out to slightly under 1/10 MOA accuracy. Now consider that the expected accuracy was a 1.2km target radius, and preliminary reports are that they still whomped the bullseye- at a range that it takes light more than a full second to get from here to there.

Of course I’m sure there’s some Benchrest Geek deep in the bowels of NASA muttering “Damn… ’bout one click up and one click left and I woulda hit perfect…”

Holly rips yet another “men are simple, women are incomprehensible Rubik’s cubes of evolution” article here. It’s every bit as good as you would think of an article entitled “Why Women Have Sex”. This bit especially was pure gold, and I’ll be seriously tempted in the future to steal it when talking about the subject:

I’m going to write a book, “Why Women Have Lunch.” Hunger is the obvious reason, but as my highly scientific survey reveals, women may also have lunch to socialize, to take a break from work, or even simply out of habit. Some women want the opportunity to try a new food, and others may want warm food on a cold day. Wow, women sure are complicated!

“President Barry got the Nobel cracker jack Peace Prize.”
“{thirty seconds of sputtering noises}…that’s not nice to tell someone who spent all night on the weird-dream express. I can’t tell if this is the real universe, or the one where I’m at a fair grounds with dog teams and twisty slides. You kept coming in and telling me weird stuff then, too.”

I’m really happy for you, and I’ma let you finish, but Yassir Arafat had the best Nobel Peace Prize of all time.

Because it’s easy and because it was a recent source of frustration, the oddest things ever said to me during any discussion of firearms. Paraphrased for passage of time and memory, brevity, and coherency:

Gun nuts talk about how the second amendment was meant to allow citizens to rebel against the government, but it was really implemented to allow Southern slave owners to put down slave rebellions!

This one just blew my fucking mind, if only because it came off as a massive non-sequitur to me. Yes, the best way to make your point to someone whose overwhelming concerns are individual liberty and personal responsibility is to tell them that the concept they thought they were defending because they admired one group was actually snuck in by another group that were bad people, therefore the entire thing is fallacious.

That it had very apparently had never entered the individual making the argument’s head that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass which group had an idea, being vastly more interested in whether the idea was a sound one or worth defending, was psychologically educational. I abandoned the idea of giving said individual an extended history lesson on the subject of the history of gun rights and slaves (specifically, how terrified said Southern slave owners were of the possibility that the second amendment might extend to them), for much the same reason I don’t try to teach the dogs to speak Mandarin Chinese.

You think you need a gun to make you feel like a real man!

This after I had been referred to repeatedly in the relevant thread as “she”. Neither have I ever suffered any gender dysphoria. When this was brought up, the commenter in question replied that it was clear I had “balls” anyway. Um, okay. I’ll just chalk up my managing to have an opinion under that “must be a man” file that seems to get so extensive on the internet. (Bonus points: the individual that gave me the line about slaves above also assumed I was a dude.)

If one of us thinks the subject is really someone’s dick even though the subject of conversation is the legality, philosophy, and other issues surrounding a machine, which one of us really has the gender issues?

You wouldn’t be so fearful if you just were around people more and realized they mean no harm/I’m not afraid so I don’t need to think about violence.

For some reason, nobody accuses people who keep home first aid kits, fire extinguishers, or other emergency tools of being terrified of the world. Why is willful ignorance considered evidence of psychological soundness?

That’s a man’s job

Stingray and I spend a lot of time together, but I don’t keep him in my hip pocket. Even when experiencing unfortunate consequences of femaleness, I still manage not to menstruate all over my gun, and I’ve never seen him use his penis to fire one. I am now at loss as to why so much as thinking bout guns or self-defense should be a men-only domain.

You shouldn’t keep anything lethal handy!

Nice car you’re driving. No, I wasn’t trying to change the subject…

Once more we are being overtaken by events (seriously, I don’t know what arranged my karma for this week, but I can’t think of what I could have done to deserve it), so have a fast link: A Business Plan and Brass Balls Will Get You Everywhere

It seems that in Britain, the spirit of capitalism is not quite dead; an enterprising fellow bought himself an automatic ticket machine, set up shop in a parking lot, and allowed the city to assume he was being paid by the lot’s owner while the lot’s owner assumed he was being paid by the city. End result: some millions in tax-free revenue for the hard worker… who has vanished without a trace.

ETA: As basically all the commenters have pointed out… turns out it’s an urban legend. Mea culpa; allergies are still kicking my ass and both ideas and time for content have been thin on the ground lately.

If you haven’t already heard, Peter of Bayou Renaissance went and had himself a heart attack. Latest word is that he’s stable, but they’re going to be doing some major plumbing work on his ticker tomorrow morning.

I haven’t had the opportunity to meet him in person yet, but Peter is Good People no matter how you slice things. Cross your fingers for him, say a prayer if you swing that way, or at the very least swing over and leave some love in his comments.

Normally, it’s taken as a given on the right that the entirety of cable news save Fox leans left, and by the left that the entirety of “corporate media” (especially Fox, or Faux as you are bound by law to refer to it after you vote for your third Democrat) leans right. Liberals generally scoffed at the idea that the media was openly biased in favor of Obama during the last election*, although Hillary Clinton supporters certainly had little trouble believing it.

You probably know my position- I do think a lot of the media, especially MSNBC, fell a little bit to a lot in love with Obama’s story and became invested in him as “their” President. Which is probably why CNN and Wolf Blitzer felt they had to leap to the defense of the administration in order to protect it from the dangerous disinformation about Obama spread by that nefarious organ of right-wing dirty tricks, Saturday Night Live. I shit you not:

Blitzer’s opening line?

Seems no politician is safe from Saturday Night Live…

WELL FUCKING SPOTTED, EAGLE EYE. Welcome to the last thirty-four years. Saturday Night Live has been sending up every single occupant of the White House since its inception, from Gerald Ford right on through Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W, and now Obama. It’s what they DO. It’s never been particularly creative, either; they usually pick some political-cartoon perception, blow it as far out of proportion as they can get away with, and that’s your standard topical joke for the next four to eight years.

Blitzer goes on here to deliver two and a half minutes of hard-hitting probing into checking SNL’s “facts” and concluding that their portrayal of Obama as an incompetent who can’t get anything done isn’t “fair” because the things he listed are things that are “in progress” according to a political fact-checking site. A TOPICAL LATE-NIGHT COMEDY VARIETY SHOW WASN’T TOTALLY FAIR IN THEIR OVER-THE-TOP SATIRIZATION? THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE! STOP THE MOTHERFUCKING PRESSES AND LET’S GET THIS SHIT CLEARED UP BEFORE AMERICA GETS CONFUSED!

Naturally, the whole thing had to be contrasted with Tina Fey’s “dead on” portrayal of Sarah Palin, which consisted entirely of getting the outfit and the accent right and then proceeding to act out a generic “airhead beauty queen” stereotype. CNN goes on to inform us that “some people” think it might have affected national perception of Palin as a clueless lightweight- which is naturally now only important now that the far-off ghost of a possibility exists that the same thing might happen to poor, underexposed Obama, who just can’t seem to catch a break in the media cycle to get his own spin on things**.

But, it’s okay. We can all relax now. CNN is on the job to get the straight facts to America: Saturday Night Live will mock politicians, even this one!. Now that we are safely warned, we can bump that terror alert level back down to “sweaty palms” and move on to the healing.

*Although some of the very same media admit that it was.

**If the sarcasm in that sentence didn’t warp your monitor, you may need to adjust some settings.