Fabulous Games and Prizes - in the lab.

I'm sure many readers are aware of the X Prize for various goals reached in commercializing the space race, as illustrated by the landmark (spacemark?) achievement by SpaceShipOne in 2004. But did you know there are X Prizes for cell crushers too?

There's another cool 10 million bucks out there for the ability to cut the cost of genomic sequencing into the affordable range, that is, to sequence one person's entire genome for less than a thousand dollars.

There appears to be several groups that are going to make this a photo finish.

The possibilities of such a cheap and afforable technology are staggering, as one's genome would become core information in medical files, allowing treatments and therapies to be targeted with greater precision.

I recall in 1994 as a college freshman I went to a seminar with a representative of the Human Genome Project, then working on merely sequencing a composite of the complete genome. I was told of the industrious effort being put into this project, a thousand computers crunching millions of numbers non-stop with a target of around 2006. Not only did the HGP beat that goal by a long shot, they were almost usurped by a private company! The merger into the HGP is its own sordid story, alas. Never the less, the acceleration curve of our technology is staggering sometimes.

A bucket of coke and a better built house: Fat America

A fantastic new book out, the Fattening of America attempts to get a real headlock on the hard questions as to why and how Americans have become so alarmingly obese. This is the first book I've read that takes a moment to ask a question most books gloss right over: Is a big Fat America a bad thing?

In the book, Eric Finkelstein, a health economist argues that our economy, with its massive increase in productivity through technology, has predisposed us to gaining weight. Our jobs have become more and more sedentary and new medical technology has overall lowered the risk of carrying a few extra or a few dozen extra pounds. The power saw and mechanical lifts have preserved the backs and knees of our construction workforce, but it also allowed them to get chubbed and diabetic. At the same time, our accelerated productivity has made things cheaper and more accessible to the bulk (no pun intended) of the population.

This book also intersects with an intriguing study out this week about how living longer is more expensive than being fat. For many years people have laid into the argument that being obese, and as such being more vulnerable to a host of metabolic diseases is a drain on the health care system. Indeed it seems a healthy individual with a longer life span will have a greater financial impact on government run and private health care than any group of obese individuals could do so.

Clearly in the end there's a lot of non-salient factors such as one's happiness, the impact of obesity on relatives and discrimination and social perception of obesity that aren't well covered here, but this book is truly the first in its field to crack open a lot of stronghold notions that have since gone unchallenged.

Fish Mining

See here a new US effort to open Federal Waters for aquaculture. This is being received with a lot of apprehension. There's the depletion aspect as well as the fact a lot of our terrestrial pollutants end up right in that area. 'Mining' a resource usually refers to the idea of exploiting all there is to take and then moving on as quickly as possible, which certainly should be a concern with this news with respect to the environment rather than the product itself as is the case in wild caught stocks. Here we're talking about positional resources such as nutrients in the water (which likely come from land), space and impact to top tier predators. It's a lot to consider, but does merit at least a hard look when looking ahead to a more sound environmental approach. Dealing with a trade deficit also is a two-way street; we might import a lot of fish, but we export any potential environmental damage to other nations as well.

The UnPoisoning

Scientists engineer edible cottonseeds.

This idea, of course, is nothing new. Humans have been pacifying the awesome chemical arsenal of plants for tens of thousands of years. Many of the great foods we eat today - tomatoes, almonds, all sorts of peas and mints originate from highly poisonous wild types.

The real implication is cotton is a plant grown in many third world nations with agrarian economies. This kind of dual purpose where a plant could serve as both a source of protein, clothing and of course, the ability to trade such things for money could have powerful impact in our increasingly small planet. Imagine a plant than can grow in the most desolate of mountain ranges or brutal of deserts and still provide dietary nutrients, substrate for clothing, heck maybe even shelter.

Once again, Science rules.

Red Hot and Rotten

A recent slaughterhouse fire led to the deaths of over 700 pigs. Go here for an amazing slideshow of the cleanup. It is quite, to borrow a word I coined, Gigerlicious in feel. Juxtaposing the organic with the mechanical allows one to draw all sorts of comparisons.

Two Steps Behind

Ripped from the NYTimes: Conspicuous increased levels of C-reactive protein in the lower class. This cracks open a door of research that's probably very fascinating and socially uncomfortable, but it would be nice if someone would go kick it in.