[Hi folks, this is my last Sepia Mutiny post. It’s been fun, but it was a one-month guestblogger gig all along (same deal with Turbanhead). I’ve really enjoyed playing in this sandbox, and doing comments gupshup w/people like Bong Breaker, Punjabi Boy, DesiDancer, Razib the Atheist, Al-Mujahid for Debauchery, etc. etc. Feel free to come play in my smaller, geekier box over here. Ciao, and I leave you with a short post on bioethics, just in case “Versions of the Ramayana” wasn’t punk enough for you]

Pankaj Mishra has an intriguing piece in the Times, about India’s budding biotech industry. It receieved a major injection of momentum after George W. Bush severely limited embryonic stem-cell research in the U.S. a few years ago.

Surprisingly, though India is in some ways an even more religiously polarized place than the U.S., the question of the ethics of this kind of biotech (as well as the ethics of genetic cloning) has not become a bone of political contention. This is despite the fact that passages in Hindu scriptures like The Mahabharata clearly suggest that life begins at conception:

Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul — the true Self (or atman) — as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception. The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in The Mahabharata, the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father’s cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother’s womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed. (link)

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Some of the comments on SM of late have disturbed me greatly.  I am begining to realize that a lot of people are very confused about who they are.  Even worse they seem obsessed with trying to convince people who they are not.  While sitting in a jury pool all day last Tuesday I did a little bit of reading.  I learned of National Geographic’s Genographic Project which attempts to trace the path of humans as they left Africa.

[Spencer] Wells, 36, is a population geneticist using science in global pursuit of the greatest story not yet told: the story of how humankind traveled from its origins in Africa to populate the planet. The most telling clues lie with isolated, indigenous tribes like the Tubu, for their DNA remains, in a sense, the purest. Their unique genetic markers, characteristic mutations in a defined sequence of DNA, are like flags waving from the place their ancestors have inhabited for thousands of years–the starting point for ancient migrations. Any venturesome Tubu who crossed the Sahara to see the outlying world, and propagated in the process, passed on one or another of those genetic markers to his or her offspring. Any traveler who came through the Tibesti and intermarried did the same. Wells might take a cheek swab from an investment banker in Boston and find that same genetic marker: proof that one of those Tubu created a family line that leads, in some circuitous way, over continents and generations, from the Tibesti to an oak-paneled office in Back Bay. It’s in the hope of tracing myriad journeys such as this that Wells, a newly named National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, is undertaking one of the most ambitious and expensive research adventures in the National Geographic Society’s 117-year history: the grandly named Genographic Project.

At a cost of 40 million dollars over five years, the brunt of it borne by National Geographic, IBM, and the Waitt Family Foundation, the Genographic Project under Wells’s direction is establishing 11 DNA-sampling centers around the world, with the goal of collecting 100,000 cheek swabs or blood samples from mostly indigenous peoples like the Tubu. A sense of urgency infuses the project: Year by year, at an ever quickening rate, the outside world is crowding in on, and at the same time absorbing, indigenous peoples. A Tubu who moves to Paris will still have the genetic markers that distinguish him as a Tubu, but the geographical context for his markers will be gone. As for the Tubu who remain in the Tibesti mountains, they may marry more with outsiders as modern technology makes contact more likely. Generation by generation, tracing the last routes of historical migration of such isolated people grows that much harder. Wells wants to map as many routes as he can while their geographical origins are relatively intact.

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Seven years ago I spent a few days on the island of Capri, off the coast of Italy. At the top of the island was a famous hostel where everyone who visits ends up staying. My friends and I got lost trying to find it. Out of nowhere came a very old man who led us down twisting paths, first to a view of the Italian coast and then on to the hostel. I couldn’t help notice that this man, despite being old and short in height, was incredibly fit. His arms were like tree trunks and he moved with the agility of a mountain goat. I decided right then that this was the musculoskeletal system that I wanted when I became an old man. This feeling overcame me again, years later on the Inca trail where the Quechua porters (some quite old) made us a look like pathetic weaklings. If anyone has seen the Motorcycle Diaries they will recall the scene where Che and his buddy are forced to crash out on the Inca trail, just as a Quechua guide runs by them.

Earlier this week NPR had a fun story (MUST listen) about an article that appeared in the June 17th issue of the Journal Science. The paper is titled, Energetics of Load Carrying in Nepalese Porters, by Bastien et. al. [paid subscription required].

Nepalese porters routinely carry head-supported loads equal to 100 to 200% of their body weight (Mb) for many days up and down steep mountain footpaths at high altitudes. Previous studies have shown that African women carry head-supported loads of up to 60% of their Mb far more economically than army recruits carrying equivalent loads in backpacks. Here we show that Nepalese porters carry heavier loads even more economically than African women. Female Nepalese porters, for example, carry on average loads that are 10% of their Mb heavier than the maximum loads carried by the African women, yet do so at a 25% smaller metabolic cost.

Come on. You can’t possibly read that and not want a body like that!

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In Egypt, near the ancient city of Alexandria, in the year 1911, on a day in late June, an event occurred that you won’t find in most history books. Those who give their lives in the pursuit of science are never as remembered as those who die during the waging of war. Human society may never properly evolve until such wrongs are corrected.

It was approximately 9a.m. in the morning and our forgotten hero had probably just gone out for a walk or finished sniffing some butts. Suddenly, from the morning sky fell 10 kilograms of rock that had broken up into several pieces as it fell through the thick atmosphere of our planet. Scientists later recovered approximately 40 total pieces. One of these rocks struck our hero, the dog, and killed it. To date it is the only mammalian fatality ever recorded at the hands of a meteorite. The dog’s true sacrifice wasn’t fully appreciated until it was discovered that the meteorite was actually a chunk of the planet Mars. The meteorite was named “Naklha”, in honor of the region in which it landed. The dog’s name is a casualty of history. Millions of years earlier the meteorite had been a basaltic rock that had been blown off the surface of Mars at escape velocity, when a larger meteorite had impacted Mars. It was propelled into a heliocentric orbit where it lingered for several millions of years. The irresistible attraction of gravity finally pulled it towards Earth, and its fatal encounter with our dog. Studying the meteorite and comparing it to data streaming back from Mars, beginning with the Viking Mission in 1976, has helped us to unravel many of the secrets of the Red Planet. If you think that I am making all this up and simply suffering from another delusion, then feel free to look it up.

Although the above story has only the most tenuous link to the following one, I just felt it was a story that needed to be told. OutlookIndia.com reports:

…NASA has given Indian names to certain types of rocks on Mars, a senior planetary geologist at the space agency’s Mars Mission said today. “…NASA has given Indian names to a number of rocks. We shall disclose the names soon after NASA gives a clearance to make this classified information public,” NASA planetary geologist Amitabha Ghosh, currently on a three-city tour to India, told PTI today.

Ghosh said the rocks were named in consultation with Indian geophysicists and astrophysicists.

For the first time, a four-member team from NASA, including planetary geologists Ghosh, Dr Michael Wyatt, astrogeologist Dr James Rice and Dr Nicole Schultz are in India to further space science research.

“The idea is to hold talks at scientific organisations and planetaria to create awareness about space science research,” Ghosh, the only Asian on the mission, said.

As members of the Mars Explorer Rover Mission, the four have been witness to the activities of Spirit and Opportunity rovers that landed on Mars.

Of course this is just a publicity and excitement building stunt. There are countless rocks on Mars. Giving some Indian names isn’t that big a deal. More importantly the team has created a website called Tharsis India to further awareness of Mars exploration in India. The Tharsis region on Mars is known for its supermassive volcanoes.

The visit to India comes at the same time as the Paris Airshow where NASA mentioned that it is shooting for after 2015 to put humans back on the Moon. Continue reading →

If I wasn’t a broke ass graduate student I’d be on a flight to Boston tomorrow morning. “Why,” you ask? The Guardian says it all [tip from Francis Assisi]:

One of the strongest arguments against time travel is that we are not overrun with curious tourists from the future. A university student in Boston plans to change that, by inviting budding Doctor Whos to the world’s first time traveller convention this weekend.

The organiser, Amal Dorai – a masters student in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – aims to test the theory of time travel by inviting people from the future to the event.

This is friggin awesome! Dorai’s hypothesis seems to me to parallel the Fermi Paradox which asks why we haven’t been overrun by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the galaxy yet.

“We are doing this as a very low-risk, low-cost way to investigate the possibility of time travel,” he said. “I think the probability they will come is very low, but if it does happen it will one of the biggest events in human history.

“Of course, no time travellers doesn’t rule out the possibility of time travel, they could have just decided not to come to our convention.”

Ahhh…hope. The last refuge of the nerd. Incidentally there was a Star Trek the Next Generation episode years ago where a time traveler from the past pretended he was a time traveler from the future. No word yet on how Dorai plans to handle this possibility. If we were to teach a time traveler from the past too much, he/she could pollute the timeline. It’s enough to make your head spin. Continue reading →