October 2010
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What a Plant Knows
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it actually feel an insect’s tiny, spindly legs? And how do cherry blossoms know when to bloom? Can they...
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Broader Broadband
“Competition and the Internet” [Science Agenda] is overly simplistic when it argues that broadband in the U.S. is too expensive and too slow.
Today’s most advanced applications typically require seven megabits per second of bandwidth or less, far below the capabilities of most U.S. wireline broadband. This is presumably why a recent Federal Communications Commission survey found that 91 percent of U.S. broadband users were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their speeds, and another study found that consumers were not willing to pay much for extra speed. Indeed, consumers in most countries typically subscribe to slower speeds than the highest available. Also, although very high speed connections in the U.S. are quite expensive relative to many developed countries, prices for slower connections compare favorably.
But most important, your editorial focuses entirely on wirelines, although wireless broadband is booming and already affects Internet use, innovation and investment. If fostering competition is the real policy objective, wireless broadband—not net neutrality—has the real potential to enhance competition, especially at slower speeds. Fostering wireless growth is far more important than getting a 100-Mbps connection in every home.
Scott Wallsten
Vice president for research, Technology Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.
Spectrum of Choices
As parents of a four-year-old who was diagnosed to be on the autism spectrum (the subject of Nancy Shute’s “Desperate for an Autism Cure”) at 15 months of age, we have spent countless hours researching, measuring, experimenting and hoping for something, anything really, that could improve our son’s quality of life. Our search began with conventional medicine, and we frankly hoped it would end there. But the stark reality is that conventional medicine has offered no answers at all and has seemingly been more concerned with vilifying treatments that do not require pharmaceutical intervention.
Gary Latham
Columbia, Md.
Energy Density
Antonio Regalado’s “Reinventing the Leaf” primarily discusses Caltech’s Nathan S. Lewis’s solar energy process, in which water is the base fuel, but there is no mention of water sources. Does the water have to be clean? Is the technology aimed specifically at water-rich places? Or if water desalination is necessary, is the project still worthwhile?
Dov Rhodes
Haifa, Israel
LEWIS REPLIES: The water does have to be clean, but in fact we hardly use any. It is not used for cooling but as the precursor to store the energy in the split forms of hydrogen and oxygen. And it takes a very small amount of hydrogen to store an enormous amount of energy—more than 100 times as much as in a lithium battery of the same weight. Also, the water would be recycled and could come from rainwater or, in many cases, even water vapor.
So water is not really an issue. Demonstrating the technology and getting it to work are much more pressing concerns for us at this stage.
Income Gap
In “Closing the Health Gap” [The Science of Health], Christine Gorman is exactly on target about the need for primary care except for one glaring omission: medical specialists will typically earn at least three times as much as primary care physicians in return for having spent two or three additional years of training. Until this income gap is resolved, the probability of significant numbers of physicians choosing primary care as a specialty is very small indeed.
David S. Grauman, M.D.
Fairbanks, Alaska
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4 Comments
Add CommentThe following link published in both the magazine and in the letters section above does not work:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.ScientificAmerican.com/feb2011/skeptic
Devra Davis' comment about studies in Sweden finding "those who started using cell phones as teenagers have four to five times more brain cancer as adults" seems to rely on a common misconception about causality. After all, virtually 100% of folks who, as adults, end up strung out on heroin, started out on ... milk. Correlation is not causation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will be delighted to address some of the questions that Mr. Shermer presents above. He states, "...cannot help but wonder why no one seems concerned about skin cancers caused by holding cell phones in one’s hand and pressed against one’s ear".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is an excellent question. The only thing we need to do, is compare the doubling time of skin cells with the doubling time of neurons in the brain. We shed our skin every 35 days on average, while it is known that neurons do not regenerate - and, when they do, it is a tremendously slow process. Thus, if we ask why the cumulative effects of cancer are more visible on the type of cells that does not have the capacity to divide, and will not be so obvious on cells that are regularly and quickly shed, I think that Mr. Shermer already has the answer there.
Moreover, the peer reviewed biomedical literature already documented tinnitus and parotid gland tumors, the latest article on a 4-fold increase in parotid tumors among Israeli people was just published, and this also is helpul in dispelling Mr. Shermer's confusion about tumors or health problems that occur in regions in close proximity to the cell phone, in addition to the brain.
In addition, the EU study that Mr. Shermer refers to, has not been discredited. It is in the respective Journal, where readers can peruse it. Perhaps Mr. Shermer wants to state that the study was discredited by the industry, that might be true, but as far as the scientific community goes, that study stands as a splendid research article that was published and is still present in a first-order biomedical journal.
In addition, Mr. Shermer is factually wrong in stating that other studies have not been replicated. The ability of non ionizing radiation to break DNA was demonstrated by 6 different scientists worldwide, 6 different groups, the finding was repeated, reproduced, and validated. It is useless to refer to every article as "not having been replicated", when it is well-known that several respected investigators found and published the same effects.
You are right Jeff, correlation is not causation; but when correlations in multiple countries and in multiple organisms point towards the same association, there is a very good likelihood that it is causal. That's what biology has taught us for decades,in various systems. And just being blindly dismissive, stating that "correlation is not causation", does not bring anything positive to anyone, except perhaps the industry. We need to rely on correlations that in multiple biological systems point towards radio frequency radiation causing serious and severe health effects, as it is already obvious if you read the papers on various organisms such as C. elegans, Drosophila, mammals, rodents, and humans.
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