VOA's weekly science and technology magazine.
MUSIC: "Our World" theme
This week on Our World: The space shuttle is in orbit again as the program begins to wind down ... a carbon-free energy future ... And some surprising heart disease victims.
THOMPSON: "They had the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes way back then, even though their diet and lifestyle were quite different than ours."
Hardening of the arteries in ancient Egyptian mummies, assessing the fight against neglected tropical diseases, and more.
I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
Space Shuttle in Orbit; Only Five More Flights Scheduled
The Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into orbit on Monday, on its next-to-last scheduled trip into space.
Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero and LIFTOFF! of Space Shuttle Atlantis on a mission to build, resupply, and to do research on the International Space Station. ...
The six astronauts docked with the space station on Wednesday, bringing with them more than 16 tons of parts and equipment. Many of the pumps, gyroscopes, and other bulky spare parts are too big to be carried by European or Russian spacecraft, which will be the only supply vehicles for the space station after the shuttle fleet is retired, possibly as soon as next year.
Only five more flights are officially scheduled, though that could change. A group of experts known as the Augustine Committee has suggested extending the shuttle program to 2011, but so far that's just a recommendation.
NASA plans to end the shuttle and space station programs to concentrate on next-generation space exploration, possibly including a return to the moon.
One more bit of space related news before we move on:
On Wednesday, the National Air and Space Museum here in Washington previewed its newest gallery of space exploration, called "Moving Beyond Earth." The exhibit includes two Hubble Space Telescope instruments that were brought back by astronauts who did some upgrades to the orbiting telescope during a space shuttle mission in May. Veteran astronaut John Grunsfeld was on that Hubble repair crew.
GRUNSFELD: "The wonderful thing about the Hubble Space Telescope - and also this gallery - is that the Hubble story is still continuing. And so as we discover new things with Hubble, as Hubble goes on its journey with astronomers looking at the most distant universe and things in our backyard, we're going to discover a lot of new things that can appear here and hopefully inspire those young folks who will come in."
The new display at the Air and Space Museum also features video game-like interactive features designed to appeal to the next generation of astronauts and astronomers.
Scientists Outline Roadmap to Carbon-Free Energy Future
Two California scientists say that the world could meet 100 percent of its power needs with renewable energy as soon as two decades from now, eliminating fossil fuels like coal and oil in favor of a mix mainly of wind and solar power, plus a modest contribution from water and geothermal sources.
Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark Delucchi of the University of California, Davis, set out their roadmap in the November issue of Scientific American magazine.
In an interview, Delucchi told me that there's never been a change this big and this fast, but he said there are some precedents.
DELUCCHI: "During World War II there was a massive ramp-up of manufacturing capability. In terms of massive technological development toward a particular goal, of course [there was] the Apollo program. And on that basis we think that it's not a technological problem. I don't even believe that it's a capital availability problem."
Q: You've got in your model a mix of wind and solar mainly, a bit of hydro, tidal, geothermal thrown in. How did you get to that mix? How do the different elements work with each other, in other words.
DELUCCHI: "The considerations that went into that are roughly - the cost of generating technologies, their complementarity - in some cases, winds blow steadily at night, sun shines in the day. The need in most cases, still, even in you have a well-designed complementary integrated system, you still need a steady, invariable source of power like hydro power, you need that as a backup. So in summary it's a combination of qualitative consideration of cost, complementarity, reliability considerations, and the need for backing up systems."
Q: In your article, you project that a switch to renewables will actually result in a decrease in demand for energy. How so?
DELUCCHI: "Most end-use devices use electricity more efficiently than they use, for example, heat. Most strikingly in the automotive transportation sector, electric motors are more efficient at delivering work per unit of energy input than are gasoline internal combustion engines or diesel combustion engines. And the savings in transportation are quite large, quite large. So that accounts for the bulk, but not all, the bulk of the savings of end-use energy that you get."
A somewhat less optimistic take comes from a British engineering association.
A report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London says government targets for reducing greenhouse gases are probably not realistic. Instead, the report says, what's needed are programs to adapt to a warming world and active geoengineering efforts to slow the rise in global temperatures.
I asked the report's author, Tim Fox, about their controversial geoengineering component.
FOX: "We did an engineering-based analysis of these ideas. And to do that we looked at a number of criteria. One was that they had to be low-carbon solutions. Two, that they had to be based on technology that's either available or close to being available. And three, they have to be able to be developed and deployed without distracting us too much from the business of going about our low carbon transition. From an engineering perspective we came up with three front-runners there, very practical approaches.
"The first of those was the concept of artificial trees. Second one was ..."
Q: Let me interrupt you. What do you mean by artificial trees? You have to explain that.
FOX: "An artificial tree is a mechanical device. One visual way of seeing it is a large flyswat. The swat part of the flyswat is a series of filters, and these filters can be used to extract CO2 from the air that passes through the filters, and the carbon that is removed can be fed into emerging carbon capture and storage infrastructure for safe storage.
"So an artificial tree is a very, from our engineering analysis, a very practical, very pragmatic way of enabling us to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. So for example, vehicles, they're dispersed and they're very difficult to capture the carbon from. We can use [artificial] trees to capture that carbon whilst we're busy decarbonizing our electricity system using a mixture of renewable energy, carbon capture and storage-fitted fossil fuel plants, nuclear power, and biomass."
The other two geoengineering ideas are using algae to absorb CO2 and also as a biofuel, and designing or retrofitting buildings to make them more light-reflective, and so less prone to absorb the sun's heat.
The report by Dr. Tim Fox of Britain's Institution of Mechanical Engineers suggests geoengineering as a temporary measure, as a decades-long transition to carbon-free energy takes place.
Food Prices Increasing in Poorer Countries, says UN
Prices for our own personal energy source - food - remain high across much of the developing world, despite this year's relatively good global harvest. VOA's Steve Baragona has more on a new report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
BARAGONA: FAO says its latest figures show the food crisis that began in 2007 with sharply rising prices, is continuing in the developing world. FAO chief Jacques Diouf drew attention to the numbers at a news conference ahead of this week's U.N. summit on world hunger.
DIOUF: "For the world's poorest people, the food price crisis that hit even rich countries a couple of years ago is far from over."
BARAGONA: In two-thirds of the 68 developing countries the FAO surveyed, prices for rice, wheat, millet, and sorghum are more than 25 percent higher this October than they were in 2007. Maize was more expensive in about half of them. But on international markets, cereal crop prices have, for the most part, returned to their 2007 prices. Rice is the exception.
The reasons why food remains more expensive in the developing world vary from region to region. In East Africa, for example, drought and conflict have left 20 million people in need of emergency food aid. Meanwhile, FAO Senior Economist Liliane Balbi told VOA's Joe DeCapua that in West Africa, imports are down. And that has meant a good harvest has not been enough to bring food costs down.
BALBI: "Prices have declined with the harvest, but [they are] still well above two years ago. You have, for example, in Nigeria, prices in October of millet, that is an important major staple, prices are 73 percent higher than two years earlier."
Steve Baragona, VOA News, Washington.
The FAO report on food prices came out ahead of this week's Food Summit in Rome.
User-Friendly Blog Highlights Animal Diversity
Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.
This week, it's a site where learning about evolutionary biology is made painless, and even a little fun.
DUNN: "CreatureCast.org is a collaborative blog and video series about animals. And the videos and blog posts are put together by folks at my lab here at Brown University, and also by other friends, including scientists from other universities, and even some artists."
Casey Dunn is an evolutionary biologist who edits CreatureCast.org, which takes a user-friendly, and sometimes wide-eyed look at the extraordinary diversity in the animal kingdom.
There are conventional posts, but also student Sophia Tintori's charming clay animations.
TINTORI VIDEO: "Back when we were all single-celled organisms, growth was pretty straightforward. The goal was to out-reproduce everyone else - eat all the food, make more copies of yourself, and just try to dominate your corner of the sludge."
Reproduction, in fact, is a major theme of CreatureCast.
DUNN: "A lot of the aspects of biology that are most interesting about organisms often have to do with their reproductive biology. For instance, in many animals, they have other means of reproducing in addition to or in place of sexual reproduction. There's all sorts of fascinating variation on that."
Biology you can relate to at CreatureCast.org, or get the link to this and more than 250 other Websites of the Week from our site, VOAnews.com/ourworld.
MUSIC: John Scofield - "Animal Farm"
You're listening to Our World, the weekly science and technology magazine from VOA News. I'm Art Chimes in Washington.
Scientists Discover Heart Disease in Ancient Egyptian Mummies
An international team of scientists has discovered heart disease in ancient Egyptian mummies, dispelling the view that cardiovascular disease is an illness of modern humans. VOA's Jessica Berman reports.
BERMAN: Researchers used computer X-ray tomography, or CAT scans, to see whether they could detect evidence of heart disease in 22 mummies located at the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, Egypt.
CAT scans are commonly used to monitor cardiovascular disease patients.
The mummies were between 2,000 and 3,500 years old, according to Randall Thompson, a cardiologist with the Mid-America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri.
Thompson, who led a study of the mummies, says they were extremely well-preserved.
THOMPSON: "There was cardiovascular tissue in a fair number of these mummies. Sixteen had either the heart or cardiovascular system intact that we could say something about them. And we also found atherosclerosis, or the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes, was not uncommon."
BERMAN: Thompson says the CAT scans showed definite evidence of atherosclerosis, which is the buildup of fat, cholesterol and calcium, on the inside walls of blood vessels of three mummies and probable atherosclerosis in three more.
Thompson says atherosclerosis was significantly more common in mummies that were 45 years of age or older at the time of death, and it looked much like calcification seen in the arteries of modern heart patients.
Although the mummies had been members of ancient Egypt's upper classes, meaning they lived and ate well, Thompson says their lifestyle was significantly healthier than today's.
THOMPSON: "They didn't eat processed food or transfats; didn't smoke, and even the wealthier individuals almost certainly got a lot of exercise. There was no motorized transportation; they had to walk everywhere they went. And so we were a bit surprised. They had the disease that causes heart attack and strokes way back then even though their diet and lifestyle were quite different than ours."
Thompson says he's using what he's learned from his mummy study to counsel his patients, especially those who have dieted and exercised in an effort to avoid heart disease.
Researchers describe their discovery of heart disease in ancient mummies this week in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Jessica Berman, VOA News, Washington.
Parasitic Brain Infection Cited as a Cause of Epilepsy
Tens of millions of people around the world suffer from epilepsy. It's an ancient malady that afflicted Napoleon and Julius Caesar. Most people think epilepsy is untreatable. But new research shows that about a third of worldwide cases of epilepsy could be easily treated, or even prevented. Rose Hoban reports.
HOBAN: Hélène Carabin is a veterinarian who studies infectious diseases that are transmitted between humans and animals. She says scientists have known for some time that many cases of epilepsy are caused by a parasitic worm called cysticercosis.
CARABIN: "The adult worm is in humans. Humans infect pigs, it gets in the meat of the pigs, pigs infect humans, and then it gets in the intestine of the human."
HOBAN: Once the worm establishes itself in the brain. Then it's just a matter of time before the person develops seizures.
Carabin says it's been difficult to determine exactly how many cases of epilepsy have been caused by the parasite. Epilepsy can have a number of causes, from high fever to cancer tumors. In many cases, doctors can't determine the reason.
Blood tests to detect the presence of cysticercosis only reveal whether or not a person is infected, not where in the body the infection is present. So Carabin and her students at the University of Oklahoma did an extensive review of the available scientific literature. In particular, they looked for studies that included taking x-rays or magnetic images of the brains of epileptic patients to actually confirm the presence of lesions.
CARABIN: "We really got to an estimate of the proportion of people with epilepsy in countries endemic for cysticercosis, 30 percent of epilepsy [patients] have lesions of neurocysticercosis in their brain."
HOBAN: The sad thing, Carabin says, is that cysticercosis is completely preventable, as long as people can interrupt the cycle of transmission from human to pig and back again. Some countries have tried eradication campaigns with some success.
CARABIN: "And there was actually a study in Tanzania that has shown that just purely by educating farmers on keeping their pigs penned, and not feeding them human feces, you could reduce the incidence rate of porcine cysticercosis by 50 percent."
HOBAN: Carabin recently presented her findings to the World Health Organization. She hopes that with greater attention to the problem of cysticercosis, more people will avoid contracting this debilitating, and eventually deadly, condition.
Carabin and her students presented their findings this month at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
I'm Rose Hoban.
Assessing the Fight Against Neglected Topical Diseases
The current issue of the policy journal Health Affairs features a collection of articles on the theme of "Fighting Neglected Diseases." These are a dozen or so conditions that include schistosomiasis, hookworm, sleeping sickness, river blindness, and others that bring pain and misery to as many as one out of six people on earth.
These neglected tropical diseases are not big killers like AIDS or malaria. But Health Affairs Deputy Editor Philip Musgrove says their impact is vast.
MUSGROVE: "These aren't orphan diseases. These aren't things that affect a few thousand people in the world or a tiny fraction of the population. The estimate, if you take the seven that are most widespread, that something of the order of 1.2 billion people affected by one or more of them."
Many of them are diseases of poverty, spread by parasites that thrive in poor sanitation.
Effective treatments exist, and they can have a big payoff, says Peter Hotez of George Washington University.
HOTEZ: "Not only is their health and economic burden right up there with any of the Big Three, but we can do something about these diseases at extraordinarily low cost, at costs that - we're looking at maybe 1/100th the cost of a year of anti-retrovirals for HIV or even Direct Observed Therapy for tuberculosis or antimalarials and bednets."
But even at pennies per dose for many of them, the drugs can be too expensive for patients who may be among the poorest people on earth.
Large, international drug companies have helped, by donating drugs worth an estimated billion and a half dollars.
But many experts believe the donated drugs are not a long-term solution.
Peter Singer, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, says the pharmaceutical industries in countries like Brazil and India, countries which are geographically and economically closer to these diseases, may be an important part of the solution.
SINGER: "There is a pipeline of affordable innovation in vaccines, in drugs, in diagnostics, and devices for neglected tropical diseases in these emerging economy companies. Think about this as a new vein of gold, sitting just beneath the surface, which has not been fully mined."
Effective treatment of neglected tropical disease can do more than make people healthy. It can improve entire communities. Merck and Company donates the drug ivermectin, brand name Mectizan, to treat river blindness. Merck official Ken Gustavsen notes that river blindness is spread by black flies that live and breed around fast-flowing streams.
GUSTAVSEN: "That also happens to be the most fertile area for farming. So as a result of river blindness, people would commonly move away from those most fertile areas. Because of vector control and treatment with Mectizan, in West Africa alone, more than 25 million hectares have been recovered for additional farming, which by World Bank estimates is enough land to feed 17 million people each year."
Most of the people affected by what are called neglected tropical diseases live in Africa, but Peter Hotez of George Washington University stresses that these are diseases of poverty. And poverty, he says, can be found even in wealthy countries like the United States.
HOTEZ: "Neglected diseases occur wherever you see poverty. So that, not only in the lowest income countries of the world, but wherever you have poverty, you'll find diseases that resemble neglected tropical diseases. We have enormous pockets of poverty in post-Katrina, Louisiana, the Mississippi delta, the Texas-Mexico border, Appalachian region, in our inner cities. And with it, very alarming rates of neglected disease."
Hotez and the others are authors of papers on neglected tropical diseases appearing in the current issue of the journal Health Affairs.
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Our program was edited by Rob Sivak. Bob Doughty is the technical director.
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