Carcinogens in natural foods - the Ames test

I have previously written about the difference between natural foods and "unnatural foods" in terms of how much carcinogens they contain. I did one post on "Irrational fear of pesticides", and another post that I called "natural foods contain more carcinogens than unnatural foods".

Just now I found a video clip from Physics for Future Presidents, a UC Berkeley lecture series that you can watch for free online, in which Richard Muller, an entertaining physicist explains what this is all about. Watch and enjoy.

MIT open courses

Nobody could have missed that I love to listen to audio and video lectures on my spare time. In particular when I am doing something where I do not have to concentrate (such as doing dishes or walking the dog). I recently wrote about The Teaching Company which is probably my favorite company in the world. I have also mentioned Berkeley webcast and in particular the lecture series called physics for future presidents taught by professor Richard A Muller.

When reading Lunkens blog I saw some really good news. MIT, one of the most prominent Universities in the world (particularly in physics, technology, and computer science), have been inspired by Berkeley and have now made a good deal of their courses available online for free, hurray for that! For example, here is a lecture series on introductory biology taught by Eric Lander (see picture above), a key figure in the human genome project.


So, make use of these fantastic resources. With a few clicks on your mouse you can enrich your life by learning about anything you wish from world leading experts, who are also in my experience fantastic teachers.

Irrational fear 2: Nuclear power

Last time I wrote about pesticides and how we are worried to death about 0.01% of the pesticides that we ingest (the synthetic ones) instead of the 99% which seem to be as bad if not worse. Another area which I think is often associated with irrational fear is nuclear power. The word "nuclear" seems to elicit a knee-jerk kind of reaction in many people. Take for instance Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging (NMR for short), a very powerful and quite safe diagnostic method. People were very reluctant to use this method, seemingly only because it had "Nuclear" in the name. In part because of this fear they have now changed the name to Magnetic Resonace Imaging (MRI for short), and the technology has been a major boost to diagnostics as well as to research.

The following arguments are to a large extent a reflection on Richard Muller's (see picture below) paper with the title "The witch of Yucca Mountain". I can warmly recommend the article but if you want the same information in video format you can go here and forward to 47min and listen to the rest of the lecture (it is very entertaining).

It is no secret that we are facing an energy crisis. I am personally not convinced that CO2 emissions is an important contributing factor when it comes to Global warming, however, the fact of the matter is that our fossil fuels will eventually be used up and when there is none left we will need a different source of energy. Fission of uranium and plutonium is not an endless source of energy, however, it would provide us with energy for quite a while. Yet many countries do not want to build these Nuclear power plants, largely because of what I think is irrational fear…

Before I encountered Muller I associated nuclear power plant accidents with Chernobyl (see picture). However, Chernobyl was not a typical nuclear power plant. Its design was the worst imaginable and as Muller explains in his lecture such a design is completely prohibited today. The worst case scenario for a modern nuclear power plant is the nuclear meltdown. For a meltdown to occur, it is required that 4 different independent security systems which are inspected regularly, break down simultaneously which is not at all likely. If however, the highly unlikely worst case scenario would occur, and the radioactive material would penetrate meters of steel and concrete and go into the ground and the gases escape we would still not have anywhere near the same levels of radioactivity that were present after Chernobyl because the radioactivity leaks out into the ground instead of being blown up into the sky. I can understand that people want Nuclear Powerplants to be safe, however, there seems to be some sort of obsession here. People seem not to worry about other types of dangers. What if a chemical plant blew up? What is the worst case scenario there? Or what about the laboratories where they deal with the Ebola virus, what would happen if all their security systems broke down?

There is also a major concern about nuclear waste. The plutonium waste coming from a nuclear power plant has a half life of about 24.000 years meaning that after 96.000 years 1/16 of the radioactive waste will still remain. The question which does not yet have an answer is, where are we going to store this waste? In United States, Yucca Mountain, a place with very few earthquakes, was chosen as an ideal storage site. If the unthinkable would happen at Yucca Mountain, and all the radioactive waste would leak out, it would still be in small non-water soluble glass-pellets, so it would not mix with the ground water. Furthermore, even if Yucca Mountain was filled to its capacity limit and all the radioactive waste leaked out into the ground water and then out of the pellets in which it is cotained (this scenario has already passed into science fiction), the water would still not reach even a fraction of the radioactivity levels present in the Los Angeles drinking water! The drinking water that the citizens of Los Angeles are drinking is from the Colorado river which flows through many valleys with Granite. Granite contains some fraction of percentage of uranium which is slowly dissolved in the drinking water, thus making it radioactive. Because there is no agreement on where to store the waste today, today the radioactive material is simply sitting in a building next to the nuclear plant, not an ideal storage site.

To sum up, instead of storing the nuclear waste in the safest imaginable location where it has virtually no chance of leaking out, and even if it would leak out it would not be a major disaster, it is stored in buildings next to the power plants, which is a much less safe location, all because of the irrational fear among the public.

Cubic Zirconias, and why I regret buying a diamond ring…

I have never really understood people who say that they have no regrets, perhaps because I have lots of regrets. I regret all the times I have been unfair or even mean to friends as well as strangers, I regret the fact that I drank too much as a teenager, and I deeply regret having spent a good part of my life watching sunset beach. It seems to me that whoever claims he or she have no regrets is rather naïve. My most recent regret is my engagement ring choice.

At the time when I bought the engagement ring that my fiancé is now wearing, I wanted the most beautiful ring I could find (obviously). I finally settled on a ring made out of white gold with a small ingrained diamond. It is in this that my regret lies. Two factors have made me wish that I had not chosen a diamond ring. The first is the truly excellent Edward Zwick movie, Blood Diamond (see picture), starring Leonardo Di Caprio. Indeed it has all the attributes of a typical Hollywood epic, but it also sends a strong resounding message to the viewer: the diamond industry has caused much suffering in Africa, and it is up to us to make sure that the diamonds that we buy have not contributed to this suffering (by asking in the store for instance). Had I bought my diamond ring today I would have asked about this!

The second reason for my regret I heard in one of Richard A. Muller's terrific lectures. In this lecture (go to 48min) Richard introduces a stone that I had not previously heard about, the Cubic Zirconia (see picture below). This stone, is much less expensive than diamond, and it is not quite as hard as diamond (close though). However, I did not give my girlfriend a diamond because it is expensive or because it is hard, but rather because it is such a beautiful stone, and in this respect Cubic Zirconias actually beat diamonds. What makes a diamond beautiful is its high refractive index. In essence diamonds are good at bending light and therefore we perceive them as beautiful (anyone know why?). The refractive index, which is a measure of how much something bends light, for diamonds and Cubic Zirconias is 0.044 and 0.060 respectively, hence the latter are more beautiful. The diamond industry has protected themselves from this seemingly lethal threat by saying something like "how can you prove to someone you love them if you buy a cheap stone?". To me this is completely beside the point. I want my girlfriend to have the most beautiful ring, not the most expensive one, and when I want to spend money on her, I think I can find better priorities than the second most beautiful stone out there…

So here is my advice to my readers. Don't repeat my mistake. If you want your future fiancé to have the most beautiful ring, then get one with a Cubic Zirconia. If you still insist that the only way to prove your love is to buy an insanely expensive stone, then see to it that it has not cost people their hands…