The Refined Geek

After a long weekend of staying up late, drinking merrily and enjoying the company of many close friends I found myself being a little under the weather. This is pretty atypical for me as I’ve only ever had the flu twice and I usually pass through the cold season relatively unscathed. Whilst there’s thousands of possible reasons for this I’ve always found that should I find myself in the beginnings of an infection a strong dose of chilli seems to make it subside, or at least take my mind off it long enough to start feeling better. I realised yesterday that whilst I might have some anecdotal evidence to support this I hadn’t really looked into the science behind it and the stuff I uncovered in my search has been pretty intriguing.

For starters there are some strange experiments out there that have used chilli (well the chemical that gives it the burn, capsaicin) as an apparently reliable method to induce coughing in test subjects. The first one I came across was testing whether or not coughing is a voluntary action and the results seem to indicate that the coughing we get with the common cold is a mixture of both. Other experiments showed that people with an upper respiratory tract infection (which includes things like the common cold) are more prone to coughing when exposed to a capsaicin/citric acid mixture. None of these really helped me in understanding whether or not chilli aids in reducing the symptoms of the common cold or helping to cure it but a couple other studies do provide some potential paths for benefits.

Subjects with perennial rhinitis, a permanent allergic reaction to stimulus that doesn’t vary by season, showed a marked decrease in nasal complaints when treated with a solution of 0.15mg of capsaicin per nostal every 2nd or 3rd day for 7 treatments. The benefits lasted up to 9 months after the treatment and incredibly there were no adverse effects on cellular homeostasis or overall neurogenic staining (which sounds rather impressive but is a little out of my league to explain).  Whilst this doesn’t directly support the idea that consumption helps the common cold it does provide a potential mechanism for it to relieve symptoms. However how much capsaicin ends up in your sinuses while eating it isn’t something I could find any data on.

Other studies have found similar effects when capsaicin solutions have been sprayed into the nasal cavity with the improvements lasting for up to 6 months. That particular study was a little on the small side though with only 10 patients and no controls present but the result do fall in line with the previous study which had much more rigorous controls. The theme appears to resonate through most of the other studies that I could find: topical application in the sinuses is good, inhaling it will cause you to erupt in a coughing fit.

Anecdotally that seems to line up with the experiences I’ve had and it’s good to see it backed up by some proper science. As for consumed chilli helping overall however there doesn’t appear to be any studies that support that idea but there are potential avenues for it to work. So like many scientists I’ll have to say that the results are interesting but require a lot more research to be done. Whether it’s worthy of investigating is something I’ll leave up as an exercise to the reader, but I’m sure we’d find no shortage of spice loving test subjects who’d be willing to participate.

When a technology company doesn’t get a whole lot of press it usually means one of two things: the first is that it isn’t that interesting and no one really cares about it or, and this doesn’t happen often, they simply don’t want/need it. Conversely if a product is a dismal failure it’s usually guaranteed that it’ll get a whole bunch of the wrong type of attention, especially with the Internet’s bent towards schadenfreude. With that in mind it made me wonder why I hadn’t heard more about D-Wave since I last wrote about them around this time last year. Especially considering that Lockheed Martin had bought one of their D-Wave One systems a year prior to that.

Turns out they probably don’t really need the press as they’re doing just fine:

VANCOUVER — When the world’s largest defence contractor reportedly paid $10 million for a superfast quantum computer, the Burnaby, B.C., company that built it earned a huge vote of confidence.

Two years after Lockheed Martin acquired the first commercially viable quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, the American aerospace and technology giant is once again throwing its weight behind a technology many thought was still the stuff of science fiction.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was just old news resurfacing 2 years later but it isn’t as Lockheed Martin just purchased a D-Wave 2, their latest and greatest quantum computing offering. Details are a little scant as to what is actually in their latest system but going off their product road map it’s likely to be some variant of their Vesuvius chip which contains 512 qubits. That’s 4 times the amount of qubits in their previous system which would make it exceptionally more powerful and all for the same cost as the first unit they sold.

In my quest to try and find a little more information about their new system I stumbled across this page which digs into the underlying architecture of the D-Wave One/Two systems. Now back when I first wrote about D-Wave they weren’t exactly forthcoming with this kind of information which was what drew them a considerable amount of criticism but since then a lot of their loudest critics have renounced their positions. Interestingly though, and feel free to correct me if I’m interpreting this wrong, whilst they indeed claim to have produced a functioning qubit they haven’t managed to entangle several of them together. Whilst this doesn’t make their system useless, single qubits daisy chained together will still be useful for some specific functions, it does mean that the exponential scaling doesn’t really apply to D-Wave’s style of quantum computers. I could be wrong about this but their explanation only mentions entanglement-like properties in the qubit section with their interconnecting grids only being used to “exchange information”, not to provide multi-qubit entanglement.

That doesn’t make it any less cool however as I’m sure as they continue to scale up their processors they’ll eventually start entangling more bits together which will increase their computational power exponentially. We won’t see consumer level processors using technology like this for a long time though as they’re akin to CUDA units on graphics cards, highly specialized computational units that excel in their task and not so much in general computing. Still D-Wave’s systems signal the beginning of the quantum computing era and that means its only a matter of time before we see them everywhere.

Ever wondered how we evolved to look the way we did today from our ancestors that lived millions of years ago? Wonder no longer:

I often find myself digging through our evolutionary history in order to find out why we have certain features or why we seem to lack certain adaptations that other species have. Whilst I don’t have a good explanation for everything that’s shown in the video above (had I more time I’d get my wife, a fledgling biologist, to comment on it) it is curious to see things like the progress of the nose and the reduction of the large forehead. It also struck me as to just how subtle some of the changes are from generation to generation and yet that gradual accumulation ends up with the face we all recognize.

The best thing about this video is how clear it makes the transition from our common ape ancestor to our current form as homo-sapiens. Whilst I know that simply showing someone a video like this won’t be enough to convince them that evolution is real (indeed if you don’t want to understand it there’s little I can do for you) it does illustrate the point quite aptly. It also demonstrates the idea that whilst we shared a common ancestor we evolved along a different path alongside them, addressing the “well if we evolved from apes why are there still apes” question quite nicely.

Vaccines are the most effective form of disease prevention as they train our bodies to respond to them long before we encounter them in wild. They’re responsible for systemically wiping out several diseases that caused countless numbers of deaths around the world and have saved people from the life long consequences that survivors of said diseases would have to struggle with. You’d think with proven benefits like that the choice to use them, especially for the most vulnerable groups of people (I.E. children and the elderly), would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately it seems that as more time passes the more often I come across articles detailing the increase prevalence of anti-vaxxers and I’m struggling to understand why.

Whilst the anti-vaxxer movement isn’t exactly new, indeed as long as there has been vaccines there have been those who have been opposed to them, this current wave can trace its origins back to Andrew Wakefield’s long since discredited research linking the MMR vaccine to autism spectrum disorders in children. Even though he has since been very publicly shamed over the matter people still seem to link vaccines with all sorts of disorders they are simply incapable of producing. Worse still is the fact that this baseless fear is now spreading to other vaccines, modern ones with impeccable safety and efficacy records.

This little bastard is the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) which is responsible for nearly all cervical cancers found in women today. Thankfully we have a vaccine for it now and all it requires is 3 shots over the course of 6 months to eliminate the risk of ever getting it. The vaccine is most effective when delivered to children when they’re young or in their early teens but it is still effective in older individuals (my wife had hers when she was in her early twenties). Recent studies show that despite its proven track record of efficacy and safety parents are becoming increasingly worried about it with many stating that they’ll never vaccinate their children for HPV:

A rising percentage of parents say they won’t have their teen daughters vaccinated to protect against the human papilloma virus, even though physicians are increasingly recommending adolescent vaccinations, a study by Mayo Clinic and others shows. More than 2 in 5 parents surveyed believe the HPV vaccine is unnecessary, and a growing number worry about potential side effects, researchers found. The findings are published in the new issue of the journal Pediatrics.

…
Five years ago, 40 percent of parents surveyed said they wouldn’t vaccinate their girls against HPV. In 2009, that rose to 41 percent, and in 2010, to 44 percent.

Let’s tackle the idea that the vaccine is unnecessary first as this means parent’s believe their children simply don’t need it, something which should be easy to prove by looking up cancer rates. I’d accept that it’d be unnecessary if the incident rates were low but the fact of the matter is that cervical cancer is the second most common form of cancer in women and the fifth most deadly. The rates might look statistically low however if you could eliminate that risk with a simple (and usually free) vaccination course I think you’d do it if it was any other form of cancer. Calling it unnecessary simply shows your ignorance of how prevalent it really is.

The side effects of the HPV vaccine are also well known and for the vast majority (we’re talking 99.9999% here, and I’m not exaggerating) are mild and easily treatable with over the counter analgesics. In those rare cases where there are severe reactions doctors are trained in how to respond to them and patients will fully recover in short order. All of the other reported side effects, everything from waking comas to deaths, can not be casually linked to the vaccine. Indeed in the 20 or so cases of deaths reported as adverse reactions to the vaccines none of them were found to be caused by the vaccine and were explained by other factors. Considering some 40 million people have been vaccinated with it so far and we can’t attribute anything but eradication of cancer and some mild side effects I think its fair to assume its safe.

I know I’ve been beating this horse (which seems to keep reviving itself) for some time now but it does really get to me that people are being wilfully ignorant of the facts behind vaccines about how effective, safe and necessary they really are. Sadly whilst it didn’t take me long to find all this information it was shown right alongside a whole treasure trove of anti-vaxxer bullshit which is why I continue to write things like this. It’s my hope that someone looking for good information on the subject will stumble across my posts like these and hopefully be convinced that vaccines really are worth it.

Australia is a relatively unexciting place, tectonically speaking. We’re smack bang in the middle of the Indo-Australian plate which means that our landscape is quite old (as there’s no tectonic activity reshaping it) and earthquakes are quite rare, with the few we experience being rather weak by anyone’s standards. This is quite good for builders here as this means that tall buildings like skyscrapers and radio towers don’t require additional engineering in order to protect them from those kinds of natural disasters, although we still have tropical cyclones, mass flooding and spiders the size of small horses (I’m only lying about one of those, I swear).

Other countries aren’t so lucky and should they want to build something over a certain height there’s a certain amount of engineering that needs to be done in order to make sure they don’t go tumbling down once the first earthquake hits. Japan is arguably the leader in this technology as they have to deal with large magnitude quakes as a semi-regular occurrence. Seeing it in action though is rather impressive:

A quick bit of research shows that these are mass damper protected buildings (they are the Shinjuku Nomura on the left and Sompo Japan Head Office on the right, for reference) which have a large sprung mass inside them that moves counter to the direction of the seismic waves. Now this doesn’t completely eliminate all the energy passing through the building so they still sway a significant amount. However the majority of modern skyscrapers are designed to sway by a fair amount due to regular things like wind which exert an enormous amount of pressure on buildings this tall. You wouldn’t notice that however as it happens a lot slower than what you’re seeing in this video.

What I find truly amazing though is just how stable it is inside the building (Shinjuku Center) where the filming is occurring. Indeed that building would have been undergoing the same amount of sway and flex as the rest of the buildings were but to an observer inside it looks like you’d barely be aware that anything was happening. The translated description text does say that most of the building services shut down during the quake (elevators being the main concern) so if you weren’t aware of it when it started you’d probably find out in no short order.

I had seen many videos showing off the technology behind this video but after viewing it I realised that this was the first I had seen of it in action and it’s far more impressive than I expected it to be. It’s yet another testament to how far science and technology has come, being able to tame forces of nature that were long thought to be out of our control. It might not be the most exciting thing to talk about with your friends but it does make for some damn cool watching, that’s for sure.

Life is a strange thing. No matter where you go on Earth as long as there’s water you’re guaranteed to find some form of life there. Current scientific theory posits that the reason behind this is that after the initial conditions were met to instantiate life it then set about diversifying itself into many environments in order to out-compete its rivals and become the dominant species in its chosen niche. As far as we know it’s nigh on impossible for life to originate in some of the conditions we find it in and some are just so inhospitable that we don’t believe life could sustain itself in such conditions for any reasonable amount of time.

One such location is Lake Vostok a body of water that’s buried beneath some 4KMs worth of ice. Based on radar imaging of the ice flow we believe that this particular lake has been cut off from the outside world for some 15 million years although the water is probably closer to 13,000 years old, due to the flow of ice around it. The water at the bottom remains liquid due to the enormous amount of pressure bearing down on it from the several kilometre thick ice sheet above it even though its average temperature is about -3 degrees centigrade. The water there is also unlike any other water in the world containing about 50 times the amount of dissolved gasses (mostly oxygen and nitrogen) making it quite a unique environment.

It’s interesting for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is whether or not there is life down there. The conditions are extremely inhospitable since no sunlight reaches it, the temperature would kill most microbial life and due to its isolation from the outside world it’s likely to be very nutrient poor. Now it’s not like we haven’t seen conditions like this before and then proceeded to find life there (indeed there’s a whole classification dedicated to these types of creatures: Extremophiles) but the question of whether or not there’s life in Vostok is important due to its implications.

If we find life there, we have a few other places in the solar system which could be worth investigating.

This is why the scientific community erupted in a clamour of joy recently when scienticists from the Lake Vostok outpost announced that they had found life in their drill samples and it contained DNA that was only 86% similar to current life on Earth. Discovery of such an alien form of life would mean there’s a good possibility that the oceans under the surface of our gas giant’s frigid moons might also contain similar levels of life. It would then open the path to missions like Cryobot which, up until a discovery like this, were scientific long shots that have a hard time justifying the giant budgets required to make them a reality.

Unfortunately though the announcement was somewhat premature as the bacteria discovered has turned out to be a contaminant putting the kibosh on all the excitement. It’s an unfortunate symptom of scientific reporting as the results had not yet gone through peer review which is designed to catch mistakes like this. It doesn’t mean the work they’re doing there is all for naught though as it simply means that they need to be more cautious before releasing information lest they cause another stir like they just did. Problem is without public interest its hard to keep things like this funded which is what causes scientists to release early results before the proper peer review process can take place.

However even if they don’t find life down there that will still be something of major scientific significance. As I said before we seem to trip over life wherever we go on this planet and so the current upper and lower bounds on where it can exist are a little fuzzy. Finding a place on earth where life simply can’t survive would mean that we could focus our efforts on the search for life elsewhere and potentially not spend ludicrous amounts of money and time foraging for life in places which it simply would not be able to exist in. We’re still a fair way off from knowing either way on life in Lake Vostok but no matter the outcome it will still be worth pursuing.

I feel the scientist’s pain on this one, I really do. On the one hand you want to do solid, valuable science that will be a major influence on future studies. However by the same token you have to generate enough interest in your area in order to secure funding to keep doing just that and that puts a lot of pressure on you to release results like this before they’re ready for prime time. Thankfully the scientific process works to ensure that inaccurate information doesn’t remain like that for long.

Thanks to our northern hemisphere counter-parts I’ve been privy to all sorts of interesting cold weather things from making instant snow to the ingenuity that people come up with when they’re snowed in. Here in Australia we do get the up on the other end of the spectrum quite often during summer however although that doesn’t really drive us to do much more than sit around a pool and drink copious amounts of beer. So you can imagine then that anything involving sub-zero temperatures is going to be somewhat intriguing to us, especially something as cool as this:

There’s nothing particularly complicated about what’s going on here but the demonstration is quite novel. What you’re seeing is the formation of ice crystals on the surface of a soap bubble which starts off slow but ramps up significantly as more crystals form. I think this is partially due to the way crystals form as they usually need a rough surface to attach to. This is how those instant ice videos work as the bottles don’t have any anchor points for the crystals to form but once you shake it up a bit you give them a surface to attach to.

There was one question that was left unanswered due to the video cutting off at the end however: whether or not it’d still float after it was frozen.

Now the bubble isn’t increasing in mass, it’s simply changing forms. There’s the possibility that some of the moisture from the air outside the bubble will condense onto the crystalline surface however I don’t think that’d change the mass by an appreciable amount. The density would also be going down as well thanks to water’s intriguing property of getting less dense as changes into ice. All those factors together would indicate that a frozen soap bubble would behave in much the same way as a regular one but I’d still like to see this hypothesis tested.

Although I do much prefer warmer climates, so this will have to be an exercise that’s left up to the reader.

Long time readers will know that I have a penchant for videos that demonstrate scientific principles, especially if they’re somewhat unintentional. Usually the first video will lead me on a vast clicking spree as I search for another video explaining the phenomenon as whilst I pride myself on my enthusiast level of scientific knowledge I have a bad habit of getting key things wrong. I can often overcome this with some avid Googling and following the rabbit’s hole that is Wikipedia’s reference system but for this particular video I think I’m diving into new territory.

Now before you watch the whole thing I’ll warn you that the ending contains vomiting, the first minute or two is skippable and I’ll admit this isn’t the most high brow video I’ve linked here. All you really want to see is the demonstration of this rather fascinating process however, everything else around it is irrelevant:

The reason why I picked this particular one over the dozens of similar videos that are around is because he uses many different types of liquor and each of them has the same curious result of creating what appears to be ethanol vapour. One of the current top comments says that it is in fact just carbon dioxide, which was plausible given the carbonated beverages he was using initially, however he also uses boxed wine which doesn’t contain any carbonation and still yields the same results. Failing to find a decent explanation I consulted with my wife who’s currently studying chemistry at university and I think we’ve come up with a decent conclusion about what’s happening there.

For starters this is nothing like Alcohol WithOut Liquid gadgets which are technically called nebulizers and work by mixing your alcohol of choice with oxygen in a fine mist spray. This means that you’re still ingesting all of the drink in question anyway, you’re just not doing it through your stomach like you usually would. The reason we believe it isn’t working like this is because of the high amount of remaining liquid after the rapid de-pressurization is completed and the apparent effects on the person who’s imbibing in the resulting mist. From what we can tell it has to do with ethanol’s low vapour pressure.

Most people are familiar with the triple point of water whereby the state of said liquid can change depending on a couple variables, namely temperature and pressure. Now the pressurization of the bottle at the start would increase the boiling point significantly however upon releasing that pressure there would be a small vacuum created at the surface as all the air starts to rush out. This would cause the ethanol (and some of the water too, I’m guessing) to boil away from the surface rapidly and it would be dragged upwards with the escaping air creating the mist.

Now I might be getting the mechanism wrong here but this was the best explanation we could come up with after watching the process a couple times over. If you’ve got a much more scientific explanation than what we’ve come up with than I’d like to hear it as I’m sure there’s a bit more going on here than I can figure out. Still it’s a pretty interesting bit of accidental science going on here, even if the end result is somewhat…questionable

Arguing with facts on your side can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean task, especially on the Internet. For the most part when I claim something on this blog I try to back it up with reputable information sources if I haven’t done the research myself and if I’m talking completely out my ass I try to make that known so you can take that information with the required grain of salt. However when people comment on here I feel obliged to reply to them, even if what they’re saying has no basis in any kind of fact or reality. This can feel like a form of asymmetric warfare at times as the amount of time taken to disprove something is usually an order of magnitude more than what it took to write it in the first place.

Now I don’t usually like to pick on people who make comments here, if you’ve taken the time to post here I feel it’s better to respond to you directly on the post, but some of them simply demand more attention than I’ve already given to them. The one I’m thinking of in particular is this comment where they claim that herd immunity has been debunked, something that’s never been brought forth in any research paper that I’ve been able to track down. As far as I can tell it all comes down to the opinion of a one Dr. Blaylock who’s opinions have always been radically different from the scientific norm. He’s not a scientific dissenter either as many of his claims have been thoroughly debunked by other research but the herd immunity claim seems to remain.

Whilst it would be all well and good for me to simply link to research papers which show case this fact quite well I thought it’d be better to point to something that demonstrates the point visually. The picture above is from this simulation tool which shows the results of what happens when a disease moves through a population. The first couple are interesting to get a feel for how an uncontrolled infection can spread even if only a single person is infected. The latter ones deal with some real life situations and demonstrate quite aptly why herd immunity works and why we’ve started to see small epidemics in isolated populations where they don’t vaccinated their children.

Probably the most shocking revelation I got from this simulation was the existence of Waldorf schools who’s official stance on vaccinations is “we have no official stance” but then immediately goes on to recommend parents don’t vaccinate their kids against a wide spectrum of diseases. Apart from the giant hypocrisy of saying one thing but then encouraging the other this kind of behaviour is inherently dangerous because it will mean there’s a cluster of unvaccinated people in constant contact with one another, a hot bed for a potential epidemic. It’s one thing to claim that but it’s already happened once and there was potential for another outbreak to occur due to the incredibly low vaccination rate. Considering that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world where vaccination rates are above a certain threshold it’s a timely reminder that herd immunity is real and when its broken the consequences can be devastating.

I would go on but I think I’m preaching to the choir here as whilst the number of comments I get disagreeing with me out numbers those who do I know that if that reflected reality us humans would be in a far worse state, health wise, than we are today. The fact of the matter is that herd immunity is real and works beautifully for protecting those precious few who can not be vaccinated for one reason or another. Failing to vaccinate is not only a bad decision personally it also puts others at risk and that’s the only reason I need to support the current standard of mandated vaccinations.

I’m sure everyone has heard of the idea of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. For anyone who’s interested in scientific principles it can be a pretty irritating thought experiment as you wrangle with definitions, principles and the limitations of your own knowledge of science. Personally I never really thought about it much past the point of thinking that they’d both be converted to pure energy (this makes the assumption they’re both physical objects with mass) but as it turns out there’s a much, much better explanation. One that makes me feel a little dumb for not researching it a little further:

The idea itself is in fact a paradox since the existence of one or the other of the two parts of the equation means that the other simply can not exist. If you have something that is immovable then its impossible for an unstoppable force to exist and vice versa. Indeed diving into the semantics of it like the video does makes their existence even more problematic, even if we ignore the energy requirements and just go by the laws of physics. I have to say that the end result of them simply passing through each other was not something that I would have expected but then again I only did 6 months worth of physics at university.