Science for security

Following the horrific attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 170 people, India's pro-science PM Manmohan Singh has pledged to put new technologies to work in efforts to beef up security.

He says that "surveillance systems, cryptography, near real time search and identification from distributed large data bases and computer simulation exercises to enhance our crisis tactics and responses" should all be used.

Most interestingly, Singh has pointed towards China and Japan as examples of countries that have integrated science into government to improve the lives of their citizens. Japan has the world's highest spending as a proportion of GDP on scientific research and development, and China has experienced the biggest growth in R&D over the last fifteen years.

Meanwhile the United States' expenditure on scientific research has stayed fairly constant as a percentage of GDP, while the UK's has actually fallen.

If science and security really are so closely linked, then perhaps an aim for 2009 should be for all countries to back their scientists instead of turning automatically to war.

Picture from AP.

Everyone wants a handout

As generous lottery winners will tell you, the worst thing about handing out money to people you know is that even more will come knocking. The US government knows how it feels.

Following the mega multi-billion dollar bailout of some of the world's biggest banks and now possibly also the struggling automotive industry, others have started to wonder why they shouldn't get a slice of the action too.

The latest to be reportedly queuing up for help is the burgeoning ethanol biofuels industry. According to the Wall Street Journal blog, when the Renewable Fuels Association was approached for advice by the Obama team its suggestions included "setting up a $1 billion short-term credit facility so ethanol producers could finance current operations."

Quite a hefty chunk of cash for such a young and questionable industry... Wonder who'll ask for a handout next? If it's going begging Obama, throw a few million my way.

The great Jesus robbery... foiled

Now a little technology-related festive fun for everyone. When the three wise men tried to track down the baby Jesus thousands of years ago, they used the tried and tested method of following the stars. Today, people are using cutting-edge global positioning systems.

A community centre in the sunny US state of Florida was shocked when an 18-year-old woman attempted to steal the Jesus model from their nativity scene. Luckily, they had mounted a GPS device inside the figurine, which meant that police were able to track it down double quick and arrest the thief.

Apparently, according to the Associated Press, Jesus theft is quite widespread. In one report, a Jesus was stolen and replaced with a pumpkin. Mike Johnson, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal group, said: "I suspect most of it is childish pranks... Clearly, there are adults with an agenda to remove Christ from Christmas."

Now I'm leaving to put a state-of-the-art surveillance camera above my (secular) Christmas tree... Don't want anyone nicking the baubles.

What would Darwin say?

You may not know it but this year is a special one for evolutionary biologists because, if he were still alive, it would be Charles Darwin's 200th birthday.

So, as humans are wont to do with their heroes, there has been widespread eulogising and pondering about Darwin would make of the world today is he could be here.

Sadly though, almost 150 years since Darwin's On the Origin of the Species was published, there is still remarkable resistance to his ideas, despite the fact that science has continually reinforced them. A Muslim scholar in Turkey, Adnan Oktar, says that millions of fossils exist that will prove within a decade that evolution is wrong. Exactly why nobody's found one of these fossils yet is still a mystery.

Another study has shown that more Americans believe in devils and angels than in evolution. In fact there are countless shoddy-looking websites dedicated to informing the public that Darwin was wrong and even some kind of threat.

The saddest thing about this bizarre debate is that religion has been pitted against Darwin. I know plenty of people who believe in a God and still believe in modern science and evolution, proving that there doesn't need to be a conflict.

Luckily history has shown than the right ideas always win out in the end. After all, people once believed that it was heretical to believe the earth wasn't the centre of the universe. Hang in there Darwin... give it another century.

CNN no longer reports...

The latest shocking news hot from the CNN newsdesk is that it has cut its entire science, technology and environment news staff, including the 17-year CNN veteran Miles O’Brien. CNN chiefs say that science will now be integrated into general news coverage.

Apparently, it's not a financial decision... Which begs the question: Was it an editorial one? The list of science stories that have needed intelligent, rational coverage is so obviously long that I won't even try to describe them here.

In a world in which IT and science play such an integral part of everyday life, not to mention underpin our understanding of life itself, it makes no sense for a channel as brilliant as CNN to fire those people who work to help us know it better.

Of course, CNN is not the only media outlet to be slashing jobs. Everyone's feeling the pinch right now... But for some reason, in most places, entertainment coverage hasn't suffered a bit. Funny that.

Picture from the surreal All Things Beautiful blog.

So... when exactly are we going to die?

2013. According to the latest report from the United States Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. It says that it is "more likely than not" that terrorists will use a WMD somewhere in the world by then.

But security expert Michael Krepon, who has worked at the US State Department, has suggested they might be stretching it a bit. “We’re not going to hell in a hand basket,” he said yesterday, after reading the report.

The huge efforts that have gone into combating terrorism and controlling the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons mean that we are probably at less risk than the scare-mongers would have us believe.

In fact, says Krepon, the bigger problem is governments constantly keeping their citizens on high alert with the threat of terrorist attack hung high over their heads. It was exactly this kind of misguided fear that lead the United States and Britain so easily into the Iraq War.

Luckily, the authors of the report anticipated the anxiety they might cause and have helpfully included the sentence: "The intent of this report is neither to frighten nor to reassure the American people about the current state of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."

Right, that's ok then.

Picture from First Run/Icarus Films.

Not just GM crops... nuclear too

In its never-ending quest to find new uses for radiation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today announced that countries should combat the growing food crisis by backing one idea in particular: Induced mutation.

This essentially means using radiation to speed up the genetic modification of crops so that new plant varieties can be developed more rapidly. Scientists achieve this speedy GM cultivation using mutagens (they might sound scary, but they're not) such as gamma rays or chemicals.

The technique has been in use for more than eighty years, and has already helped developed more than 3,000 plant varieties, including a form of high-yielding, drought-resistant golden wheat in Kenya, and altitude-resistant, larger-than-average barley in the Peruvian Andes.

Pierre Lagoda, Head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation and IAEA's Joint Division’s Plant Breeding and Genetics Section said: “We call spontaneous mutation the motor of evolution... If we could live millions of years and survey billions of hectares of land with 100 percent precision, we would find variants with all of the traits we’re looking for but which have mutated naturally... But we can’t wait millions of years to find the plants that are necessary now, if we want to feed the world. So with induced mutation, we are actively speeding up the process.”

That the public might feel a bit strange about eating food that has not only been genetically modified but also produced using nuclear technologies is something the IAEA is also conscious of:

“I understand that people are suspicious of these important to understand that in plant breeding we’re not producing anything that’s not produced by nature itself,” Pierre Lagoda said. “There is no residual radiation left in a plant after mutation induction.”

As food shortages really begin to pinch it's more likely that the world will have to turn to alternative agricultural methods like this. But at the same time, with so much irrational fear already surrounding GM crops, selling this idea to the world is not going to be easy.