If you’ve ever wondered what the Seattle metro area would be like if drivers were less coddled, I present to you the I-5 Spokane Street to I-90 Bridge Repair.

The work on northbound I-5 will require some of the most extensive lane and ramp closures Seattle drivers have ever seen. I-5 will be reduced to two or three lanes during the daytime, and sometimes just one lane overnight, during the intensive 19-day period, Aug. 10 through 29…

Drivers will likely face lengthy backups and significant delays on freeways and city streets from 4 a.m. to midnight. Traffic will be the worst during the morning rush hours. The August construction lane closures will create long backups on northbound I-5 and will push traffic onto other routes, including city streets in Georgetown, SODO, Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill. WSDOT anticipates I-405 and State Route 99 will be popular freeway alternatives. Trucks will be encouraged to use I-405, East Marginal Way South and Airport Way South.

Backups and delays will not be limited to the Seattle area and south end; they will spread to the Eastside. We expect the typical morning congestion on I-405 to extend throughout the day. Many more trucks will be using I-405 during this construction. Other drivers will also choose I-405 as an alternate route.

Will the city continue to exist when thousands of solo-drivers are faced with getting on a bus, taking a train, using a water ferry, walking, or cycling to work? How will people adapt? Just how unsustainable is ‘driving until you qualify’ for a suburban McMansion? Does car capacity matter—or is it more commuter capacity? What is the local climate impact of all the cars?

This is basically a wonderful prospective study of these questions—provided the data is collected. It’s even more informative because only one direction of I-5 will be closed. Much like when the Viaduct closed after the earthquake, we can get a peek into what a very different Seattle would be like. I’m so excited!

In fact, this reminds me of one of my all-time favorite climate change papers, taking advantage of the mandatory grounding of all commercial aircraft from September 11th to 14th in 2001:

Some researchers have speculated that persisting contrails exacerbate “global warming” in areas where they most frequently occur…Previous attempts to identify a contrail effect in the climate record have been based mostly on circumstantial evidence…
These results support the hypothesis that the grounding of all commercial aircraft in U.S. airspace, and the consequent elimination of substantial jet contrail coverage during the 11–14 September 2001 grounding period, helped produce an enhanced surface DTR in those areas that typically experience the greatest numbers of jet contrails during the fall season (e.g. the Midwest).

What questions do you want answered from the great I-5 shutdown of 2007?

… the lay press article Dan linked to says so. Well, let’s look at the key figure from the peer-reviewed scientific article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The horizontal black lines are the 95% confidence intervals; for a given row, if the black line doesn’t touch the vertical zero line, there is a 95% chance of correlation. Reading down the figure, you have an increased chance of being obese if your mutual friends (you both agree you are friends), same-sex friends, spouse, or sibling (particularly same-sex sibling) are obese. The connections between obesity in friends and family seem to be about equally strong. Nifty.

Does this mean you become obese because of your family or friends? Let’s ask my friend David what he thinks:

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. (David Hume, 1737)

(This quote is more fun if you imagine it being said with a deep Scottish brogue.)

Thanks David! The correlation between obese people having obese family and friends doesn’t automatically mean that having such relationships causes obesity. There are any number of ways this could be interpreted; perhaps obese people feel more comfortable being friends with other obese people. A study of cause and effect would be very different than this one—take skinny people and give them only obese friends, take obese people and give them only skinny friends, wait twenty years, and weigh (for example.) If you want to show a causal link between having obese friends and becoming obese, you’ll have to do that. A retrospective study like this one can’t cut it.

The authors of the article go on about how this study “suggests that obesity may spread in social networks…” but until some cause and effect studies are done, suggests does not equal proves. Claiming that this study proves obesity spreads through friends makes both David and me cranky.

Adult rat heart stained for cadherin, DNA, and filament actin (from the ever talented Veronica Muskheli).

The red staining is with phalloidin bound to rhodamine, a stain made from a mushroom poison that binds polymerized actin. When the heart cells beat, these bands of actin are pulled towards one another, causing the entire cell to forcefully shrink in length. The green staining is for cadherin--the protein that glues one cell to the next. Finally, the DNA is stained with a blue dye. This is a tough machine, capable of beating for a lifetime.

Continue reading "Nice Figure" »

Of all the disturbing, eye-opening images brought up during Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" presentation last week, one stood out most vividly. Weisman was talking about the widespread transition to plastic packaging 50-some years ago and the accumulated environmental effect of the 120 billion pounds of plastic produced every year now. There is, he reported, a floating mass of plastic bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, composed of non-biodegradable petrochemicals. He said this flotilla of eternal junk is estimated to be some 800 miles wide, bigger than Texas.

There are plenty of reports about the "Eastern Garbage Patch." It circles in the North Pacific Gyre, a slow, clockwise-spinning current in a vast swath of usually untraversed ocean between Japan and the West Coast of the US. What used to be one of the most pristine, remote, and desolate places on earth has become a swirling trash heap.

The problem is plastic. It floats, it blows, it doesn't biodegrade. Instead it photo-degrades, meaning as it floats in the currents, it's broken down by sunlight into smaller and smaller particles but never completely disappears.

It's no longer just a six-pack ring showing up around a seagull's neck--plastic pollution is affecting the entire food chain. Trace particles of petroleum-based plastics are showing up in zooplankton, the microscopic animals that form the basis of the aquatic food chain. From bottom to top, we're all eating plastic.

And we're getting massive islands of garbage and endless schools of plastic bags in what used to be untouched ocean.

Thankfully, Seattle is considering a ban on plastic bags. That's something we all have to get behind 100%. It's hard to believe we--ANY city, really--has gone this long without one. Convenience is no argument against health.

Today the King County Board of Health will vote on banning trans fats.

From my column this week:

In 1911 Crisco food chemists, seeking a cheaper and more-shelf-stable fat for industrial baking, came up with a clever idea: turn the bends in cheap unsaturated fats into kinks, creating trans fats. A kinked chain can pack in like a straight one, allowing tasty baked goods at a lower price. And as an added bonus, because kinked fats are unnatural, they take longer to spoil. Brilliant! But the problem is our livers hate these fats, and they protest by pumping out way less good HDL cholesterol than normal. Plus, each additional 2 percent of your calories from trans fats nearly doubles your risk of getting heart disease, which is why every reputable source agrees there is no "safe" amount of trans fat in your diet.

Two percent of calories is about 5 grams of trans fat – one muffin, a small order of fries, or 5 double-stuffed Oreos (before they were reformulated) per day.

The proposed ban would only affect restaurants, not pre-packaged food.

The legislation would require all food establishments with operating permits from Public Health – Seattle & King County to discontinue using products that contain 0.5 grams or more of artificial trans fat per serving, excluding pre-packaged foods with nutritional labels. The implementation timeframe will be addressed by the Board of Health’s Advisory Committee on Nutrition at its July 9th meeting and will be incorporated immediately into the proposed legislation.

Read the FAQ [PDF] for more information, or attend the meeting today at 1:30pm in the King County Courthouse, Room 1001.

Tell me what this means:

Thanks to new technologies (like microarrays), collecting vast amounts of data is easier than ever. So, what do all those dots mean? Without some annotation – information on what those dots represent, which ones are more important or interesting for a given problem – it’s hopeless to answer a useful question.

The technology is great, but without careful context, the data is worse than useless. Poorly applied, it’s an endless source of false leads, false connections and false certainty. This is the difference between data and evidence.

Which brings me to:

"We have no credible information pointing to a specific imminent attack," said [White House homeland security adviser] Ms Townsend. "But the warning is clear, and we are taking it seriously."

Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security secretary, told a newspaper last week that he had a "gut feeling" that al-Qaeda was preparing an attack.

Courtesy of MSNBC

Aside from the Constitutional and moral cesspool that centers a policy to not control the collection of personal information on citizens, it’s the pathetic uselessness of the data generated (“no credible information” “gut feeling”) that drives me nuts. Warrants are filters, guaranteeing that there is some good reason to be listening, and that other cheaper and potentially more informative methods have failed. Warrant-less wiretapping is like running a microarray having made no effort to identify the spots. There is no better way to generate a lot of time-wasting information and false leads.

There's a well-funded creationist on the loose... in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Discovery Institute's pro-intelligent-design blog crows about outreach to Spanish-speaking communities.

Just fantastic.

Scary:

About 315 gallons of water apparently spilled from a tank at one of the plant's seven reactors and entered a pipe that flushed it into the sea, said Jun Oshima, an executive at Tokyo Electric Power Co.

But check out this way more impressive nuclear power plant fiasco from the mid-90's:

Detroit Edison's plan to release slightly radioactive water from the Fermi II nuclear plant into Lake Erie today has received the blessings of state, county and city officials...
The 1.5 million gallons of tainted water are being dumped as part of repairs to the plant. It was damaged Christmas Day when a steam turbine failed.

(from the Buffalo News Feb 24, 1994.)

Take that Japan. USA! USA!

Extra bonus nuclear disaster fact? The Fermi I reactor - with a liquid sodium metal core, plutonium producing fast breeder reactor - melted down in 1966. Both plants are built on the shore of Lake Erie. For the non-chemists among us: Sodium Metal + Water = Boom.

Will this

ever equal the impact of this

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare. .... The domestication of biotechnology in everyday life may also be helpful in solving practical economic and environmental problems. Once a new generation of children has grown up, as familiar with biotech games as our grandchildren are now with computer games, biotechnology will no longer seem weird and alien. In the era of Open Source biology, the magic of genes will be available to anyone with the skill and imagination to use it. The way will be open for biotechnology to move into the mainstream of economic development, to help us solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate the human condition all over the earth.

I wish I could share Freeman Dyson's optimism.