The Beijing Olympics

Remember when the Olympic games were about the athletes and the sports? I've been coming across some pretty weird articles and thought I'd share.

The Beijing Olympics in August are about the Chinese gov't's

• human rights abuses---this site is worth a visit just for the display of professionalism
  


• controlling the weather---

  Its cloud-seeding weapons include 6,781 artillery guns and 4,110 rocket launchers, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The China Meteorological Administration says 4,231 flights for cloud-seeding were conducted from 1995 to 2003.
  
  The Chinese scientists say it worked — increasing rainfall during those years by 210 billion cubic meters, enough to meet the annual needs of 400 million people. China has a population of about 1.3 billion.

  (more excerpts below)
  


• Beijing pollution,
  


• genocide in Darfur (Spielberg actually had an effect!).
  
  But the biggest crowds in Beijing might turn out to be for an unexpected kind of game - the digital kind.

  Regarding the Olympics deal, I ask him the inevitable question: Isn't video gaming rather non-athletic?
  
  But he unreels a rapid-fire series of comebacks:
  
  * "This involves hand/eye coordination in the extreme. The best guys train eight hours a day."
  * "You burn more calories playing 20 minutes of boxing on the Wii than in a 20-minute jog."
  * "Do you get more obese playing video games or watching football on TV?"

  
  More on their weather control program...
  

  But the history of Chinese science projects has its quirky examples, too — like the one that promises to produce softball-size tomatoes or giant gourds by shooting seeds or seedlings into space and then sowing them back on earth.
  
  Fifty years ago, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong made extravagant claims about new agricultural techniques that could lift China out of starvation. His plans to beat nature were based mostly on ideology and pseudo-science and caused widespread famine.

  
  ...............................
  

  On the very day Chinese weather modification experts were boasting at a news conference about controlling rain during the Olympics, the country’s midsection was being pummeled by the worst snow storm in 50 years, which Chinese meteorologists failed to predict.

Of Course Coffee Is Good For You!!

I can't help but wonder how much we waste on hopelessly stupid research like this.

Dr. Lenore Arab of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA also took part, presenting results of a review of nearly 400 studies investigating coffee consumption and cancer risk.
There's evidence, Arab noted, that the beverage may protect against certain types of colon cancer, as well as rectal and liver cancer, possibly by reducing the amount of cholesterol, bile acid and natural sterol secretion in the colon, speeding up the passage of stool through the colon (and thus cutting exposure of the lining of the intestine to potential carcinogens in food), and via other mechanisms as well.

It's tasty. It was never supposed to be thought of as good for anything other than a jolt.

The Honey Bee "Die-Off"

We are experiencing an odd and somewhat scary vanishing act in our honey bees. We're not alone in the world, (I've found reports involving England, Brazil and Taiwan) but scientists don't even know if the disparate events are related.

Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

I've been hearing reports of this for weeks, but I find the uncertainty in the discussion distracting. If I'm not the one looking for answers then the ideas and theories are just speculation and suspicions. But this story has had precious few facts. The big theory a couple of weeks ago was that cell phones were suspect. This week it's parasites or some disease. The evidence is strong.

A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.
The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.

The 90's, though, represent a recent decade and I can't remember any mention of it. Perhaps I've just forgotten or maybe the latest Clinton scandal simply overtook it's place in the news. This article by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer,
mentions other similar episodes in the more distant past, and seems to give the impression that it's not yet time to panic.
The article also includes the required enviro-nut expert...

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse — and we took it for granted."
"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.

Anyway, the Texas A&M UniversityEntomology Dept. has this for us...

CCD symptoms and beekeeper actions on suspicion of CCD are outlined below.

1. In collapsed colonies (dead colonies):
a. The complete absence of adult bees in colonies with no or little build-up of dead bees in the colonies or in front of those colonies.
b. The presence of capped (sealed) brood in colonies
c. The presence of food stores both honey and bee bread (pollen)
c1. Which is not robbed by other bees
c2. When attacked by hive pests such as wax moth and small hive beetle, the attack is noticeably delayed.

2. In cases where the colony appears to be actively collapsing (dying):
a. An insufficient workforce to maintain the brood that is present.
b. The workforce seems to be made up of young adult bees.
c. The queen is present.
d. The cluster is reluctant to consume provided feed, such as sugar syrup and protein supplement.