Scott and Scurvy

Reading Scott and Scurvy, a fascinating post on Idle Words about the scurvy which plagued Robert Scott's 1911 expedition to the South Pole:

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

It's a fascinating story of how medical practice which lacks knowledge of underlying causes can become distorted over time. It's also kind of heartbreaking to read about the polar missions failing again and again all because they're working from the wrong model of scurvy as a disease.

2020 Visions

Nature's interviews of prominent scientists on their visions of scientific progress in the next decade. Exciting stuff!

Steven Strogatz's Sync

Steven Strogatz's wonderful book Sync discusses how synchrony in biological networks is not only common, but neigh-inevitable. His opening discussion of fireflies is particularly vivid: along some riverbanks in Southeast Asia, populations of fireflies stretching for miles will all flash in synchrony, a phenomenon which baffled western explorers for decades. It turns out the effect is easy to replicate in a model-- say you have a collection of periodic oscillators which fire a burst of light at their peak and then reset, you can achieve synchrony if you make it so that each oscillator, when it fires, bumps its neighbors forward a bit in their cycles. Because firing induces a forced reset of the cycle, oscillators will be pushed forward in their cycles until they fall into sync, and then stay locked there; this effect takes off in small groups and quickly grows until the entire network is firing together.

The important points here being that a) neurons do this too (in fact it can be hard to get spiking neural networks to stop doing this) and it's really probably important to coding somehow, and b) you guys, fireflies are totally attempting to form some sort of massive insect-based consciousness here.

You can read more on the subject in the preview of the first chapter and a half, posted on Google Books.

GhostNet

Investigators with Infowar Monitor have recently exposed a vast spy system dubbed GhostNet which has been gathering intelligence information from over 1200 government, military, and NGO computers across 103 countries, mostly in South and Southeast Asia. The system is based almost entirely in China, but it is yet unclear whether it is the work of the Chinese government, independent Chinese citizens, or some outside organization.

A recent New York Times article on the system is full of spooky facts, such as evidence of the system's use against the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan rights movement, and descriptions of its capacities including the ability to activate infected computers' audio and visual recording equipment to covertly eavesdrop on their surroundings.

View the 53-page report detailing the GhostNet investigation here.