(R to L) Kevin Kelly, Robert Krulwich, and Steven Johnson talk about technology, and dismiss the Singularity.

Is the Singularity Near? Depends on who you ask. The New York Public Library and FORA.tv recently sponsored a discussion on accelerating technologies and whether they will benefit or harm our society. On hand were Kevin Kelly, Steven Johnson, and Robert Krulwich, all popular commentators on science and innovation. The three speakers generally took a ‘middle of the road’ view of our developing scientific possibility – the future will probably produce some amazing technologies, but they will be matched by amazing concerns and dangers. Somewhere in that mix, the concept of the Singularity, as outlined by Ray Kurzweil, came up for discussion, and all three were quick to dismiss it. Kelly, Krulwich, and Johnson seemed to believe in the progression of technology, but the idea that such progression might lead to unending exponential growth was not only implausible, but the people who believed in such change were trying to solve problems “just by thinking about them”. Watch a highlight that focuses on this part of their discussion in the video below. For those of us who like “thinking too much” it’s nice to hear opinions from the other side of the table.

The entire 80+ minute discussion can be found courtesy of NYPL on FORA.tv by clicking here.

Whether or not you agree with their opinions, it’s hard to find three speakers who have had more success discussing science than Kelly, Krulwich, and Johnson. Excluding actual scientists, of course. Kevin Kelly is one of the founders of Wired and author of works like Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines…(you can download it for free). Steven Johnson is a New York Times Bestselling List author many times over and has written about topics as varied as disease, innovation, pop culture, and technology. Robert Krulwich is one of the hosts of RadioLab, a science minded show on NPR, a well known speaker, moderator, and science-type journalist. …He’s also one of my favorite people to listen to (a very funny and level headed guy).

So, should their dismissal of the Singularity sway you? Maybe. With complex issues like accelerating technologies, it’s often easier to listen to experts than to try to become an expert yourself. That sentiment goes for those who adhere to Ray Kurzweil as well as Kelly, Johnson, and Krulwich. Clearly when you’re dealing with predicting the future there’s no real way to prove any side of the argument is right without simply waiting for time to pass. I think, though, for those of us who find the entire concept of the Singularity intriguing, it’s good to hear opposing views that are based on experience rather than ignorance. Krulwich, Kelly, and Johnson aren’t cutting-edge scientists, they are commentators like myself (forgive the conceit of comparing them to me) and while I disagree with their sentiments in this case, I appreciate the time they’ve spent researching, learning, and talking about technological innovation. The discussion about the Singularity has to be just that, a discussion, not a monologue. Now, I can only hope that FORA.tv and NYPL invite Kurzweil, James Canton, and Aubrey deGray to give a counter argument.

[screen capture and video credit: Fora.tv]

Original post source

A survey of 200 sites in 20 countries around the world has found that bisphenol A, a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen and is linked to developmental disorders, is ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans.

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found mostly in shatter-proof plastics and epoxy resins. Most people have trace amounts in their bodies, likely absorbed from food containers. Its hormone-mimicking properties make it a potent endocrine system disruptor.

In recent years, scientists have moved from studying BPA’s damaging effects in laboratory animals to linking it to heart disease, sterility and altered childhood development in humans. Many questions still remain about dosage effects and the full nature of those links, but in January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that “recent studies provide reason for some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children.”

The oceanic BPA survey, presented March 23 at an American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, was conducted by Nihon University chemists Katsuhiko Saido and Hideto Sato. At an ACS meeting last year, they described how soft plastic in seawater doesn’t just float or sink intact, but can break down rapidly, releasing toxins. In their new findings, they showed that BPA-containing hard plastics can break down too, and found BPA in ocean water and sand at concentrations ranging from .01 to .50 parts per million.

As for what those numbers mean for public and environmental health, it’s hard to say. BPA can cause reproductive disorders in shellfish and crustaceans, and doses below a single part per trillion can have cell-level effects, but the path from water and sand to ocean animals needs to be studied.

One disturbing possibility is that BPA could bioaccumulate, with animals eating BPA-tainted animals that have eaten BPA-tainted animals, finally reaching high concentrations in top-level ocean predators and the humans who eat them. For that to happen, BPA would have to be stored in fatty tissue, rather than passing quickly through the body.

“That’s a really difficult, unsettled question,” said Shanna Swan, a University of Rochester environmental medicine specialist who wasn’t involved in the survey.

In a 2009 Environmental Health Perspectives study of BPA concentrations in people who had recently fasted, Swan found that BPA levels remained high longer than expected. It’s possible that BPA indeed accumulated in their fat, said Swan. They could also have picked up BPA from as-yet-unappreciated non-dietary sources, such as household dust or leaching from PVC water pipes. Or both scenarios may be true.

The BPA contamination found by Saido and Sato likely comes from a mix of boat paint and plastic. About three million tons of BPA-containing plastics are produced each year. The United Nations estimates that the average square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of plastic trash.

“Marine debris plastic in the ocean will certainly constitute a new global ocean contamination for long into the future,” wrote Saido and Sato in their presentation.

Image: fiЯas/Flickr

See Also:

• We Should Have Banned Bisphenol A Twenty Years Ago
• Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean …
• Common Lab Gear Could Contaminate Critical Research

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Hot water really can freeze faster than cold water, a new study finds. Sometimes. Under extremely specific conditions. With carefully chosen samples of water.

New experiments provide support for a special case of the counterintuitive Mpemba effect, which holds that water at a higher temperature turns to ice faster than cooler water.

The Mpemba effect is named for a Tanzanian schoolboy, Erasto B. Mpemba, who noticed while making ice cream with his classmates that warm milk froze sooner than chilled milk. Mpemba and physicist Denis Osborne published a report of the phenomenon in Physics Education in 1969. Mpemba joined a distinguished group of people who had also noticed the effect: Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes had all made the same claim.

On the surface, the notion seems to defy reason. A container of hot water should take longer to turn into ice than a container of cold water, because the cold water has a head start in the race to zero degrees Celsius.

But under scientific scrutiny, the issue becomes murky. The new study doesn’t explain the phenomenon, but it does identify special conditions under which the Mpemba effect can be seen, if it truly exists.

“All in all, the work is a nice beginning, but not systematic enough to do more than confirm it can happen,” comments water expert David Auerbach, whose own experiments also suggest that the effect does occur.

Papers published over the last decade, including several by Auerbach, who performed his research while at the Max Planck Institute for Flow Research in Göttingen, Germany, have documented instances of hot water freezing faster than cold, but not reproducibly, says study author James Brownridge of State University of New York at Binghamton. “No one has been able to get reproducible results on command.”

That’s what Brownridge has done. One of his experiments, presented online, repeatedly froze a sample of hot water faster than a similar sample of cool water.

Note the word similar. In order for the experiment to work, the cool water had to be distilled, and the hot water had to come from the tap.

In the experiment, about two teaspoons of each sample were held in a copper device that completely surrounded the water, preventing evaporation and setting reasonably even temperatures. Freezing was official when sensors picked up an electrical signal created by ice formation.

Brownridge heated the tap water to about 100° C, while the distilled water was cooled to 25° C or lower. When both samples were put into the freezer, the hot water froze before the cold water. Brownridge then thawed the samples and repeated the experiment 27 times. Each time, the hot tap water froze first.

The experiment worked because the two types of water have different freezing points, Brownridge says. Differences in the shape, location and composition of impurities can all cause water’s freezing temperature — which in many cases is below zero degrees C — to vary widely. With a higher freezing point, the tap water had an edge that outweighed the distilled water’s lower temperature.

Because the experiment didn’t compare two identical samples of water, the mystery of the Mpemba effect is not really solved. “I’m not arrogant enough to say I’ve solved this,” Brownridge says. But he has set some guidelines about when the effect can be seen.

Physical chemist Christoph Salzmann of the University of Durham in England says he’s not convinced the Mpemba effect really exists, because there are innumerable things that influence the timing of freezing, making it impossible to completely control.

Predicting how long it will take for a water sample to crystallize “is a bit like trying to predict when the next earthquake or crash of the stock market will happen,” he says. “I would not want to say that the Mpemba effect does not exist. But I have still not been convinced of its existence.”

Image: Kenn Wilson/flickr

This week, 200 scientists will gather in an attempt to determine how research into the possibilities of geoengineering the planet to combat climate change should proceed.

They say it’s necessary because of the riskiness and scale of the experiments that could be undertaken — and the moral implications of their work to intentionally alter the Earth’s climate.

The group is meeting at the Asilomar resort in California, a dreamy enclave a few hours south of San Francisco. The gathering intentionally harkens back to the February 1975 meeting there of molecular biologists hashing out rules to govern what was then the hot-button scientific issue of the day: recombinant DNA and the possibility of biohazards.

The 1975 process wasn’t perfect, but after a fraught and meandering few days, the scientists released a joint statement that placed some restrictions and conditions on research, particularly with pathogens. That meeting is now held up as a model for how researchers can successfully assume the mantle of self-regulation.

“And perhaps that was the final, foggy significance of Asilomar: a promise that the scientists who deal with the most fundamental of life stuff will not sequester themselves beneath Chicago stadiums or within blockhouses in the New Mexico desert — that their work, at least as significant as the most subtle of sub-nuclear manipulations, will be done with care and public scrutiny,” wrote Michael Rogers in a June 19, 1975 Rolling Stone article.

Organized by the Climate Response Fund, a new group created to support geoengineering, this week’s conference is self-consciously recalling its famous Asilomar predecessor: All the participants in the new conference were sent Rogers’ article.

A conference brochure summed up the popular attitude toward its predecessor, praising it “as a landmark effort in self-regulation by the scientific community” and attributing the lack of “dangerous releases of organisms modified with recombinant DNA” to the “effectiveness of the ultimate guidelines and procedures.” It includes a black-and-white photograph of 1975 scientists meeting in the resort’s hoary chapel (above).

But in important ways the the two Asilomars are different. The Climate Response Fund was founded by Margaret Leinen, who although a respected scientist, already had a commercial interest in a company doing geoengineering. The original Asilomar had a more official provenance: It was organized by the National Academy of Sciences with $100,000 from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

But even if the two conferences were identical, the real history of the ‘75 Asilomar conference highlights the problems of scientific self-governance as much as the solutions it offers. It was messier than most would probably like to recall.

Crucially, the 1975 Asilomar meeting sidestepped the question of how recombinant DNA research should be done and who it should benefit, in favor of the more technical question of how it could be done more safely.

“The recombinant DNA issue was defined as a technical problem to be solved by technical means, a technical fix,” wrote MIT historian of science Charles Wiener in a 2001 retrospective. “Larger ethical issues regarding the purposes of the research; long-term goals, including human genetic intervention; and possible abuses of the research were excluded.”

This year’s version of Asilomar could draw even more attention to the fundamental tension of scientific self-regulation of risk- and value-laden experiments. Already, this week’s conference has drawn criticism from high-level scientists with an interest in geoengineering like Stanford’s Ken Caldeira and the University of Calgary’s David Keith.

“My only concern about this meeting is that the convening organization, [Climate Response Fund] is nontransparent and appears to be closely tied to Climos which was conceived to do ocean fertilization for profit,” Keith wrote. “While I am happy to see profit-driven startups drive innovation, I think tying ocean fertilization to carbon credits was a sterling example of how not to govern climate engineering, and I am therefore concerned to see a closely linked organization at the center of a meeting on governance. A meeting on governance ought to start by having transparent and disinterested governance.”

Despite Keith’s strongly worded statement about the conference, he has decided to attend to, as he put it, “speak out.” Caldeira declined his invitation, telling Wired.com that he preferred governance meetings held by “established professional societies and non-profits without a stake in the outcomes.”

The 1975 Asilomar conference did go through more established routes and even with that pedigree, the molecular biologists struggled to come up with a decision-making strategy that could address the concerns of the public.

“The motive from the start was to reduce potential hazards and to proceed with the research, avoiding public interference by demonstrating that scientists on their own could protect laboratory workers, the public and the environment,” MIT’s Wiener continued. “Of course, this action contained a contradiction: They were dealing with a public health issue and simultaneously attempting to keep the public out of it.”

Certainly, there’s a logic to letting experts in a scientific field decide about the field’s future. The presumption is that those closest to the science know its possibilities — both good and bad — best. Yet, that assumes that the science is guiding the proceedings.

Rolling Stone’s Rogers recorded a remarkable amount of confusion and the suggestion that the conference’s organizers had structured the rules to protect their own lines of research, while limiting other people’s work. In a March 22, 1975 article, Science News‘ Janet Weinberg described the scientists’ collective response to draft rules as “a barrage of unyielding, self-indulgent, and conflicting attitudes.”

This historical reality led Tufts University bioethicist Sheldon Krimsky to write that the modest regulations that emerged from Asilomar were not based on some systematic definition of risk, in the 1982 book, Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy. Rather, they represented a much more human solution, a “negotiated settlement among scientists incorporating some science and considerable conjecture and intuition.”

While most scientists believe that the Asilomar meeting was a qualified success, some do not. The most outspoken, DNA co-discoverer, James Watson, reportedly blurted out during panel on risk, “These people have made up guidelines that don’t apply to their own experiments.” Watson argues the conference led to the creation of “totally capricious and totally unnecessary” guidelines and actually made the public more afraid of biotechnology. In 1978, Watson railed against Asilomar and similar meetings, saying they were “a real theater of the absurd in which the only professionals were a bizarre collection of kooks, sad incompetents, and down-right shits.”

It’s obvious but worth noting that Watson was concerned that science was, and would be, too limited. In fact, he had experiments that he had to put off for two years due to the regulations. But social scientists have generally drawn the opposite conclusion about Asilomar’s power to limit science.

Susan Wright, a historian of science at the University of Michigan, has called the bargain supposedly struck at Asilomar — some research restrictions in exchange for scientific self-governance — a myth on both sides of the deal.

“It is a myth that most scientists working under competitive pressures can address the implications of their own work with dispassion and establish appropriately stringent controls — any more than an unregulated Bill Gates can give competing browsers equal access to the world wide web,” she wrote. “Sure enough, some five years later, the controls proposed at Asilomar and developed by the National Institutes of Health were dismantled without anything like adequate knowledge of the hazards.”

Further, she says, “it is equally a myth that scientists in this field are self-governing.” Instead, their research agendas are shaped by utilitarian interests of government or corporate sponsors. Even at that early stage, before the biotech boom of later years, molecular biologists were never doing pure science.

Even researchers who consider the 1975 Asilomar conference a success, who convened on its 25th anniversary realize that the its process is no longer feasible.

“While there is general agreement that the 1975 Asilomar meeting made a large contribution to the resolution of a major scientific policy issue, it was clearly the consensus at the 2000 meeting that perceptions of science and of scientists have changed so drastically over the last quarter century that it is virtually inconceivable that a similar format could be successful today,” wrote the editors of Perspectives in Biology in a special issue in 2001.

The Asilomar conference this week will have to deal head-on with these dilemmas. Odds are, no matter what happens, any statement that comes out of the meeting will be incomplete, unfinished and provisional. It should also incorporate and remain open to input from critics of geoengineering.

Perhaps, the messy negotiations of parties guided by science and their own interests will push the discussion to the sensitive middle ground that the 1975 conference found, making no one totally happy, but recognizing the potential — good and bad — of a radical new field of scientific inquiry.

Images: National Academy of Sciences.

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