We're doomed!

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It’s the end of the world - again
http://2020visions.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/end_of_world.jpgThe idea that humans are killing nature and have a short amount of time to change their ‘ecocidal’ behaviour has been around for far longer than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s science body whose recommendations are being discussed in Copenhagen. But the amnesia that environmentalist campaigners and theorists display when it comes to past predictions of doom is striking.

For instance, in 1990 Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith co-authored the book 5,000 Days to Save the Planet, calling for an urgent decrease in CO2 emissions to avoid the Earth expiring by 2003. As it turned out, the Earth outlived Goldsmith, who passed away in August this year.

It's something in the water

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Lithium in drinking water has 'anti-suicide' effect

http://www.solarnavigator.net/animal_kingdom/animal_images/suicide_by_edouard_manet_1877.jpg
In Japan's Oita Prefecture, cities with higher levels of lithium in their drinking water experienced lower rates of suicide. The study, in the British Journal of Psychiatry, made me wonder if governments should add lithium to the water supply. Hirochika Ohgami and colleagues at Oita University found a slight, but statistically significant correlation after analysing suicide rates in 18 municipalities between 2002 and 2005. 

The amount of lithium in drinking water would seem far too low to offer any clinical benefit, since people with bipolar disorder routinely take hundreds of times more lithium each day. But Ohgami's team points to another study showing that people with bipolar disorder who don't respond to lithium are still less likely to attempt suicide after taking the drug. "It seems probable that the anti-suicidal effect of lithium may be unrelated to the mood-stabilising effects and that very low lithium levels may possess an anti-suicidal effect," they write.

Coffin nails

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15 cigarettes: all it takes to harm genes

http://www.topnews.in/health/files/lungcancer_1.jpgReading that headline you might be forgiven for thinking that after your first fifteen ciggies you have created one genetic mutation and for every fifteen cigarettes you smoke thereafter another mutation occurs. This, of course, is bollocks. There is no way that a calculation like this could be made. The figure was arrived at by dividing the total number of cigarettes smoked by a cancer victim and dividing it by the number of mutations, 23,000 in this case. It's just an averaging out of a lifetime's smoking and the mutations it causes. There are no details of the age of the cancer sufferer nor how long he had been smoking but I'm guessing he smoked an average of 20 - 25 cigarettes a day for between 35 and 40 years.

We know that giving up smoking, even after many years of the habit, eventually reduces the risk of lung cancer to almost the same level as a lifelong non-smoker. It also seems, looking at the Nature article from which this story is extracted, that some repair seems to take place over time. We also need more studies on more smokers who show no sign of lung cancer to see if they have fewer mutations and to discover why.

It is obvious that smoking causes cancer, although it seems that some people seem to able to smoke as much as they like without suffering from any ill-effects, probably because of protective genetic factors, and it is obvious that the more you smoke and the longer you smoke the greater the risk. But that is a long way from saying that all it takes to harm genes is fifteen cigarettes. Very sloppy.