Imagine all the people

As I write this, the US population is on the verge of breaking 300 million. In fact, the Census Bureau estimates that we'll hit the magic number at 7:46 AM EDT tomorrow morning. The last time the country broke a hundred million mark, it was 1967. (That would be 7 years before I was born.)

While many are taking the opportunity to discuss America's consumption patters, resource usage, and immigration policies, an interesting article showed up on New Scientist today. What would happen to the environment, the world, if the human species just up and left? How long would the traces of human habitation last on the planet?

As you can imagine different aspects of the human footprint would disappear at different rates. It's actually a fascinating study in entropy (roughly, the tendency of a system to go to the least energetic state - to just fall apart - when there's no one to maintain it). There's a couple of ways of looking at this article. First, the glass-half-full argument: that in spite of how much we've done to the planet, none if it is totally irreversible, that if left to its own devices, nature will take care of her own. Then there's the glass-half-empty argument: that it would take 100s to thousands (in the case of nuclear waste, maybe even millions of years) to undo the damage we have done.

You can read into it what you want. Me, I like the idea that things can bounce back. But, if we were to turn everything off right now, would the environment, the ecology turn out exactly the same? No, of course not. The environment probably didn't return to an exact pre-Ice Age state after the glaciers melted, either. Once an ecology is altered, artificially or naturally, I imagine it's nearly impossible to return it to its native state. However, the resilience of nature is amazing. You can see it just by looking at a vacant urban lot, and see the grass, weeds, and trees taking it over. Nature will grow back where it can.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't still be careful what we do.

[See New Scientist for the global exit story. To see how close the US is to the 300 million mark, see the Census Bureau's population clock. Most likely, by the time you read this, the zeros will have turned over. "Earth at Night" courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.]

Nobel Prize updates - have you got your scorecard out?

Since my last Nobel prize post, two more of the Nobel prizes for 2006 have been handed out.

On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their efforts to peer into the earliest moments of the universe. Dr. Smoot should not be confused with Oliver Smoot, another MIT alum whose physical stature was the basis for the smoot, a somewhat non-standard unit of measurement.

Wednesday dawned with the announcement that Roger Kornberg had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the mechanisms of genetic translation (the process by which our DNA is decoded into, well, us). Dr. Kornberg follows in the footsteps of his father, Arthur Kornberg, who took home the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959; they are the 6th father-and-son laureate pair in the history of the Nobel Prizes.

[More on the Nobel website.]

If Fluffy makes you sneeze...

....then it's time to trade up to a hypoallergenic cat!

For those allergic cat lovers who can't be bothered with antihistamines or allergy injections -- and have about four grand kicking around -- science brings you a new kitty specifically bred to produce less of the protein that makes you red-eyed and and sniffly. The new kitties, created by a research firm called Allerca, were produced by the oldest form of genetic engineering in the book: selective breeding. By finding cats that naturally produce less of the protein (called Fel d1) and breeding them together, Allerca was eventually able to raise cats that don't raise the hackles of our immune systems.

Allerca first started taking orders for the sneeze-less felines back in 2004, and there's already a long waiting list.

[More on the BBC, or on the Allerca website.]

It's like the Oscars, but for academics

The academic world is holding its collective breath, as we've entered the most exciting time of the year...Nobel season. Over the course of the next few days, the Nobel Institute will announce the winners of this year's Nobel Prizes. Awarded by Sweden's Nobel Institute, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901 for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.

The awards were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, who, according to the Nobel Prize website, was "a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author and pacifist." He also happened to be the man who invented dynamite.

The will said, in part:

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

Nobel died in 1896, but the first award was not given until 1901. The reason? His family contested the will. Ahh, sweet litigation.

And how does one find out if they've won one of these coveted awards? In the US, it seems that one receives a phone call at home, very early in the morning. Still only half-awake, one picks up the phone, and wonders if the person on the other end is a crank caller with a bad Swedish accent. Then one receives several dozen other phone calls, usually from reporters who have also woken up at unreasonably early hours. And then one realizes, "Holy Crap, I'm a laureate! I'd better have some coffee!!"

As of this writing, only the prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded. The winners: a pair of researchers, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who discovered RNA interference (RNAi). This natural process effectively silences genes like the mute button on a stereo, and can be used both experimentally (to answer the question, "Hey, what happens when I turn this gene off?") and potentially therapeutically in diseases like cancer.

The unusual thing about this particular award is that it came so quickly. The researchers only published their seminal work on the subject 8 years ago. Nobel awardees (or laureates) typically don't receive awards until decades after the actual accomplishment for which they are nominated.

And now, for a shameless plug - the Nobels' lesser-known stepcousin, the IgNobel Prizes, will be awarded this Thursday night. Only slightly less prestigious (they can make or break careers, you know), the Igs honor those achievements which make people laugh, and then make people think. The awards, which are handed out by actual Nobel laureates (there are one or two of them just hanging around in Boston), are awarded in a ceremony with all appropriate pomp and circumstance. I can say that because I will be on stage helping herd the winners through the ceremony.

[For more on the prizes, check out the Nobel website or a recent story from Reuters. For more on the IgNobels, including how to get tickets or see the webcast, take a look at Improbable.com.]