Do antibiotics make us fat?

the human gutAcross our population, the widespread use of antibiotics may have encouraged a set of bugs that increases obesity.

Roger Highfield at the Telegraph reports that there is a link between gut bacteria and obesity where antibiotics may play a significant role.

Bacteria make it possible to digest our food. The human digestive system is home to about 100 trillion bacteria – around 10 times the number of cells in the major organs (there are another 25 trillion red blood cells, plus a few trillion brain cells). “Good” bugs, such as lactobaccili, alter the way that fats are emulsified in the upper gut, making them less available to the body.

“We never dine alone: our microbes are able to sit at the dining room table together with us, consume for their own purposes the nutrients that are available, notably those we cannot digest on our own, and share the bounty with us,” said Professor Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University School of Medicine.

“This raises the question of whether differences in the mix of bacteria in our guts predispose some of us to obesity: the number of calories harvested from a serving of cereal may not be the same for everyone – some people may extract slightly more than others and over time this will add up.”

Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London studies bacteria and fat digestion. He’s thinking that obesity could be linked to antibiotic use and misuse. “Mapping the change in population obesity in the US over the last 20 years looks rather like the spread of an infectious disease.”

Roger Highfield asserts,

“You would be nothing without these microbial minions milling around inside your large intestine, performing crucial functions that your fancy, complicated human cells haven’t a clue how to do.

“The ecology of the human gut is at least as complex as that in soils or seas.”


The University of Maryland achieved the first large-scale gene sequencing of the human gut. The findings should lead to a better understanding of how microbes in the gut contribute to health and diseases.

Most of what is known about the microbes that live in the human gut has been learned from samples grown in a Petri dish. But only one percent of bacteria is able to grow in a Petri dish. We can now look at bacteria that we couldn’t see before. By looking straight at the environment, we can see all of the organisms, even those we can’t culture.

Duty, dedication, loyalty and love

Jan & Gertruda GrzebskiDuty, dedication, loyalty and love are obscured in media stories about a man in Poland who awoke from a very long coma.

Hit by a train in 1988, Jan Grzebski has been in a perpetual coma and kept alive by his wife Gertruda. She was convinced that he would recover one day.

“People kept asking when he was going to die, but he is not dead,” she said.

What’s the amazing part of this story?

To prevent bed-sore infections, she changed her comatose husband’s position every hour for nineteen years!

She exclaimed to AP, “This is my great reward for all the care, faith and love.” [Times Union, Telegraph, BBC, Telegram]


Update:
physorg.com has discovered additional insight about Grzebski, now becoming known as the Polish ‘Rip van Winkle’. Commenting on the extreme nature of his 19 years, Grzebski told the news service AFP that he was conscious of what was going on around him throughout his state of — “well, call it ‘in absentia,’ if it wasn’t a real coma”.

“I heard everything around me.

“I understood everything but I could not utter a single word.

“I was like a plant.

“It was horrible, not being able to communicate.”

One thousand letters

Old handwritten letterAfter the death of a secretive collector, Susannah Morris of Christies was called in to make an examination. In the laundry room, wedged between a washing machine and a tumble dryer, was a plain metal filing cabinet.

As Miss Morris delved through files, where the papers were arranged by size rather than alphabet, date or subject, her eyes grew wider.

There was a love letter by Napoleon;
a letter by Beethoven;
one by Albert Einstein;
by Isaac Newton,
Hemingway,
Frederick the Great,
Darwin,
Voltaire,
Lewis Carroll,
Pushkin,
Monet,
Churchill,
Gandhi,
Defoe,
Tchaikovsky and
Dostoevsky;
a diplomatic note to the king of France in the hand of Elizabeth I;
a letter of condolence by John Donne;
a tragic 1545 account written by John Calvin about the suicide of a friend;
a withering letter by Charlotte Brontë on male shortcomings.

She said, “It was an extraordinary find in such an improbable place. It is a history in miniature of the last 500 years of western civilization and is the most remarkable collection on the market for a generation or more.” Albin Schram, the son of an Austrian industrialist, spent half his life assembling the collection.

The most valuable item in the collection is Donne’s letter of condolence in 1624 to Lady Kingsmill the day after the death of her husband. He says that man should not judge God’s actions “although we could direct him to do them better”. [UK Telegraph]

What’s unknown?

Discovery is usually unexpectedA bit about the many, many arrangements we can find in every bucket.

Before California Assemblyman Bill Filante made a bid for Congress in 1992, we enjoyed several conversations about our culture and how poorly we understand probability.

Random numbers are misunderstood as folks buy lottery tickets of astronomical odds. The late assemblyman was staunchly against government lottery, not merely because State lotteries pilfer pockets, but because he worried about a wasting of purpose.

Government, he asserted, must never operate a program that will require ignorance of its citizens.

We must teach each other the vast difference between what’s likely and what’s random. After pulling the handle for a few coins, we must learn how ingeniously we convince ourselves that the next bet will deliver a few more coins and, as if lubricating Providence, one more bet will gift our riches and our deserved relief.

We make errors whenever we believe what we fail to measure. We too often make errors of assumption in our gambit to read trends and decipher patterns. Major policy changes and significant spending are often based on quick conjecture that we trammel into winning consensus. We easily let ourselves tweak models by removing complexity, ignoring ambiguity and failing to capture fringe events.

We trick ourselves if we do not understand probability,
because we find reasons where none exist.

Discovery is most often by accident. Many breakthrough inventions were unintended. It may be that randomness has better luck than most research.

Is it better when we try to evaluate stock markets? Known by ‘The Black Swan’ and reminding us about the unsteadiness of circumstances, Nassim Nicholas Taleb may be Wall Street’s principal dissident. [wiki]

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know….”

Replying to eager investors, Taleb accounts for upsetting conventional views when he says, “Let us understand the true odds of financial ruin, so we can enter the markets prepared.” His book Fooled by Randomness is selected by Fortune as one of “The Smartest Books of All Time”.

Some say Taleb’s caution requires a new understanding of what we call heroic…

“The truth is that we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Nassim Taleb and the lesson of our volatile times.

“There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.” – Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 2002

Arlene Goldarb says that Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. “What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories.”

Thinking about how we look at our historical achievements, she repeats Taleb’s assertion that ‘… almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. He’s said, “most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for.”

Forbes has published an essay where Taleb reminds us again that, “Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for.

The Economist reviews The Black Swan, noting that “Humans are bad at factoring in the possibility of randomness and uncertainty. We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict, and overestimate our own knowledge.”

The Telegraph says “it turns out, we humans prefer to work with predictions and forecasts, even when they are nearly always wrong.”


The above is primarily a re-post from 2006. I’ve been thinking about whether we gamble our future and I remembered Taleb’s warnings about certainty.

As if policies are randomly drawn out of a hat to only deter criticism, I’ve been annoyed about the quickdraw corn ethanol policy that may inadvertently be causing massive increases in feed and food costs. I’ve been worrying about commodity inflation as improving living conditions around the world legitimately increase demand while we fail to install adequate productivity for our basic industries. And are we spending more to be green than living well with less?

I’ve been worried about our governments. Too many players are relying on simple popularity and I worry that ordinary majorities do not look deeply into issues and too easily can lift the foolish. To be a wise population, we need adequate knowledge and robust discussion. Otherwise, we fib about weaponry and see threats in our shoes, treat rare disease and ignore pestilence, favor the elite and ignore the desperate….

We seem to be convinced that we can fund a war against a random event. In puny numbers, ugly terrorists are costing us the budgets of centuries because their unknown steps and devious surprise is the power of their terror. It’s the old saw about the enemy we know….

We’ve shown that we do not honestly account for unknown factors.

The other night while playing remote roulette, I saw Donald Rumsfeld on television declaring there were many factors evaluated while establishing our current policies for war. He said something similar to this:

‘We have considered the known known and the known unknown.
We just don’t know about the unknown unknown.’

China’s new Circular Economy law

New skyscrapers in ShanghaiPulling itself along a bootstrapped rush to modernize, China consumes about eleven times the energy to produce a dollar’s worth of gross domestic product as Japan and five times that of the United States.

This is the type of calculation that supports the theory that its struggle to develop will prolong China’s economic impact on the United States and Europe.

But others, such as Daniel Hannan at The Telegraph, see a polar switch where China quickly changes places with wealthy western players to resume its millennial privilege on top. Visiting while Shanghai seems to burst in activity, he worries that while we squabble between ourselves and thump the world’s discontents, a dynamic and inevitable giant may challenge what we think we know about industry and geopolitics. A Polish lawmaker has said, “The world we know is finished. Our children will be their slaves”.

To move toward increased efficiency and sustainability, the economic planners of China are announcing a 2008 law to force a “circular economy”. More than aggressive bargaining and global reach, China seems to be asserting an industrial ecology that will consider the ‘flow of material and energy and not just the money’. [link via lunch over ip]

Along with resource efficiency, the new law would require evaluation of the environmental friendliness of products before they enter the market. Supervising resources, engineering the disposal of waste, and setting up an accountability system for manufacturers will help “produce the maximum amount of products with the minimum resources.” [story, via chinaview.cn]

China’s 11th Five-Year Program requires low energy consumption and high efficiency, low emissions of pollutants, and minimal waste discharge, using the “3-R” principles of reduce, reuse, and recycle.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, wants an effective green economy.

The National People’s Congress has mapped out a plan to reduce energy consumption by 20 per cent and its main pollutants by 10 per cent while still maintaining an average of 7.5 per cent in GDP growth. [china daily]

More than ten provinces and municipalities have regulations on the circular economy. [people’s daily]

Worldwatch reports that this is no breakthrough. “It is very hard to see the necessity to draft a new law. Many articles in the draft are very hard to put into practice in China, like asking producers to collect and recycle packing materials. Furthermore, the draft does not include clear and tough punishment for those who violate the rules of the circular economy.”


Environmental Friendliness:
It’s New but Is It Good? New Product Development and Macromarketing,
Journal of Macromarketing [Abstract]

Links at Green3 with interesting and useful information on environmental friendliness for business managers.

Ecolabelling, where producers supply the characteristics of a commodity to the public with the aim at furthering environmental objectives and its impacts on trade and economy. University of Toronto.

Korea’s Environmental Declaration of Products – environmental-friendliness of products evaluated through Life Cycle Assessment.

Japan’s promotion of the 3Rs to further efficiency in the use of resources and energy, to integrate the reutilization and recycling of goods, and to reconsider wasteful lifestyles and customs in order to allow sound development of the economy of a new society with a reduced environmental load.

USA Federal Trade Commission’s “Guidelines for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims”, for the guidance of the public in conducting its affairs in conformity with legal requirements in labeling, advertising, promotional materials and all other forms of marketing, whether asserted directly or by implication, through words, symbols, emblems, logos, depictions, product brand names, or through any other means, including marketing through digital or electronic means, such as the Internet or electronic mail.


Everybody should have an “energy budget”, and all through the year — taking into account all energy sources, the production of goods and all activities — a person should ideally consume only 2000 Watts (the equivalent of twenty 100-Watts lightbulbs that are on 24/7).

Today, like most Europeans, a Swiss consumes on average 6500 W (about 3000 from fossil fuels, 2000 from renewables, mostly hydroelectric, and the rest imported from abroad) — Americans use some 12000 per head. – Alexander Zehnder, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Morals are insufficient policies

We need goodwill.

To represent us, we need bright, eloquent, vigorous and warm hearted relations around the world. We want others to know our fine intentions and our requirement for a positive and peaceful way of living together.

We appoint goodwill ambassadors to help lift respect for our nation. When an Egyptian leader asked Karen Hughes, the Administration’s Goodwill Ambassador, why President Bush mentions God so often in his speeches, she retorted by probing whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God. She told him, “Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives. Our Constitution cites ‘One nation under God.'” [Salon]

Injecting religion into global relations is not honoring the spirit of our nation.

“Wow ‘Em With Untruths” is a post at theAgitator illustrating the unkempt thinking we allow.

‘One nation under God’ is not in the Constitution. Our Framers took great care to exclude such language. ‘One nation under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 during the Cold War.

Francis Bellamy of the National Education Association composed the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. His original wording was, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ Bellamy wrote about choosing the words:

“It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution…with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people….

“The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands.’ …And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?

“Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’ No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization.

“But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all….”

In the 1920s, the National Flag Conference of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution changed ‘my Flag,’ to ‘the Flag of the United States of America’. Bellamy wrote that he disliked this change. A Catholic campaign by the Knights of Columbus added ‘under God’ in 1954 altering the pledge toward a public prayer. Bellamy stopped attending church because he disliked inequality and racial bigotry that was too often ignored by religion.

Our Founders would urge us to quit promoting morality and religion in civic life.

We fail to execute the deeds of earth when we encumber ourselves with the needs of heaven.

It’s not that faith is unimportant nor should be. It’s that faith is not the task of governments. We need governments for the purpose of getting things done in our world.

Morality is the zeal that faith propels and morality is too often promoted by the immoral. It places people in positions of power. Nietzche warned about the rise of the Nazis when he noticed that morality is the ‘easiest way to lead people by the nose’.

It not that faith isn’t important. Faith is potent. Thus it must be separate from power.

What warning in today’s world will help us see our leadership more closely? Recent political leaders are first and foremost opportunists. We all know opportunists will say whatever we want to hear. What we fail to recognize is the pathology that follows. Folks that spend their time to fool you are generally greater fools.

We are not only determining good versus evil when we vote. Our leaders must convince us not merely of their morals but of their honor. This is the civic challenge that is so much different than the calling of the church.

Honor is a task of great skill that is much more than promoting conscience from a pulpit or a podium. When we look for leaders, we are determining good sense, good manners, good wit – requirements of truthfulness, fairness and vision that create good practice.

Original sketch of the proposed face of the Great SealThere’s excellent policy guidance for our government shown in this early sketch of the face of the Great Seal of the United States.

First in official heraldry, there’s no top on this pyramid but Divinity.

Our symbol easily points out that the American government isn’t joined to God. Government is not from Heaven, nor can be connected to it. Instead, it shall be shaped by the Constitution and restrained to the tasks of the world.

Since 1776, we are never again to be put upon by human authority acting as if God or godly. With divine approval, Annuit Cœptis, we are each bricks in the wall upon a green and pastoral earth. While through the ages, no other order is required.

America’s founders carefully and courageously wanted to provide us a very great freedom for our belief and our practice. Government was not to be involved.

Government is not to make our morality, nor to make rules from our morality, nor preach or promote our morality, nor to represent God in its relations.

Government is to be greater than that: Our government is to leave our God to us. Now, that’s Divine.

Find a flow and kill-o-watt it

There’s untapped power in flowing water. Without building dams and reservoirs, power plant promoters are looking for ample rivers to install new ‘variable speed’ power plants on the river bank.

Spiraling water down cavity pipe to spin turbines, the trick is to match the load on the turbine-generator to the flow of the river.

Run-of-river Patent 4674279General Electric says, “Run-of-river hydroelectric power is one of the most environmentally safe and commercially viable sources of electricity generation… a green method of power generation because of their small environmental footprint.” General Electric and Plutonic have permits for at least four Run-Of-River projects.

Green Power Corridor
Plutonic Power is paying attention to British Columbia, proposing 25 run-of-river projects to generate enough energy for a half million homes. Fortis is building a nonstorage plant in Central America. Ecuador is building riverbank power.

Developing non-polluting power generation from rivers may be sensible, but is it green?

Using moving water is more pollution-free. These new plants will have a smaller environmental footprint than traditional hydroelectric, but they are not small facilities. Hydro is popularly more sustainable than coal and oil, but there are other serious impacts, including hundreds of miles of new transmission corridors. Millions of tons of gases emissions are avoided, but the environment is not.

Replacing carbon intensive energy sources is smart, replacing other forms of generation which are less efficient is sensible, but we must not foolishly install hundreds of power plants on river banks.

Calling this technology “Green” might be a push. But we require electricity. Before recalculating for climate warming, merely for new air conditioners the USA requires the equivalent of 400 additional 500-megawatt power plants. That’s more than 1,000 riverbank plants!!

With new power plants on the river bank, utility agencies see untapped rivers as revenue. Now, that’s green!