Dry Ice Factory

John Cramer, professor emeritus of Physics and occasional science fiction writer, addresses the latest claim that cellphones cause brain cancer:

'Nowhere did the article ask a key question: Is there any plausible physical mechanism by which the electromagnetic microwave radiation from cellphones can possibly produce DNA damage leading to brain cancer?'

Disease dooming native bumblebees

They work in the cold when honeybees are still snug in their hives, and cloudy days don't stop them either.

Bumblebees are workhorse pollinators, depended on to pollinate everything from cranberries and blueberries to hothouse tomatoes.

But native bumblebees are in trouble, victims of diseases some scientists say are spread by commercial bumblebees shipped around North America to pollinate crops.

While much attention has been given to the plight of European honeybees, dying in droves in so-called colony collapse disorder, the sharp decline of some species of native bumblebees has been largely overlooked.

So much for my observation that local bumblebee populations have actually increased in the wake of the die-off of honeybees. Then again, it could be that native bumblebees are more threatened in agricultural areas where the commercial bees are more likely to be introduced. It could be that in non-agricultural urban areas like my neighborhood they're doing fine.

We had a Chungatorial meeting yesterday, and at some point our high-powered intellects got themselves focused on the hot topic of Lemuria. In lost continent mythologies, Atlantis goes back to Plato, if not earlier, but my sense was that Lemuria was of a more recent vintage. I think the initial question was whether Lemuria was invented by Madame Blavatsky or whether she got the idea from somebody else. The answer, according to Wikipedia, is quite fascinating: a sunken continent named Lemuria was initially proposed in 1864 by a zoologist named Philip Sclater, who was trying to explain why there were lemurs in both India and Madagascar but not in any of the intervening territory in the Middle East or Africa. This was before the theory of plate tectonics was widely accepted and it was understood that Madagascar had once been a part of the same land mass as India but India broke off and drifted toward Asia. Sclater's theory was that there had been a continent in the Indian Ocean that both India and Madagascar had been a part of and that the bulk of it between them sank under the ocean.

What fascinates me about this origin is that a discarded scientific theory was then adopted by occultists (i.e., the theosophists) and was passed on from *them* to science fiction writers such as A. Merritt and Robert Howard. Blavatsky peopled Lemuria with an ancient race of dragon or snake people who developed a mighty civilization but began to practice black magic, which caused the continent to sink. This is what Merritt picked up on in The Moon Pool, not the idea of a land bridge for lemurs. Blavatsky claimed to have received her ideas from a text called The Book of Dzyan, but it's assumed to be her own invention, and of course some of her ideas about these ancient races with superhuman civilizations came from Bulwer-Lytton's early science fiction novel, The Coming Race (1871). How did she come across Sclater's idea of a sunken continent in the Indian ocean? Her first reference to Lemuria, in The Secret Doctrine, was apparently in 1888, about twenty years after Sclater published a scientific paper proposing his idea. Did Blavatsky read about his theory, or had the idea already spread into the esoteric imagination by then?

One of the other odd bits in the Wikipedia article is that they have recently discovered a large land mass called the Kerguelen Plateau that actually was submerged in the Indian Ocean 20 million years ago. Drilling in 1999 discovered "pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment." There are no reports of lizard men wielding ancient superscience and quietly biding their time, waiting for the right moment to take humanity by main force.

Update: Brian Haughton, in an article called "The Lost Lands of Mu and Lemuria" at New Dawn Magazine ("A Journal for a New Consciousness, a New Humanity, and a New Era!" -- ahem), says "Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings." (There seems to be some confusion on the internet about whether the name is Sclater or Schlater.) The article also indicates that Australian writers at the end of the 19th century latched onto the Lemuria concept, envisioning Australia as a remnant of the sunken continent.

The Planetary Congress -- a meeting of the Association of Space Explorers -- is being held in Seattle this year, 15 - 20 September. The Association of Space Explorers is a professional organization of astronauts and cosmonauts. Says the article:

As part of the weeklong meeting the [University of Washington] will host two public events on Tuesday, Sept. 16. In the morning astronauts and cosmonauts from Europe, Russia, Canada, Japan and the U.S. will discuss their countries' space programs. The panel discussion takes place in Meany Hall from 9 to 11:45 a.m.

In the afternoon, speakers will discuss the effects of space travel on human health. That seminar, "Human Health for Long Duration Exploration," takes place in Meany Hall from 1:15 to 4 p.m.

Both presentations are free and open to the public.

The full schedule for the Planetary Congress lists events all over the area.

Just read two interesting stories about the global economy in the online New York Times. The first was about a Chinese company, Nanjing Automobile Group, that is planning to open a plant in Oklahoma to make MGs. It is the first Chinese carmaker to open a factory in the US, and of course it would do so with a British brand that hasn't been sold in the US since the mid-'80s, right? The cute conclusion, quoting Jeremy Anwyl of a consumers advice website, "Hopefully some of the electrical problems you wouldn’t bring back," he said. "If you really want to go for nostalgia, you put on a leaky roof."

The other story is about biotech companies that are establishing outposts in the US in order to attract venture capital. This includes a Scottish company, Cyclacel that has done a "reverse merger" with a Seattle company named Xcyte Therapies. A "reverse merger" is when a company is nominally acquired by another, while actually retaining control, in order to acquire the Nasdaq listing of the US company. Xcyte was apparently foundering on its own. But the funny line from this story was, "Paion, which is developing a stroke drug derived from vampire bat saliva ... "

Okay, we can all write the script to that movie, can't we?