Cancer? No thanks!

Plants have cells, chromosomes, hormones, and most of the cellular organelles as animals, yet plants apparently do not get cancer, which is kind of strange.

Plants cannot survive without the sunlight that gives humans skin cancer. So, how come we have cells that proliferate out of control and plants don't?

Plants have a complicated collection of pigments that handle excess energy in solar radiation. That may protect underlying cells from having their DNA blasted and ionized.

Radiation will kill plants. But not give them tumors.

Plants do get things called "galls" but galls are caused by viruses, insects, nematodes and other kinds of parasites. The gall is a way for the plant to hold its enemies at bay.

If humans behaved more like plants physiologically, we would grow a tough container of cells around tumors. Of course, part of what makes cancer perplexing is that it is our own cells out of control. Normal cells would recognize the abnormal ones, but as we know, will not kill them all, all of the time.

Why doesn't yeast develop cancer? Suppose one yeast grew a duplicate, and the "daughter" had damaged genes and would not separate? And then the daughter starts to make messed up yeast cells like crazy. They grow into a relatively big clump.

There is no "central yeast" so the mutated yeast could multiply until it ran out of food. No yeast cancer.

Do we even know if insects get cancer? Generally they are not around long enough to accumulate a cancerous number of mutations.

No, only big animals with a lot of cells get cancer.

Maybe that's the evolutionary price we pay for having trillions of cells. Sometimes one of them goes berserk and makes billions of crazy copies.

In return we get eyeballs, brains, bones, and the rest of the stuff. Respiration, metabolism, the Krebs cycle, and so on.

Would you rather be a plant?

Water, Water, Everywhere...

Earning a platinum designation from the U.S. Green Building Council is tough and only the most determined institutions make the attempt.

Essentially, the building has to produce about as much energy as it consumes and should have no carbon footprint.

Yale's under-construction Kroon Hall is aiming for platinum, which is laudable.

How a building of laboratories and classrooms can produce as much energy as it consumes is a puzzle. Either the building has to use a minimal amount of energy, or must come up with ingenious ways to generate electricity.

It would be easy to reduce energy consumption to zero. Just eliminate lights, heating, and electrical sockets. True, the interior would be freezing and dark for several months a year, and then hot, stuffy and dim.

That doesn't seem practical. Solar power in New England is not a great idea because about one out of three days is cloudy. Likewise, New England does not have large plains that naturally generate wind.

Here are a few suggestions: Internal fans, connected to generators, spun by the wakes of walking students. Have students wear thermocouples. Line the halls with copper coils and have students wear magnets as they walk from one room to another.

The Kroon plan does include an intricate water system that will supposedly save 500,000 gallons annually. How in the world could Kroon Hall even consume that much water, unless they are converting bauxite into aluminum?

The water system is intended to treat storm water run-off. Not anything as gross as sewage. Just relatively pure rain that has flowed through turf and soil. The first rain water is dirtiest and it's diverted into a large tank. So is gutter water.

This water is then directed into a pond containing aquatic plants that serve as biofilters. Clean water then flows into a harvesting tank. There it will be used for toilets and irrigation.

So basically, the storm run off still ends up in the sewage treatment plant and/or Long Island Sound, but first it runs through some pipes and a pond. Why bother to clean water that will be used in toilets?

Unless the slope of the pipes is carefully designed and adjusted, moving the water will require pumps, or students turning a big wooden wheel connected to a pump.

The expense of the pipes, pond, and tanks hardly seems worth it. How long will the storm water project take to pay for itself?

By then we'll all be using fusion power.

More applications, more rejections, more money

Johns Hopkins University, the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, the real Johns Hopkins University, sends pleas to high school seniors.

Johns Hopkins wants you to apply for "the most amazing four years of your life."

The six-page, full color brochure must have cost a fortune. And the university is sending them out indiscriminately. Why?

Johns Hopkins isn't the only university to engage in this practice. Most of the ones that self advertise are either schools you've never heard of, schools you'd never consider, or both.

After the first few letters, high school students start throwing out the solicitations unopened.

By now, after undergoing SATs, SAT IIs, ACTs, "How to succeed at SAT" classes, private tutors, and several weeks or months of anxiety, most of those applying to college have already settled on their favorites. Or at least, the favorites to which they think they can gain admission.

So here's Johns Hopkins, one of the most selective of the selective, begging the poor student to spend another $60 or $70 to apply to a university that costs around $50,000 a year.

Out of about 14,000 applicants, fewer than 4,000 are admitted, and 1,207 end up attending.

Here are some universities that don't send out unrequested promotional materials: Yale, Harvard, the rest of the Ivy League, Reed, Williams, Oberlin, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and on and on and on.

Their attitude is "If you don't know who we are, then you're unfit to go to school here." Unfit to take Western Civ, room with an ominous eccentric, play "residence hall" hockey, seal someone in his room with a pile of beer cans, and the rest of the college experience.

The National Guard has a well thought out mailing. Many pretty young women apparently enroll in the Guard, despite what you may think. The Guard brims with possibilities for betterment: education, experience, discipline, service. And, oh yes, (you may have to try to kill people who are trying to kill you). That last part escapes mention.

It's easy to see why the National Guard needs to promote itself. But Johns Hopkins?

The accepted theory of college solicitations is that enlarging the applicant pool while accepting the same number increases the appearance of selectivity. The higher the selectivity, the higher the tuition can be.

But Johns Hopkins? What's up with that? Huh?

Just another one of the strange, inexplicable, and mystifying parts of the college application process.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Is is possible to live on bread and water only?

For a while, yes.

We're assuming a good brand of unenriched white bread.

But then you would develop scurvey (lack of vitamin c), beriberi (lack of vitamin B), rickets (lack of vitamine D), kakke disease (see beriberi), and you would eventually be deprived of essential amino acids, that is, ones you cannot synthesize. That would lead to a loss of protein and breakdown of muscles.

There are also essential fatty acids, such as arachidonic acid.

So even if your diet were restricted to bread, water and a vitamin pill, you eventually would waste away.

Your teeth would fall out, your connective tissue disintegrate, and you would develop pressure sores.

But on the brighter side, you would definitely lose weight.

Stick it in Your Ear

If you surf cable TV channels late at night you're sure to see a new low in smoking cessation ads.

This is the "auricular" treatment that allegedly eliminates the desire to smoke in two weeks.

A crazed blonde claims the device is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (it's not) and so easy to use. The system is two small magnets, perhaps strong rare earth magnets.

The smoker puts magnets on both sides of the left ear. Here's a chance to brush up on the external anatomy of the human ear. The magnets are to be placed on the Scapha, the outermost C-shaped plane next to the outer fold.

That's it. Why would sticking magnets to your ear ease the desire to smoke? A "pressure point" in the ear stimulates the same parts of the brain as nicotine. This is signified in the ad by fireworks going off in the smoker's head.

This suggests that a smoker could give up tobacco and get hooked instead on little magnets in the ear. If any of this contained a grain of truth, that would be good.

However, stimulating the smoking parts of the brain does not seem as if it would quell the desire to smoke.

Or maybe you end up wanting to smoke magnets.

Too Much of A Good Thing

One sentence in the ads for erectile dysfunction prescription medications never fails to get a laugh. If you have an erection lasting more than four hours seek immediate medical help, the warning goes, more or less.

Predictably, men watching this often snicker and say "If I had an erection for four hours I would..." Fill in the lubricious blank. Well, what would you do? It's not as if many middle-aged men have dozens of eager partners waiting to service them.

At any rate, the caution seems silly. What harm could there be in a 240-minute erection?

To understand the problem, consider what causes an erection. Blood rushes in and one-way valves keep it from leaving until the blood is no longer needed.

An erection that won't end is called "priapism," after the king of Troy, Priam, who legend says fathered 50 offspring.

Priapism is usually painful, and usually affects males between 5 to 10 and 20 to 50 years. If not treated promptly, priapism can cause scarring and permanent erectile dysfunction.

Yes, that's right. Permanent.

Priapism cen be caused by sickle cell disease, leukemia, black widow spider bites, carbon monoxide poisoning, and of course, certain medications. The condition is treated with ice packs, injections, and shunts to let the blood drain.

That doesn't seem like a barrel of laughs.

Priapism is one kind of ED you definitely don't want.

Red Moon at Night, Motorists Take Fright

The moon was like our own private lunar eclipse.
the disk was full, and a dark febrile red-maroon.

The riddle was that no lunar clipse was expected that night. There had been one a few days earlier, as the moon swept through the very narrow shadow cast by Earth.

Refracted light passing through Earth's atmosphere paints the moon red. Bluish light is scattered and longer wave-length red light penetrates our atmosphere and hits the moon.

But we were driving though Pennsylvania perhaps 10 or 11 p.m. and the moon was rising. It was about 20 degrees above the horizon and as weird-looking as it ever gets.

The moon hung like a blood blister. Out satellite even seemed ominous, though we knew that lunar signs do portent disaster. (Do they?)

A cell phone check confirmed that no one else was seeing a lunar eclipse.

What was going on?

The only good explanation was that we were looking at the moon through an extremely thick layer of atmosphere, which was exerting its own optical effects. Specifically, the atmosphere was scattering blue, as it always does, and letting red through.

The red was dimmed by tons of soot, dust, water vapor, volcanic ash, fly ash, meteorite dust, smog,and smoke.

And that's the stuff we can see. Even if we got rid of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, it looks like we'd still be in trouble.