Through a regiment of selective breeding, the researchers produced strains of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in which half of all females were unaffected by DEET. The relative ease with which they did so means that it’s quite likely DEET resistance is passed from generation to generation if only one parent has the gene responsible. While scientists did not pin down the actual sequence of DNA conferring resistance, or the process by which it might do so, they do have some promising leads. Certain olfactory cells which go haywire in normal mosquitoes in the presence of DEET respond less dramatically in the resistant population, and likely play a role in the efficacy of the pesticide.

Regardless, this research suggests we can expect a largely DEET resistant mosquito population in the near future. While similar resistance accumulated against the insecticide DDT, this is the first published study to indicate this worrisome trend developing with DEET. Brands like Off! and Bug Barrier will need to move on to other active ingredients as the efficacy of their product wanes. Whatever new bug spray is developed will surely reek with the same stench of public rumor and unverified accusation, but its inventors would do best to not focus on all of that. The problem they need to overcome will be far more challenging: preventing evolution.

Rain forms as water vapor condenses around tiny particulate debris in the air through a process called nucleation, beading up and becoming a drop of rain whose growing mass pulls it to the surface of the earth. Traditional cloud seeding methods involve scattering this debris (usually silver iodide) into the air onto which the water vapor can condense. Laser seeding, however, works by ionizing the oxygen and nitrogen atoms that are near the beam. These atoms are far more effective as nucleation agents when ionized than in their normal states. Following several short bursts from the Teramobile laser, researchers recorded as many as twenty times the number of water droplets in the laser’s path than they did before its firing. Of course, this creates only a tiny corridor of condensation, hardly the stuff of rainstorms.

The team in Switzerland is looking at ways of consistently producing the same effect when sweeping the laser(s) through the sky. If they are successful, they stand a remote chance at swaying a threatening sky into a rainstorm, but it will be quite a while before anyone is terraforming desert into savanna by laser light. Still, this innovation, in as much as climate engineering can be, is an ecologically responsible and relatively cheap alternative to past methods. As the data rolls in year after year confirming the rise of temperatures around the globe, climate engineering seems more probable an alternative than the immediate and drastic increase in conservation efforts necessary to potentially stall the current temperature trajectory. Discovering new techniques like this one that decrease the risk of tinkering with Earth’s hyper-chaotic weather system are necessary and encouraging next steps in that direction.

They manage to bring this scene to thousands and thousands a day through a pretty nifty trick. While augmented reality is nothing new, the Dutch approach is pretty innovative. They start with a blue screen (like the green screens of cinematic fame) set up in a film studio. They shoot a scene in the foreground in which some guys get into a shoving match with EMT workers that quickly degenerates into some cranial soccer and head stompage. The instigators proceed to rip the contents out of the ambulance parked nearby while continuing their rampage on the now lifeless public servants. It’s a graphic scene for sure.

Back on the streets of the Netherlands, the violent footage is overlaid on a video feed that is recording people across the street from the billboard. Those people who stop to watch the attack will notice themselves in the image, passively watching from across the street as the awful event unfolds.

It is a chilling and surreal way of delivering a difficult message. The PSA obviously stops short of asking people to physically confront the attackers. It requests that bystanders follow four steps: ask others for help and speak out together, call 112 (which I guess is more like 911 than 411 or 1-900), stay with the victim, and take photos to file with a police report. While the campaign is billed as informing citizens on how they should respond to similar situations, it is far more effective as a mechanism of shame. The discomfort induced by being forced into the event coupled with the inability to react because of its digital nature is an acutely unnerving, but effective, combination.

Researchers at the University of California published a study last year which tested an alternative method for treating persons in this plight. Administered across four hospitals with 34 separate participants, doctors placed patients who were in cardiac arrest on heart-lung bypass machines to keep oxygen flowing to the brain but not by way of the heart. This allowed them to keep the heart in stasis through cardioplegic blood infusions and to reintroduce oxygen at the slowest rate possible. Having decreased the metabolism of the heart considerably by putting it in a suspended state, the oxygen consumption of the muscle becomes low. As the safe level of oxygen in the heart gradually increases, the chemical boundaries in place to restrain its activity are decreased. When this process passes a self-sustaining threshold, the heart is defibrillated and the bypass machine removed. Using the conventional procedure for treating cardiac arrest (oxygenation, defibrillation, and ephedrine injections), survival rates range from 7% (occurs out of hospital) to 15% (occurs in hospital). Of the 34 patients in the study treated for cardiac arrest, 80% lived to be discharged.

While the sample size of this study leaves much to be desired, its outcomes are provocative and will surely spur further research. In some ways, it’s baffling that cellular death has gone so long misunderstood. If cells can survive for an hour or more without oxygen free of consequence, this discovery may be the vanguard of medical research that provides an entirely new framework for the way we think about death.

Harvard Medical School is in the news again after publishing further analysis in the American Journal of Public Health regarding the investments of health and life insurance companies. They tracked the total value of stock in the top five fast food companies as of June 2009, which summed to a quite sizable $1.88 billion.

Of the giants, Northwestern Mutual led the pack at $422 million. Massachusetts Mutual held $367 million and Prudential $356 million. When contacted for comment, the assistant director of corporate relations of Northwestern Mutual claimed their investment to be only around $250 million, and argued that, “We have to determine what’s going to give our policy owners value. We have to make sure we fulfill our obligations to them, and to do that we invest in a wide variety of industries.” By her estimate, Northwestern’s fast food total is just .2% of their entire portfolio.

Objections raised by other insurers surveyed in this analysis resonate of last year’s tobacco study. The database used for the Harvard research includes exposure through index funds, and many of the insurers only account for direct investments. Regardless, the industry’s financial leverage is so great that they could create index funds around commodities that were not counterproductive to their company missions. They are funding, through an intermediary, an industry which is a significant contributer to the soaring obesity rates in America. The total medical cost related to obesity in 2000 was almost $200 billion dollars. It certainly seems counterproductive for insurers, especially of the health and disability variety, to fund a significant cause of death and disability.

Some say that this is a revolving door methodology employed by health and life insurers to maximize profits. Get them fat, keep them there, and make money coming and going. While there is truth to profitability usually being a percentage revenue, so earnings grow in absolute terms with the scale of demand, that’s not what is going on here.

I see insurers more as profit motivated statisticians than health care providers. While most of us get mailings from our insurers encouraging us to find better ways to live healthily, that is because it is in their best fiscal interests to do so. Life and health insurers don’t want their customers to die or get sick, that’s when they have to pay out. The real problem here is that the insurers could use some tact and practice a little conscientious investing. If fast food stock is just .2% of Northwestern’s portfolio it shouldn’t be hard to make it zero. If they don’t divest on their own, consumers may offer these statisticians a strong financial incentive to do so.

Currently housing queries from July 1st to December 31st 2009, Government Requests is a composite of official state appeals for information held by Google or for the removal of material hosted by Google. Selecting any one country reveals an interesting breakdown by the types of removal requests. It even specifies whether it was the result of a court order. While they stop shy of posting the specific Gmail accounts or blogs that got the axe, they don’t hesitate to list the percentage of requests in which Google, at least partially, complied.

So how do all of these numbers play out? The odd front-runner in both data and removal requests is Brazil. With 291 appeals for content removal, Brazil has nearly twice as many as the second place contender, Germany. The United States is fourth in this standing with 123 requests, more than half of which are specific to YouTube videos. While Brazil is still first among nations as relates to official requests for information regarding accounts, user profile data, etc, the United States comes in a close second (3580). A distant third, the United Kingdom has only 1166 data requests. Regarding frequency of compliance (for all countries with more than 10 removal requests), Canada falls in at a lowly 43.8%. Having only 16 removal requests, however, their sample size isn’t large enough to condemn the nation as frivolous and petty. Spain, with almost twice as many only ranks in at 53.1%. Out of the heavy weights, the US comes in at 80.5%, Brazil at 82.5%, and Germany at a whopping 94.1% compliance.

Woefully lacking from the list of nations is Google’s former patron, China. Well, it is there, immediately adjacent to an unflatteringly naked question mark. Clicking on China displays the following, “Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.” Note the name of the website, “Government Requests”, then consider the wording of Google’s statement regarding China. “Censorship demands” is pointedly accurate, but aren’t all of these, more or less, censorship demands? Tuh-mey-toh, tuh-mah-toh, I guess.

I’m excited and (dare I say?) proud of Google for their latest stride into the deep end of the transparency pool. It might just boil down to freedom of information being good for their bottom line, but I’m not buying that as the whole story. Google is a corporation with a conscious, and they are still recovering from the vile taint of forced censorship that corrupted their business in China. With promises to update the database again in six months, and a disclaimer that, “We’re new at this, and we’re still learning the best way to collect and present this information,” it appears Google plans to keep the site going for some time. Maybe the next step is to post the name of the removed blog, the address of the missing block in Street View, or the transcript of the pulled YouTube video. Bring it on, I say. Each government should be held accountable for every mote of censorship that they require their people to endure.

Now a portion of generation Y (Z, Millennial, or whatever), having rode the wave of technological innovation throughout the 90′s and 00′s, is making babies. These infants enter a world saturated with social media, having parents who, for the first time in history, maintain large numbers of friends and acquaintances online through virtual networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. These parents have access to the largest information repository ever, the Internet, in their pockets or purses, wherein all answers (and falsehoods) are present. Among rational people, arguments concerning the particulars of one known fact or another are a thing of the past, made extinct by the on-hand access to information offered by devices like smartphones, which put the wealth of all recorded knowledge at finger’s reach.

I would argue that the future of handheld computing rests at the confluence of power and accessibility, a model dominated in its current paradigm by Apple’s iPhone. As it so happens, the timing of the brood born by generation Y coincides with the rapid advances in ease-of-use functionality taking place within the smartphone industry. This, coupled with its (mostly) open access to third-party application development, makes the iPhone a dominant platform for children’s educational software beginning, serendipitously, with the kids of the first generation to reap the educational windfall offered by the Internet.

Having a daughter not quite two years of age and another little one on the way, I’m actively involved in vetting kid’s electronics. Between my wife and I, we’ve tested most of the industry standards. We own a Leapfrog Tag and several Vtech readers. Like many parents, we rely on these gadgets to help our daughter actively entertain herself in an educationally beneficial way. In our experience, however, no toy was remotely as helpful as the applications we downloaded through the iPhone’s app store. From an early age, we used iTot’s digital flashcards in place of a deck of the conventional paper variety. It wasn’t long before our daughter Camille could swipe her finger horizontally across the screen to scroll through flashcards at her own pace. By the time she was sitting upright, she could comfortably hold the iPhone in one hand, and shuffle away through the program with the other, frequently stopping at various animals to practice the noises they made. It wasn’t long before the flashcard words made up the backbone of her developing vocabulary. By around sixteen months, she knew each of the several hundred words iTot had to offer. She also used the application to learn colors and shapes. Now, she easily identifies the difference between an octagon and hexagon. A separate iTot’s iPhone app concentrates on counting skills. After a little while of playing with that, she now counts to twenty, albeit occasionally skipping sixteen and eighteen.

In addition to raw educational material like flashcards, the iPhone is full of animated children’s books that read themselves. Camille really enjoys those produced by a company called Kidztory, including classics like The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Little Red Hen. After a week’s worth of watching me turn the digital pages, she had the hang of it. These days she casually reads an entire story, starts it over, and reads it again. Until recently, she would hand the phone back to me when she got bored, and ask for a different story. Now, after some additional training on my wife’s less app-littered iPhone, she backs out of the application and selects a new one entirely on her own. For those interested in teaching their children a foreign language at an early age, the iPhone also makes this easy. The iTots flashcard and counting applications as well as all of the Kidzstory books are available in a wide range including French, Spanish, and Chinese.

The iPhone’s intuitive interface makes it ideal for the introductory teaching of all sorts of disciplines. Camille draws with SketchBook, moves brilliant patterns of shapes and colors around with Galactica or Spawn Illuminati, and plays a wide array of musical instruments on ThumbJam. Last week, I found that she created four layers of looped beats playing in several different scales and instruments. Regardless of how much of that was intentional, she is still learning about musical scales while exploring a highly intuitive synthesizer before she is two years old. That’s exposure that I’d be hard pressed to find for her elsewhere.

There is also, let us not forget, abundant potential for passive education inherent in the iPhone. Boundless volumes of Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer can be either stored on the device, watched through YouTube, iTunes, Netflix, or converted live and streamed from your home computer. Using AirVideo, I maintain ready access to a library of Curious George and Elmo videos on my PC, especially useful in the event of public meltdowns and long car trips.

When allowing a toddler to play with a telecommunications device worth several hundred dollars, there are some obvious points that bear consideration. There is, of course, the issue involving the risk of the device’s destruction at the smashing hands of a rambunctious youngster, or the accidental spamming of your boss with phone calls containing nothing but sputtering and gibberish. Luckily, the iPhone comes with some pretty resilient cases that can take just about anything short of a dunk in the toilet, and it also contains configurable user restrictions to prevent unauthorized calls, text messages, or internet browsing. For the considerably paranoid, airplane mode provides a little extra piece of mind.

What has become increasingly clear to me as I see my daughter slowly master her first computer, is that she’s learning more than words, numbers, music, shapes, and colors. She is getting a half-decade head start (at least) on the majority of her peers in dealing with something that will shape the entirety of her life: technology. Not unlike the way that the Oregon Trail on the Apple 2e was the computing lead-in for so many in my generation, I feel confident the software on the iPhone will fill a similar niche with hers. Without a doubt, the folks at Apple (presumably without intention) are now leading contenders in the electronic children’s education market. While many parents would never buy their toddler a two hundred-dollar smartphone, spending a dollar to download a kid’s book that will, over the course of its life, save countless hours of boredom induced temper tantrums, is hardly unimaginable. With almost one in five smartphone owners having an iPhone, there are more than enough parents out there to justify software development specifically for this niche. The children’s electronics mainstays seem to miss this. What is Leapfrog going to do, exactly, compete with Apple at developing highly interactive yet intuitive handheld electronic hardware? It seems to me that their best bet is to slowly become a software-only shop and piggyback off of the success of hardware vendors like Apple.

It is also important to consider that the iPhone supplements, rather than replaces, outside education and entertainment. The bond formed through teaching and reading is foundational, and most of our one-on-one time with her is still spent reading hardcopies of Curious George and Olivia. I am not terribly concerned about Camille spending too much time with the iPhone though. While we limit her television to about a half-hour of Sesame Street, she spends more than an hour playing with educational software on our iPhones on any given day. I’m trying to convince my wife that we should buy Camille her own iPod Touch for her birthday, but it’s hard to rationalize the expense when both of us have the phones. If I am honest, I think I want for her to have her own out of my personal sense of nostalgia surrounding the feelings of exploration and wonder I had with my first computer. I can’t help but ponder how long it would take before she had it totally figured out.

What’s perhaps the most crazy is how far technology has moved the educational yardstick. Camille, not even two years old, is slowly mastering her first personal computer. Sure it is an iPhone and not a Windows desktop, but that’s the technological zeitgeist. While I know most parents think their kids are special, I’m convinced that the pace of Camille’s education and the quality of her life are significantly improved by her exposure to the iPhone. If I’m totally wrong and it does nothing significant to help her in the long run, it at least keeps her entertained. Sometimes that goes a long way.

While the recent appeal was widely viewed as excellent news for Singh’s case and libel law reform, it by no means ended the litigious struggle. The decision by the BCA to discontinue their legal action saves both parties a great deal of money (it has already cost Singh over £100,000 in legal fees). It also serves to minimize the PR damage incurred by the BCA. Since the suit was filed in April 2008, complaints of false advertising culminated in the investigation of nearly one quarter of all chiropractic clinics in England.

Singh hasn’t announced his intentions to sue the BCA for the recovery of his legal expenses, but I for one would not consider it tacky. The BCA’s case was designed to suppress writing critical of chiropractic, despite their claims to the contrary. The BCA says they don’t knowingly practice techniques that do not work, but cannot prove that their remedies described by Singh as bogus have any real validity whatsoever. So do they always practice what they don’t know? Is that a stupid question? Personally, I expect that someone who calls themselves a doctor (not that chiropractors go to medical school) bases their “expertise” on time-tested evidence, and is easily capable of demonstrating the measurable benefits of their efforts.

Congratulations to Simon Singh. This is a major victory in the fight for English libel reform and science-based medicine.

Before Griffith worked with cancer patients in this capacity, he conducted a widely reviewed double-blind study in 2008 in which 36 healthy people without prior hallucinogen experience were administered drugs: some psilocybin, others placebos, Ritalin or amphetamines. Most of the volunteers in the psilocybin group expressed undergoing a profound spiritual experience that culminated in lasting positive changes. After a two-month and fourteen-month review, the majority of patients who took psilocybin still felt this way, ranking it as one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their life. Top five – not bad for a lab experiment.

This research, amongst others, spurred Griffith to investigate the clinical application of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. Finding  earnest and needing candidates in terminal cancer patients battling depression and anxiety, Griffith established this ongoing trial within the Johns Hopkins Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit (BFRU). Patients are administered psilocybin via capsule, and brought to a comfortably furnished living room, complete with low lighting, a bohemian decor, headphones for pre-selected music, and a couch. Subjects are encouraged to focus on their “inner experience” during the 8-10 hour duration of the trial. At least one “guide” is at hand throughout the course of the study, and the patients’ blood pressure and heart rate are monitored. Following the completion of two sessions, participants have follow-up interviews in which they discuss their experience and any insight gleamed from it. Additional meetings are scheduled for one month following each session and six months following the final session to review the overall condition of the patient.

Preliminary results are highly encouraging for many volunteers. One subject, a clinical psychologist named Clark Martin, found the depression associated with his kidney cancer debilitating. Despite his expertise in the field, Martin felt completely helpless. Traditional remedies like antidepressant medication and counseling failed to provide meaningful relief. Hearing of Dr. Griffith’s ongoing work, Martin, at age 65, wanted to participate. His experience with the drug was not an uncommon one, “All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating. Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.” Martin described gaining a newfound sense of empathy, “It was a whole personality shift for me. I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.” Over one year later, Martin feels his experience at Johns Hopkins gave him the perspective needed to overcome his depression. Furthermore, he says insights gained during the psilocybin sessions fundamentally changed his relationship with his daughter and friends in a positive, meaningful, and lasting way.

Dr. Griffith says that Martin’s experience is fairly typical, and postulates that the capacity for such “unitive” experiences could be hard-wired into the brain, conferring evolutionary advantage through increases in empathy. The trial subjects’ experiences closely reflect accounts of persons undergoing mystical or spiritual transcendence, and it may be that similar associations with religion or meditation occur through neurological conduits also activated by psilocybin.

As to the longterm treatment of depression in cases other than terminal disease, I am skeptical. The efficacy of this remedy decreases with the frequency of its use, physiologically, emotionally, and intellectually. It’s the novelty of the experience that makes it revelatory, and keeping that sense of discovery fresh becomes a tolerance not easily overcome. Life changing insight is not produced by every dose. Psilocybin provides a shock to the intellect, which can broaden perspectives and improve emotional health, but its continuous use will not sustain them.

As may be redundant at this point, I love my iPhone. I’ll love it even more with OS 4.0. However, in the name of all things sacred, implement some damn Flash support already. This is my chief beef with four-oh, and I have to get it out of the way. As a consumer, I don’t care that much about which billion dollar tech firm won’t support the other billion dollar tech firm’s software. I don’t have the energy for that. Apple, figure this shit out or you won’t stay the leader in smartphone innovation for long. I want to stream dubiously legal video content to my iPhone anywhere that a 3G signal exists. Make it happen.

Alright, since that’s taken care of, let’s talk about the good stuff. iPhone 4.0 boils down to one thing, really, and it’s multitasking. Sure, there are lots of fringe perks (skip a little if multitasking is not your thing), but the singular major overhaul is centered around running multiple apps at once. Using their special book of spells, Apple claims to have worked out a sneaky solution to the major historical impediment to multitasking: battery suicide. By determining which services are common to most apps and building them into the OS code (as opposed to the services running separate copies for each concurrent app), Steve says this one is in the bag. Giving the OS control over resource management means that the developer of iFart doesn’t have to manage that calculus himself (or herself, I suppose, girls fart too). The multitasking app switching mechanism is also pretty slick, with a double-tap to the home button bringing up a swanky dock that arrays each active application. A wag of the finger to the left swipes through the list of concurrent programs with ease.

Another major boon to the app hoarders amongst us is the addition of a folder schema. My hundred plus apps represent a paltry sum compared to the OCD plagued knee-jerk downloading reflex that results in the endless accumulation of crappy tower defense games and unit conversion calculators. Regardless, folders are a much-needed improvement sure to aid even the least psychotic iPhone user. By dragging one app on top of another, the gerbils within the device know to create a folder based on the categorical nature of each app. I’m not sure yet if you make a folder for Facebook and Twitter if it is called something like Social Media or FaceTwit, but I am eager to find out.

Next on the docket is the addition of the iBooks app. This is an over the fence lob from the iPad that allows users to purchase and read books from Apple’s new iBookstore. For those who want to read the classics on a surface considerably smaller than an index card, this one’s for you. I find news and blogs quite palatable on the iPhone, but something makes me view books differently. Having downloaded third-party e-reader apps and found them lacking, I’m not so sure that Apple can come up with something better.

Mail gets a significant tweak in OS 4.0, now permitting one unified inbox that collects all your tawdry and varied email in a single location. I’m thrilled that I’ll be able to purchase penis enlargement pills in the same place as check my work mail, but that’s not Apple’s fault. They’ve also built in support for multiple Exchange accounts.

Catering to their burgeoning gaming community, Apple boosts its cred by adding a social gaming network (think Xbox Live) to the iPhone. With the woefully unmarketable name Game Center notwithstanding, this arena serves as a place to perform online matchmaking, invite friends to games, or compete for the top seat on leader boards. Being a big fan of UniWar (which already has all of these things built into the app), I can see how consolidating all games under one network certainly has its benefits.

Rounding out the upgrade is a slew of additional niche features like:

• support for VPN and SSL
• An in-app advertising system allowing developers to reduce the price of apps and increase the level of background annoyance
• Wallpaper underneath your apps
• Playlist creation
• 5x digital zoom and tap to focus video
• Photo geotagging
• Support for Bluetooth keyboards
• The extension of search functionality to text messages (hear that Tiger?)
• To aid the next generation of sexters, however, email can now be encrypted with a PIN code

So all in all, I think this update is a success for Apple and its iPhone customers. Unfortunately, not all of the features, (and here is the big nasty) including multitasking, will be available on the iPhone 3G. For those of us still trapped in 2008, there’s no fresh word on new hardware either. I’ll hold out until the 4.0 update releases to the non-developer users this summer, and then I think I’ll have to splurge on a 3Gs if there’s still nothing new on the horizon. Maybe by then AT&T’s data network will support the “s” in 3Gs, tethering, or something that makes me feel like I should continue to fill their coffers every month. In the mean time, back to those tower defense games.