It is now an accepted narrative within the media that the US has become increasingly polarized. We just had our 250th celebration, and it seems to have further polarized our nation rather than bring it together. It is important, however, to put this polarization into perspective. We discuss this topic on my (relatively) new podcast, Political Reality, which I host with political scientist, Andres Jones Rooy.

First, we have to define what we mean by political polarization – mainly a divergence of ideology and policy preferences. How similar or far apart are Americans on average in terms of their political beliefs and preferences? It certainly feels as if such polarization is increasing, but political scientists have been confronted with a dilemma  – they cannot find this polarization in the data. Left and right (Democrat and Republican) do differ in many policy preference, but those differences are a lot less than most people think, and they are not increasing over time. It turns out, most people favor common sense policies that are somewhere in the middle on most issue, with Democrats skewing a little left and Republican skewing a little right. Further, people’s core concerns are all just about the same. We all want relative safety, fair prices, and good job opportunities.

There are a few exceptions to this lack of increasing polarization, including two policy issues – abortion and global warming. Over the last 20 years there has been a little increase in the policy differences on these issues. But that’s it. Another exception is a demographic one. There has been increasing polarization within our elected officials. Senators and Representatives are becoming more polarized, even while their constituents are not.

Continue Reading »

I often get questions like the one below:

“I live part time in Japan. Everyone sees hydrogen powered generators, trains, trucks, etc regularly. High density population means it’s easy to get enough synergy to justify the infrastructure. So sad we aren’t doing more to utilize this great tech. Hydrogen combustion engines emerge as cheap alternative to fuel cells.”
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/energy/hydrogen-combustion-engines-emerge-as-cheap-alternative-to-fuel-cells

This is often how news about advances in hydrogen tech are framed. The problem is – the limitations with hydrogen technology have nothing to do with the tech itself, so tech advances are mostly irrelevant. Also, hydrogen combustion is not a better solution for most use cases then hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells use an electrochemical process to combine hydrogen and oxygen, producing electricity and water. They are about 60% efficient, produce no pollution, and have no moving parts. Hydrogen combustion operates more like a regular engine, but with hydrogen as the fuel. They are about 40% efficient, produce nitrogen oxides as pollution, and have moving parts that operate at high pressure and temperature. They can be, however, more powerful for heavy applications and are cheaper to build.

For cars hydrogen combustion is a terrible idea. Maybe there is a use case for large generators, trains, and heavy trucks. Even there, however, there are current limitations that the technology of hydrogen engines or fuel cells do not address.

Continue Reading »

I recently installed a new printer on my system. Now, before you have an “OK, Boomer” knee-jerk reaction – I am a fairly tech-savvy user. I am not an IT professional, but have used computers literally since the 1970s and have kept up with the tech enough to be a confident user. I was therefore frustrated when the experience was…less than enjoyable. I was lured into installing the printer via the app. I falsely assumed that such apps serve the same function that “wizards” (remember those) did in the past, walking you effortlessly through the installation process. I also have had the experience of just plugging a printer into a USB port and having it automatically be recognized, installed, and then function just fine.

It’s been a while since I needed a new printer (I don’t use them much anymore, but I do occasionally need to print something), so I was surprised and frustrated at how long and complicated the process was. I felt I was entering in the same information multiple times, looking up numbers, following QR codes, and answering ambiguous questions. I got it to work, but it took up a far bigger chunk of my life and my mental resources than I was happy with. I later learned that the app is not there to make my life easier, but to lock me in as a customer to upsell me more stuff.

This is not an isolated incident. Again – I am trying really hard not to become an old curmudgeon. I am trying to be objective. But I do think that as one gets older, you can more easily see patterns, and your tolerance for recurrent incompetence and stupidity fades away. As a computer user, I lived through the early years of IRQ settings, manually installing drivers, and compatibility nightmares. But I was a somewhat early adopter and I pushed the limit with upgrades, so I put up with it. Then the industry evolved, with helpful wizards, then plug-and-play, then universal connectors. I did not fully realize, however, that we were past peak-convenience. It’s still much better than in the early days, and you can still have a good user experience, but there seems to be increasing unnecessary complexity, bloatware, and simply horrible user interfaces. I am constantly fending off attempts at sending me push notifications, gathering my data, solicitation for in-app purchases, and intrusive ads. Forget about spam and scams, which are a daily nuisance. Yeah, I know there are ways to handle such things – but that is still my point. It’s all on me, and it’s a constantly evolving landscape.

Continue Reading »

I have been seeing a lot of news about geothermal energy recently. This is partly because of the Geothermal Research and Development Act – which was passed with bipartisan support. Trump does not like wind and solar, without any rational reason that he can articulate. He mainly supports fossil fuel. Democrats, of course, favor renewable energy and want to phase out fossil fuel as quickly as possible. Republicans seem to be luke warm on nuclear – they support it but are not making massive investments. Democrats historically dislike nuclear, but now have mixed feelings. It’s better than fossil fuel, and we may need it, but renewables are better.

Both sides, however, agree that geothermal is awesome and are all in. Democrats like it because it is renewable – there is no fuel to burn and it is a low carbon source of electricity. Both sides like it because it is potentially a steady and reliable source of large amounts of electricity, with no intermittency problem. Republicans may also like it because geothermal requires drilling and perhaps fracking, which are technologies already used by the fossil fuel industry. They have the technology to drill wells that produce energy, in whatever form. Regardless of the reasons, this is an area of common ground where we can potentially make some progress.

What is the real potential of geothermal energy? Right now geothermal produces 0.4% of US electricity and 0.3% of world electricity. This is fairly insignificant – we  would need a 1-2 order of magnitude increase for this to become a serious player in decarbonizing our energy infrastructure. About 93% of US geothermal comes from California and Nevada, with the rest from Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho, and New Mexico. This is because of geology – these are locations with recent volcanic activity meaning there is hot rock relatively close to the surface. To understand why this is, let’s quickly review geothermal technology.

Continue Reading »

A recent study represents a confluence of technological advances that is pretty interesting. The specific problem being addressed – chemotherapy for bladder cancer – is very promising, but the technology itself can potential have many applications.

Let’s start with the problem, delivering chemotherapy to bladder tumors. The trick with chemotherapy is to create the highest levels of toxicity possible for cancer cells while limiting the toxicity for healthy cells. There are several ways to achieve this, with the primary method being finding drugs that are inherently more toxic tumor cells than non-tumor cells. The classic feature that has been targeted is the fact that tumor cells are rapidly reproducing and have a high metabolic rate, so drugs that target such cells are used. This still has an effect on healthy cells, especially those that rapidly reproduce, like hair cells, which is why many chemotherapies cause hair loss. Essentially we push the toxicity of these drugs to the limit of tolerability, to kill the cancer cells as much as possible.

Another strategy is to get these drugs to the tumor in higher concentrations than the rest of the body. You can accomplish this by intralesional injecting (injecting chemotherapy directly into a tumor), by injecting into the body compartment that contains the cancer, or by directing the chemotherapy specifically to the cancer using advanced techniques (such as lipid nanoparticles). For some types of bladder cancer the strategy has been to fill the bladder with chemotherapy and keep it in there for as long as tolerated. This works to some extent, increasing the dose of chemotherapy to the tumor while limiting systemic effects. However, there is limited penetration of the drug into the tumor because of the nature of the bladder lining.

The researchers therefore developed a hybrid algae robot to delivery chemotherapy for bladder cancer. They started with the silica shell of a diatom algae, specifically Coscinodiscus granii. The shell is called a frustule, which you can think of as a tiny glass wiffle ball. They chose G. granii because it has a multilayered porous shell with different sized pores, including a network of nanopores. They cleaned it of all the living algae parts so just the frustule was left. Essentially they are using the algae as nanofactories, mass producing these finely structured rigid shells that are also biodegradable. Nature so far is much better at creating things at the nanoscale than our technology. They then coated the frustules with magnetite and filled them with a chemotherapeutic drug, doxorubicin.

Continue Reading »

How much attention do you pay to…well, attention? Attention is one of those many brain functions that you don’t notice or think about when it is working fine, but can become debilitating if it is impaired in any way, and we notice when it is stressed to the point of failure. Otherwise we don’t have much reason to contemplate the incredibly demanding and complex neurological process of managing attention. Recently neuroscientists have added one more piece to the puzzle of what we call the neuroanatomical correlates of attention – which parts of the brain are doing what.

To review, attention is a critical neurological function the primary purpose of which is to allocate limited brain resources for processing external stimuli and internal thoughts. When you attend to something you process more information about that thing more robustly while simultaneously actively suppressing other (distracting) information. There are basically two types of attention – a top-down goal oriented attention and a bottom-up stimulus response attention. So, when reading a book, for example, you are focused on the page and processing the squiggles into words and the words into meaning. If a loud noise occurs, that will involuntarily grab your attention.

It has long been know that the frontal lobes are critical to attention, particularly goal-oriented attention. But attention is also widely distributed throughout the brain, particular in the frontoparietal attention networks. Frontal lobe executive function is a sot of master control, directing attention and focus, and critical for switching tasks. Attention has wide-ranging effects throughout the brain, however, which makes sense given it can affect so many functions.

It has also been known that the superior colliculus is a critical attention hub. This is a primitive subcortical structure that initially was thought to only be involved in vision and eye movements. However, we now know it also overlays information from auditory and visuospatial centers of the brain. These overlapping maps of the world allow the superior colliculus to focus attention on one thing and then actively suppress all other sensory information. This is partly why phenomena like inattentional blindness can be so profound – when focusing your attention on one thing, you can entirely miss even large objects in your visual field (see here for a classic demonstration). You literally become blind to such things because at a basic neural level the information is being suppressed.

Continue Reading »

To what extent do social media algorithms, and YouTube’s specifically, contribute to user’s views becoming more extreme and even radicalizing? That’s a complicated question, but researchers tried to tackle it and have come up with some interesting results.

First let’s define some terms (as the researchers did). An echochamber is a social media information ecosystem (such as a specific forum, blog, or content provider) that shares a common view, ideology, or narrative. The researcher use this precise definition: “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal.” A rabbit hole is a recommendation algorithm that leads a user from their initial content interest into a widening circle of related content. This is an iterative dynamic process that does not necessarily involve more viewpoint homogeneity or more extreme views. A “radicalization pathway” means that some combination of user behavior and platform algorithms leads a use to more and more extreme content and views. The trick in research is separating cause and effect – do extreme users seek extreme content, or does extreme content make users more extreme?

The researchers start, as is commonly the case, with a review of existing research. It’s probably not as bad as you are imagining. The research generally shows that users do tend to stay within mild ideological echochambers, and that this phenomenon is largely driven by user behavior, not platform algorithms. This makes sense – people will tend to sort themselves into groups of like-minded people. There is research showing this going back to 1940, long before social media. But this also refers to the average behavior, with a lot of variance. There are some sites on social media that are extreme echochambers, with careful curating of content and users. I have seen this defended as creating a “safe space” for a certain group. Those who do not follow the ideology of the group are tagged as “trolls” and quickly purged. But most of social media does not fall into this category.

Continue Reading »

In medical education we have a concept called longitudinal care – interns and residents need to follow a case through to its conclusion, or at least long term, so that can learn the entire process. This is why on-call work hours used to be so horrifically long (up to 36 hours), to allow doctors in training to follow an acute case to see the effects of the decisions they make. Training also includes continuity clinics where residents can follow the same patients for months or even years.

I feel that skeptical science communicators serve this role as well – we are the continuity clinics of skepticism. We follow cases through to their conclusion to see what critical thinking lessons we can derive from them. Without this follow up people tend to jump from one extraordinary claim to another, and therefore they don’t close the feedback loop and never update or improve their cognitive methods. In short, they don’t learn the lessons of their past failures, or benefit from the reinforcement of their successes.

Which is why I think it is important to follow up on the claims made earlier this year by Donut Lab. They claimed to have developed a solid state battery with a specific energy of 400 Wh/kg, with over 100,000 charge cycles, able to recharge in 5 minutes, is stable without a fire risk, operates from -30 to 100 degrees Celsius, is cheaper than current Li-ion batteries, and does not require any geopolitically sensitive materials. They presented these claims at CES in January, but notably did not have an actual battery to demonstrate. Their claims were met with pretty universal skepticism. I wrote at the time: “I’m beginning the smell the “fake it til you make it” syndrome that tanked Theranos.”

Continue Reading »

My mental map of the universe has evolved over my life, partly due to new scientific discoveries and partly due to my own education. As if often the case, as you learn more, things get more complicated. The simplistic picture I had as a child was that the universe consisted of many galaxies in which there are many stars and around which there are planets, likely something similar to our own solar system. I have had to modify this model dozens of times, and perhaps I need to make another little tweak. This has to do with where planets exist.

First, galaxies are not randomly distributed throughout the universe. They are bound together in local groups, those groups are gravitationally bound into galaxy clusters, which in turn are part of superclusters which are finally organized into giant filaments, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. So our universal address is – the Sol system within the Milky Galaxy, part of the Local Group within the Virgo Cluster which is part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

At some point I also learned that not all stars (and therefore, not all planets) exist within galaxies. Estimates of the number of stars within and between galaxies just overlap, so they may be equal, but the average estimates indicate that likely 1-10% of all stars are not in galaxies. They are wandering between galaxies, mostly within galaxy clusters. The first intergalactic star was discovered in 1997. It is likely that most such stars were formed within galaxies (you need clouds of gas and gravitational disturbances for stars to form) but then were flung out because of gravitational interactions with other objects, such as a black hole. Two galaxies colliding can also spray their stars throughout the cluster. It is also very likely that such stars would retain their planets.

Continue Reading »

In Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel he imagines a future in which most of humanity lives in gigantic cities, extending many levels underground. This leaves the majority of the Earth’s surface for industrial farming, necessary to feed all those densely populated cities. If you take a similar strategy, however, and keep the population at sustainable numbers, this could maximize land for natural ecosystems and also minimize the environmental footprint of the average person. So if we are going to plan our civilization around environmental sustainability we would not necessarily need Asimovian megacities, but we could concentrate the population in cities and in densely developed areas around cities, and leave large stretches of land in between undeveloped. This is far better than endless suburban sprawl.

But of course, we are not starting from scratch, and our current layout was not planned by some central committee but evolved organically. Pragmatically, the question we need to ask is – where do we go from here. Cities are growing dynamic things, so we can use city development to move in a certain desirable direction, even if we can’t tear it all down and start anew. This means it is important to study what the best city planning and development would be going forward.

When most people think of city planning to reduce the carbon emissions of transportation, the first thing that comes to mind is planning city centers so that they are walkable/bikeable and to provide public transportation, in order to minimize reliance on fossil-fuel burning cars. This also has the advantage of reducing city traffic, which can be a nightmare. However, a recent study suggests that, while important, this may be of secondary concern with respect to impact on CO2 emissions. For many cities, especially those with a single concentrated hub (as opposed to multicentric cities, like LA), the most impactful strategy might be the densification of a ring surrounding the city center. The range of this ring depends on the city, but is something like 10-20 km for a typical large city, but can extend to 40 km. Increased density can be accomplished with infill development, as many such zones are only moderately developed leaving lots of room for densification.

The idea is that the workplaces will be concentrated in the city center, and the workers will live in the ring around the city center, minimizing their commute distance. This could have a significant impact on the average commute distance that people have and therefore their transportation carbon footprint. This approach would work better for some cities than others, depending on geography. This plan could also maximize the impact of public transport, like buses and trains, dedicated to bringing people back and forth from this densified ring to the city center.

Continue Reading »