And a little child shall lead them

Little kids are amenable to learning new habits – generally much more so than those of us who are set in our ways because this isn’t our first rodeo. That’s why it’s sometimes more effective to teach children health science information rather than to do outreach aimed directly at their parents.

That’s part of the background to the Global Soap Project. It’s a project that rests on some simple science long ago worked out by biologists and medical researchers. The basic fact is that many types of infections are spread through contaminated water and dirty hands. Microbes can flourish in such spots, particularly sometimes in places like crowded refugee camps or in poor nations.

The Global Soap Project is a program with two basic components. The first is to collect “gently used” bars of soap from hotels – soap that otherwise would be discarded. The pieces of soap are reprocessed in Georgia and shipped to nations like Haiti and Uganda where poverty is rife and health and sanitation facilities are few.

The second prong of the program is to teach children in developing nations to use the soap to wash their hands before eating and after using the toilet. Children accept the lessons – as trusting little kids the world around do – and if they establish hand-washing as a personal habit it likely influences others in their households at home.

Hand-washing is a simple yet key approach to combatting a lot of water-borne illness – like cholera. For a variety of different reasons, in some places around the world hand washing is just not a pattern of conduct for many people. In many places it’s a difficult habit to establish in part because a bar of soap can cost a day’s wages.

Simple but basic hand washing habits are one of the best ways to combat diseases that flourish where sanitation is poor – conditions that affect a staggering 2.4 billion people according to the World Health Organization.

As I read about the Global Soap Project the other day, I thought about how much I take for granted in my life. A bar of soap beside the bathroom sink, warm water to wash with, anti-bacterial soap in the shower, and so on. When I travel, I also take for granted the little bars of soap the hotel provides me.

According to a news report from CNN, a hotel maid named Fatoma Dia is one person involved collecting scrap soap. She works at a Hilton hotel where she simply tosses little-used bars of soap into a collection bucket as she cleans rooms. Her hotel in total accounts for several hundred pounds of soap collected each month.

The soap redistribution project has included work in Haiti. Especially after the earthquake of January, 2010, many Haitians have been living without what we’d recognize as adequate sanitation facilities, both at home and in refugee camps. Cholera has often dogged the people of Haiti. A total of more than 400,000 cases have been reported since the disease reared its head in October of 2010. Basic hygiene – like washing hands with soap and water – can make all the difference in terms of limiting transmission of disease in crowded places.

CNN reports one project in Haiti that’s been aimed at changing kids’ habits. A Port-au-Prince school teaches its children to wash their hands with soap and water using a jingle with these words: “Good morning, water! Good morning soap! Goodbye microbes!” Obviously some punchiness has been lost in translation, but the simple yet useful idea gets through to me as I sit here in a nation that takes pure water and soap for granted.

I wish Dia and her co-workers the best in collecting soap that would otherwise be thrown out. Sometimes simple things matter the most of all – like giving little kids (and their parents) in the developing world a chance to avoid water-borne diseases.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Hitting below the belt

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

If you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to eat right and trim down, be forewarned that medical science shows your brain has it in for you and will actively promote your failure on two different fronts. That’s not good news, of course, but you should know about it so you can strengthen your resolve as best you can.

Here’s the scoop. It’s relatively easy – particularly if you are significantly overweight – to lose a few pounds by reducing the number of calories you consume each day.

The problem is that your initial success will trigger a couple of responses in your body. First, as you lose weight a hormone called leptin – which is produced by your fat cells – will start to drop in concentration. That change tells your brain that your stores of fat are decreasing. The brain responds to that report as if famine is on the way. The body makes changes to conserve its energies, and your metabolism will drop.

Metabolism – the rate at which we burn energy – is a major key to what our weight tends to be. Your metabolism may differ from that of John or Jane. But it also will change compared to what it was before you lost weight. The lower your metabolism, the easier it is to consume more calories than you burn in a day – triggering weight gain.

Here’s how that works in practice. Imagine you weighed 175 pounds for a number of years, but then your weight creeps up to 200 pounds. You go on a diet and successfully get back to 175. Congrats! But your metabolism is likely to now be slower at 175 than it would have been if you’d always weighed in at that one amount. In other words, science has shown you have to eat fewer calories to maintain yourself at 175 pounds than you would have if you had always weighed that amount.

What this means is that, depending on your weight loss, you may face a 300 to 500 calorie “handicap.” To beat that handicap you’ll have to eat that many fewer calories each day to maintain yourself at your new weight compared to someone who had never been overweight.

But the scientific news gets worse.

At your post-diet weight of 175, there’s a double whammy. Simply put, you’ll likely feel plenty hungry after your weight loss. The reason is that some other brain chemicals will be triggered that tell you that you feel peckish. In short, your appetite will be stimulated by the fact that you’ve lost weight. So on the one hand you’ll need fewer calories than someone of your weight who has never dieted, while at the same time you’ll feel hungrier than someone who has always been slim and trim.

What’s a poor person sincerely trying to be faithful to a New Year’s resolution to do?

For one thing, the expert agree it’s pointless to try fad diets like eating only dill pickles. The best chance of success you have it to modify your diet toward eating right in a way you can do for the rest of your natural life. “Dieting” shouldn’t be about short-term weight loss based on serious deprivation – you need to find what works for you that you can sustain over the long term.

Another key to success is exercise – and yet more exercise after that. General medical advice is to get 30 minutes per day of moderate exercise. But to maintain weight loss, you’ll likely have to do better. Many advisors in medical science say a person needs to do an hour of exercise each day to keep off pounds shed through dieting.

Nothing about weight management is easy, and scientists are learning more and more about how and why it’s so difficult to lose weight and keep it off.

But if you’re like me, January is a good time to make some changes – changes you can stick with throughout all the weeks and months of this bright and shiny New Year. Others have done it successfully in the past – so let’s encourage one another to take on the serious but rewarding work of helping our health through diet and exercise.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Cookie Cutter Science

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

One of the best parts of baking for me as a kid was the process of “helping” my mama roll out and cut cookie shapes for the oven. At this age I know that I actually hindered her work and she was just being kind in letting me participate, but at the time I thought I was an aide in the process of transforming a lump of material into a thin sheet of ginger-rich dough that we could cut up into the barnyard animals of which I was so fond – and for which we had many different cutter shapes.

One of the goals in the overall process was to make as many ginger cookies as humanly possible from the first rollout of dough. The second rollout, because it necessarily had more flour worked into it, was considerably tougher and thicker, hence not as highly prized by anyone in the family. Indeed, when we were all done, we stored the first and second roll cookies in separate containers and ate them at different times, so great was our preference for the thinner and more delicate cookie.  

Truly maximizing the number of animals you can cut from a sheet of dough and minimizing the waste bits between the animals is the sort of problem that a skilled mathematician can best address. It’s no easy task and would take more mathematical acumen than I will ever possess. Still, anyone who has done the kitchen work by the seat-of-their-pants can appreciate that some patterns of animals yield a lot more good, first-roll cookies and less waste than do others. (Simple squares and rectangles do the best job of all, capturing 100% of the dough for first-round status, but who wants to eat such simple shapes when much more is possible?)

A second more scientific issue involves how our brains process the shapes of cookie cutters themselves. I read about it recently in The Mad Science Book by Reto Schneider.

Here’s an experiment you can do with simple cookie cutter shapes: a star, a circle, perhaps a simple Christmas tree, and the like. First you need a friend or relation to put them all under a towel for you, so you don’t see the shapes. Next, using your fingers, you should work to identify each cutter by its shape.

If you are like most people, you’ll be quite able to accomplish the task with your fingers. Our brains, in other words, are good at using our moving fingers for such work.

But if your friend presses, say, the star shape into your palm – still under the towel – you will likely be only 50% as good at being able to name the shape of the cutter.

There is quite a paradox in this result.  Moving fingers require the brain to sort through a heck of a lot of information. Pressing the star into the hand is really much more simple. But why can’t the brain recognize the shape better in the simpler manner?

An American researcher named James J. Gibson took up this issue in the 1960s. He recognized that the simple experiment showed something significant. He hypothesized that our brains do better as active explorers of the world around them than as passive receivers of tactile input.

One way he had of testing the idea was to press the star shape into a subject’s hand, then release it, rotate it a bit, and press it in again. The proportion of people who could recognize the star increased when he did this.

In short, the more skin disturbance, the better. Or, to put it another way, the brain does well with different and various input – it doesn’t get swamped or overwhelmed by it.

Gibson’s work led to a revision of the theory of tactile reception. We feel things and recognize them not because our brains need to examine them in the most simple way, but because our brains are remarkably adept.

In short, we are all of us smarter in some respects than researchers before Gibson thought. That – plus this season of homemade cookies – is the good news.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princetonand Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of theCollege ofAgricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity.

Rats Are Decent Little Souls

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

The more we learn about animals, the more complex and interesting is the behavior they exhibit. My faithful mutt-from-the-pound, a dog named Buster Brown, impresses me from time to time with complex behaviors aimed at getting what he wants out of me. Most people who live with animals can tell you a tale or two of diabolical ­– or thoughtful – animal behavior they’ve witnessed.

But even knowing all that, a recent study on lab rats took me by surprise. The research makes it clear that rats empathize with one another and will actively work to help one another.

Here’s the scoop that was recently published in the prestigious journal Science. The work was done by Peggy Mason of theUniversity ofChicago with the help of colleagues.

Imagine two rats in a cage, rats that have lived together and thus know each other. The scientists took one rat and trapped it in a Plexiglas tube. The trapped rat didn’t like that, enough so it would make a sound to signal its distress.

The other rat, the one that wasn’t trapped, would scurry over to the plastic tube, biting it and interacting with the trapped rat through small openings in the tube.

The tube had its complexities. Part of it was a trigger that would open the door to the tube, releasing the trapped rat. At first the free rat came on that trigger only by accident, but it would learn the trick and release the trapped rat quickly after it understood the scheme. (The free rat would do all this only for a trapped friend, so to speak, not for a toy rat in the tube.)

You might think the free rat did all the work involved in freeing its companion because it wanted its playmate for selfish reasons. To test that possibility, the researchers also set up the tube so that it released the trapped rat to another cage. Even under those conditions, the free rat would still work to aid the trapped one – which seems to be pretty altruistic behavior.

Next the scientists researched just how strongly those altruistic feelings were in the free rat. They did that by putting two clear plastic traps in a cage. One held the trapped rat, the other held chocolate chips. (Yup, I guess rats like a nice chocolate high as much as we do.)

The free rat in the cage would work to open both traps. In doing so, it meant the free rat would have to share the chocolate with the formerly trapped rat.

That behavior is awfully impressive. Some humans, after all, might not release a trapped comrade until after they had consumed all of the chocolate to be had (at least if it was the super-dark, good stuff).

But the impressive behavior shown by a rat is just that – a behavior. It’s still impossible to really know what the free rat was feeling or thinking.

“I think it’s extremely unlikely that the rat has the same conscious experience (of decision making) that we do,” Mason said to National Public Radio.

But it’s also awfully clear that rats are social, empathetic, and even self-sacrificing little individuals. That’s a far cry from the image we have of rats that lies behind our calling someone we detest “a rat.”

Scientists will now repeat the same study elsewhere to see if they get the same results and start to expand on the work that’s been done. One point of research may be to test how the free rat in the scenario would respond if the trapped rat were a stranger, not a familiar cage-mate.

It wasn’t so long ago that scientists assumed only primates had complex emotions and were capable of the sorts of behaviors seen in the rat study.McGillUniversity’s Jeffrey Mogil has done studies on mice and is impressed by the recent findings about rats. But he says we shouldn’t be surprised to find complex and empathetic behaviors in animals other than primates.

“Behaviors have to come from somewhere,” he said to National Public Radio. “And so it would be almost absurd to expect not to see some sort of simpler form of human sociabilities in other animals.”

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist atPrincetonand Harvard. This column is a service of theCollegeofAgricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity. Peters can be reached at epeters@wsu.edu.

Hot Diggity Dam

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

As the long season of darkness sweeps over the country, it’s a natural time to think about lighting – and how dependent we are on electricity during this dim time of year. You can heat your home with several different energy sources, including natural gas, heating oil or wood. But unless you’re living off-the-grid, the lights throughout your abode burn brightly because of electricity from the grid.

Yes, I have a couple of candles, a flashlight and two kerosene lamps in my household. But I don’t use them. Instead, like more than 99 percent of us, I just flip up a switch to turn on electric lights throughout my house.

Of course people use electricity for many other purposes. We run all the equipment in emergency rooms on electricity – and when I’m trying to wake up in the morning I sometimes think it’s almost equally important that we run our coffee makers on electrical current, too. 

It’s commonplace to note that the landscape of energy is changing in this country. But it’s harder to get agreement on where we should get our electricity in the coming years. People disagree about that, and for some good reasons. But no matter what you feel about our various energy options, some basic facts about solar energy are worth review.

We could start by noting that most of the energy we use is ultimately solar in origin.  Fossil fuels, after all, represent solar energy that Mother Nature stored deep in the Earth over whole geological eras.  One down side about fossil fuels is that once we use them, they’re gone.

Engineer Bob Olsen of Washington State University recently explained to me his view that we have quite a wonderful system of “renewable solar” energy in place, especially in the Western parts of the U.S. and around the region of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

“That’s the case not because of solar electric panels, but because of the world’s largest solar collector – seawater,” Olsen said.

Because we live on land, we don’t often think too clearly about the seas. But the oceans cover about two thirds of the planet. They absorb a lot of heat energy when light shines on them. Each day they soak up enormous quantities of energy from the sun, warming and evaporating as they do so. It’s evaporation from the seas that fills the sky with clouds. Water in the clouds comes down as rain or snow.

Olsen sees precipitation as the linchpin of renewable solar energy. That’s because the rains flow into major rivers across which we’ve built hydroelectric dams. By running the water behind the dam through turbines, we generate electricity. Electric utilities take that energy and move it from the dams to our kitchens and workplaces.

The dams have several good features. One is that they have the ability to cheaply store a great deal of energy. The vast reservoirs behind each dam are natural storage devices. Solar electric panels on a roof don’t have this feature unless linked to expensive batteries that degrade over time. Simply put, dams can easily produce electricity when the sun isn’t shining, a clear advantage in having them power the grid.

If we ever get a large slice of our electricity from windmills and solar panels, I think there will still be room for the dams. They – like fossil fuel and nuclear plants – are able to produce juice on a still night when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Because we want large amounts of electricity at our fingertips 24-7, windmills and solar panels cannot be our sole source of electricity.

Another positive attribute of the dams is that they make a lot of electricity without producing any greenhouse gases. And once the basic investment of constructing the dams is finished, they are economical to run because their “fuel” is freely supplied by Mother Nature. That’s essentially why those of us who live in regions of the country with dams have relatively cheap electric rates.  

From where I sit, the hydroelectric dams are gifts that keep on giving – every time we switch on the lights.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princetonand Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of theCollege ofAgricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity.

It’s Not Just the Lava

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Mt. Rainier in my native Washington State is a stunning site. It’s a beautiful mountain, covered in snow and ice in both winter and summer. At over 14,000 feet, its summit is worthy of respect from even serious hikers. There’s no wonder it’s a National Park.

Like most all of the other beautiful peaks in the Cascades, Mt. Rainier is also a deadly volcano. It hasn’t erupted since 1894, but that’s not long ago to a geologist – we are sure it’s only sleeping and will be heard from again. And it’s not simply lava that’s most likely to create a loss of life when the mountain next blows. That’s partly due to how volcanic gas separates from lava, and also due to an eruption’s effects on ice, soil and something we rock-heads call “ash.”

Here’s the story.

Some volcanoes erupt fairly gently. The Big Island of Hawaii is characterized by that kind of eruption. When lava comes up to the surface of the Big Island, the gases in the lava tend to separate pretty gently from the molten rock – like bubbles forming and rising in a soda-pop bottle.  That’s because the lava is pretty “runny,” or not very viscous as we geologists would say. If you are a sane person (by that I mean, if you are not a geologist), you’ll likely stay at least a few feet away from the stream of lava – and you’ll be fine.

Unfortunately, the Cascades are quite different from Hawaii. The molten material in the volcanoes in the Northwest is quite viscous and stiff. When a major eruption occurs, gases that were once at high pressure are close to being released to the atmosphere – and they make their way to the air explosively.

That’s exactly what happened at Mount St. Helens in 1980 when a catastrophic eruption launched tiny bits of lava into the sky. The tiny particles are what geologists call ash. It’s not the same as ash in an old campfire, which is the remains of burned wood. Volcanic ash is just finely divided rock. (And as someone who was downwind of St. Helens when she blew, I’m here to testify that tiny bits of rock in the air make it quite difficult to breath, even when you hold your sleeve over your face.)

Being scalded to death or enveloped in an ash cloud are serious issues. But there’s another problem, too, with this style of volcanic eruption and the threat it poses for people.

Let’s get back to Mt. Rainier, covered in snow and glacial ice. When it next erupts, the great heat of the lava and ash will melt snow and ice quickly. The water, mixed with ash, will start moving downhill in a slurry that’s called a “lahar” or volcanic mudflow. That’s the greatest hazard of all for people who live near this type of volcano, because lahars move much faster than people can run and destroy everything in their path. On the good side, the Cascades Volcanic Observatory will try to give us as much warning as it can about what’s happening – but nevertheless, events may hit us hard and fast.

Mt. Rainier is so high and near the sea that it has more glaciers than any other mountain in the lower 48 – meaning it will have a lot of water available to create lahars. And because it’s so tall, the flows will come screaming down the mountain with a lot of speed and run for a long way in the valleys of the lowlands.

Maps of lahar risks around Mt. Rainier are coded yellow, orange and red. Over 100,000 people are at some degree of risk from lahars streaming down from Rainier. As more and more people move into the warmer-colored zones of the Puget Sound lowlands, more will be at risk from future lahars. In a few places, public warning systems have been set up and schools and other organizations practice what they would do in the event of a lahar emergency from Mt. Rainier.

In much of the Northwest people live on top of volcanic rock or on old volcanic debris flows. Whether I live to see it or not, the day will come that residents of this beautiful corner of the country will find things more exciting than anyone will like.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Natural and Resources Sciences at Washington State University.

Cancer detection and man’s best friend

Dogs are loyal, playful, loving and sometimes cute as a button. It’s no wonder we love them (some of us more than others, to be sure).

Dogs were likely one of the very first animals we humans domesticated. They’ve been sitting around our campfires for a very long time, indeed. We train our dogs to sit, shake and lie down. It also could be said the dogs train us to dispense kibbles, rawhide treats, and scratches behind the ears. What matters isn’t which side comes out ahead in the exchange, I like to think, but that both sides benefit from our association.

Recently I had occasion to read aloud a news report to my “Labradormix” as he lay stretched out near my feet one evening. Buster Brown came from the dog pound where he was listed as a Lab mix, although in truth the vet and I agree he has so many different influences in him it’s rather misleading to name just one. Still, because he will retrieve sticks I throw into the water, I dignify his existence by thinking of him as predominately a Labrador Retriever. And he’s content with that description.

The story I read aloud originated in Germany where a study was done with dogs who have been trained to indicate when they smell chemicals emitted by cancer cells in the human body. This isn’t the first such study to be done, but it confirmed what earlier ones had shown: dogs can be good early warning detectors of malignancies within us people.

The German study used two German shepherds (naturally), an Australian shepherd and one Labrador retriever. (Buster, of course, was pleased to hear about that fourth dog’s participation in the study.)  The dogs were trained to lie down when they smelled lung cancer. The dogs were just house-dogs, and the training didn’t go much beyond that used in typical puppy school. So it’s likely that what the four dogs could do, so could my Buster and your Fido, too.

The canines in the study were given test tubes containing people’s breath samples, both healthy subjects and those who had lung cancer. The dogs had been trained to lie down when they smelled traces of lung cancer and touch the vials with their noses. About 70 percent of the time, the dogs successfully identified patient known to have lung cancer.

The study is not the first of this type to have been done. Other studies with dogs have tested their ability to detect breast cancer, colon cancer, skin cancer and more. Some studies have had much higher detection rates than 70 percent, too.

Clearly dogs can tumble to just a tiny trace of chemicals associated with cancer cells. I’ve read that dogs have more neurons running from the nose to the brain than we people do, and a larger proportion of the dog brain is devoted to processing information from the nose than is the case in our noggins.

The fact that dogs can smell malignancies would seem to indicate the cancers create particular chemicals that are otherwise not in our bodies. Exactly what those compounds are remains a mystery. In other words, we can say the dogs in Germany did pretty well at detecting lung cancer, but we don’t know what chemicals in the test tube vials were the ones the dogs responded to. And, of course, the dogs can’t tell us that part of the story.

It’s interesting to speculate why it took us so long to ask Fido’s help in cancer detection. I think it’s partly because of the way we view science and all things medical. We think that the best scientific or medical devices will be large and expensive machines. Likely they’ll be scary, too, at least if you have to spend time with one as a patient.

It’s just outside our framework of thinking to imagine that the mutt under the kitchen table at home could do as well as a chemical detector designed by an engineer and costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As a friend of mine in graduate school used to say, “Scientific instruments should be big, noisy, scary and cold.”

Or not!

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. Peters can be reached at epeters@wsu.edu.

Stepping Up to a Bright Idea

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

At first I wasn’t sure I was reading the CNN report correctly. The story hinged on special pavement that uses the impact of human feet to generate electricity.

That’s right. A young man in Britain has invented a device that harvests the energy from a footfall hitting the pavement to power things like LED lights.

Talk about a bright idea.

The “PaveGen” project is the brainchild of Laurence Kemball-Cook, age 25 years. He’s an engineer who built a prototype of the device during his last year in school and is now working to make and market his creation.

The PaveGen tiles work because they have a bit of “give” in them. When you step on one, it’s depressed a little bit by your body weight. That motion can be used to generate a small but measurable bit of electricity. If the paving tiles are in an area of heavy foot traffic – like the stairs down to a subway station – in total they can make enough electricity for some useful applications.

Using human muscle to generate electricity is not completely new. I’ve seen students in teaching demonstrations pedaling hard on stationary bikes to light up a relatively low-watt light. In short, it takes a lot of oomph to power a standard bulb – us old ladies need not apply for any job requiring that much work on a regular basis.

But walking is one of the most efficient things we humans can do. And by stepping on the paver of the PaveGen devise, a person exerts considerable downward force – full body weight. Each step on one of the pavers generates enough juice to power an LED bulb for 30 seconds. The generating device can be linked to a battery to even out the flow of the electrical current between footfalls.

Kemball-Cook had a second bright idea as he designed his device. In addition to contributing electric power to devices outside the paver, he engineered the tiles to retain 5 percent of their oomph. That bit of power is used to light up a LED bulb in the paver itself. This means the device lights up as you walk in it, giving you positive feedback that you’re really making electricity as you walk across the pavement. People really like that, it’s clear from the news reports.

Some 20 of the tiles will be installed around London’s Olympic Stadium where foot-traffic is going to be high.

The pavers have already been tested at a school in southeast Britain.

“1,100 kids have devoted their lives to stamping all over them for the last eight months,” Kemball-Cook said.

On a shorter-term test, Kemball-Cook says he took the pavers to an outdoor festival where 250,000 footsteps created enough juice to charge 10,000 cell phones.

The pavers are a bit like social media, harnessing the individual contribution of many people in ways that generate value. That’s part of the appeal of the devices.

Each PaveGen tile can be made to the size of existing pieces of pavement so they can be substituted in for what’s already in a sidewalk.

Like with everything in this world, the economics of the pavers will determine if you see them on a city sidewalk near you. At this point Kemball-Cook won’t say what it costs him to make each PaveGen slab. He notes instead that once they go into mass production, the costs will fall.

Time will tell if this idea has legs. But I for one am rooting it does. And I’m glad to note some members of the next generation are thinking outside the box and creating some delightful devices.

Keep it up, kids!

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Doing more with less on the road

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Between the debt-ceiling kerfuffle and Hurricane Irene, you may have missed two bits of summertime news that will be important for what we drive in the coming years.

First, President Barack Obama announced that the administration and automakers had reached a deal to double the fuel economy of our national fleet of cars starting in model year 2017 and reaching the goal by 2025. Right now, cars and light trucks – light trucks include what I call my “little old lady SUV” – get an average of 27 mpg. By 2025 those same vehicles are to average an impressive 54.5 mpg.

The second bit of news came a little later but was equally interesting. For the first time, companies that build “big rig” trucks, work vehicles like garbage trucks, and buses will also have to conform to efficiency standards. In model years 2014-2018, big rigs are to become 23 percent more efficient and work trucks and buses will be 9 percent more miserly.

In some ways, big rigs and buses are already quite efficient. It’s true you see them belch black emissions when they accelerate, but because they haul large payloads as they tootle down the road they pack in a lot of work per gallon of fuel consumed. My 4-cylinder SUV gets pretty good gas mileage – in the upper 20s in terms of mpg – but when the only thing in it is me, it’s just not efficient in terms of pounds of payload. Still, truck and bus engineers will now be tasked with the challenge of making the behemoths of the streets and highways even more efficient than they currently are.

Most of us don’t make decisions about which big rig to purchase or what model of bus our city transit system should buy. But when it comes to personal vehicles, we have more and more options that both speak to the goal of efficiency and also to diversifying the type of energy we rely on for transportation.

Here’s just a sampler of what vehicle type you could purchase when next you’re on the market for a new car:

Traditional hybrid cars like the standard Prius – these vehicles are powered by gasoline. You don’t plug them in for a charge, you just fill them up with gasoline (like your father’s Oldsmobile). The hybrids get much better mileage than many cars, but they are still 100 percent gasoline dependent.

Newer hybrids like the Chevy Volt – this car runs for short distances on electricity alone. You plug it in while you sleep and it’s charged for you in the morning. Driving across town in the Volt is like owning an all-electric car. For many commuters, this has the appeal of economy because electricity is cheap compared to gasoline. If you want to go long distances, the vehicle starts automatically using gasoline for energy – so you can drive across a state or two by filling up.

All-electric cars like the Nissan Leaf – this car is all electric, all the time. You “pour” energy into it by plugging it in for a charge, likely while you sleep. It has no tailpipe, which is pretty cool – although the power-plant that made the electricity the car runs on creates emissions if it’s powered by fossil fuels.

Natural gas vehicles like one type of the Honda Civic – this ever-popular car can be purchased with a motor that runs on natural gas. Natural gas burns quite cleanly. You can recharge the vehicle with compressed natural gas at your home. If that sounds exotic, you may have already been in a natural gas vehicle – some airport shuttle buses and urban taxis are powered in this fashion.

In short, diverse types of vehicles are now coming into their own. For those of us who love motors and engines, it’s a great time to be alive. And although I hope to drive my plain-vanilla 4-cylinder SUV for another ten years, I also allow myself to daydream of some new vehicle, much more efficient than what I grew up with and perhaps powered by natural gas or electricity.

I’m thinking of bright yellow, maybe with red flames painted on the sides.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist atPrincetonand Harvard. This column is a service of theCollegeofAgricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity. Peters can be reached at epeters@wsu.edu.

Take Your Best Shot

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

When I was youngster in the 1960s I had all the shots little kids went through back in the day. And because I’m a klutz and regularly hurt myself outdoors, I’ve periodically had my tetanus immunity updated. A few years ago I underwent a series of shots for rabies after having a scary adventure with an ill coyote. Last summer I got the shingles vaccine when my assistant was suffering from a shingles outbreak. And to round it all out, tonight after work I’ll be getting the influenza vaccine for this season’s strains of flu virus.

My long history of receiving vaccinations – even including the potent shots given for rabies – has not caused me more than temporary discomfort. I’m truly glad I live in a time and place where vaccines are available for many infectious illnesses. 

Simply put, I’m puzzled that millions of Americans fear potential side-effects of vaccines more than they fear the diseases against which the shots can protect us.

In a recent NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll, an amazing 21 percent of those interviewed said they believe that autism is linked to vaccines. And of people who say they’ve changed their views about vaccines in the last five years, most said their opinions are becoming less favorable. That’s apparently why the vaccination rate for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) recently fell almost 3 percent.

Of course, nobody likes getting injections. But to believe that vaccinating children leads to autism is, at this point in history, to ignore the evidence. And this rock head feels strongly that willfully closing our eyes to the facts puts our kids at risk.

The noise that sprang up around childhood vaccines mostly comes from a study by a British doctor, one Andrew Wakefield by name. In 1998 Dr. Wakefield published a paper based on the medical histories of 12 patients with respect to the MMR vaccine.Wakefield’s study led many parents to fear that the MMR shot increased the chance a young child would develop autism.

It’s true that the first signs of autism or other serious developmental issues often arise in young children right around the time they are receiving lots of vaccines from their pediatricians. This, of course, doesn’t mean the vaccines are causing the developmental problems. (The fact that I first notice I’m coming down with a sore throat while I’m reading one evening doesn’t mean the act of reading is causing the sore throat.)

Long after the initial study hit the streets, a careful reexamination ofWakefield’s work was done. It showed that of the 12 children in the study, three actually never had autism, and five showed signs of developmental problems before they got the vaccine. Further, doctors reviewing the study came to believe not that Wakefield had made honest mistakes in his study, but that he had deliberately falsified the data on which his published study rested. And perhaps most damning of all, it came to light that Wakefield was paid more than $670,000 by a law firm that planned to sue the vaccine manufacturers.

In short, the case was a gut-wrenching example of what can go wrong with medical research. Wakefield’s conduct was so destructive and misleading that British authorities stripped him of his medical license.

But the damage lingers.

Wakefield’s original paper led a number of parents to withhold the MMR vaccine from their kids. In Britain vaccination rates dropped significantly and, sure enough, the number of kids coming down with measles went up.  

Children – and adults – are protected from an amazing array of infectious illness due to vaccines. But the fact that vaccines are so effective may be what blinds us to their value.

I suspect that if we still intensely feared polio, as we did until effective vaccines were developed for it, we’d appreciate modern shots a lot more.

Roll up your sleeves with me. It’s time for influenza shots – and I think it’s high time for all of us, including presidential candidates, to quit fear-mongering about childhood immunizations.

 

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.