With other members of the Liu lab and BME department at UCI, I'm participating in a program called Rocket Science Tutors that teaches hands-on science classes after school at low-income middle schools in Orange County (mostly in Santa Ana). Our fearless leader Nino started an "ask a scientist" program last week where we distributed slips of paper to students, asking them to write (anonymously) their questions for us, which we promised we'd answer at the next class session. We got one response the first week. Someone asked "if evolution is real [ed. note: danger!], how did life form on Earth and what did the first organism look like?" It's possible we're being trolled -- but it's a really good, and really deep, question. I spent way too long researching a good answer, which I'll paste below; it made me realize that I didn't have a very good answer and I was surprised by a lot of what I found. I wanted to answer the question credibly without taking too much class time, so my writeup may be a little scant. What do you think? Is this is the right way to answer? Continue reading

Together with some friends from the Taco Tuesday Social Ride (we bike to taco places around Irvine on Tuesdays; you're invited), I'm planning a bike trip from Irvine to San Diego for late September. I don't think any of us have gone that far (~90 miles) in a single day before, so we're doing some training now to get our mileage counts up.

Today, we did a ride down Santiago Canyon Road in the foothills to the east. At 46 miles with a 1/2 mile of climb in full sun, it was a pretty good trip!

For the curious or adventurous, you can find an overview map and a route card. We were hoping the Irvine part of the Peters Canyon Trail would be re-opened, but it was still closed east of Warner, so we detoured south to Harvard and continued until we met the trail past Walnut.

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I got an entertaining bit of mass email from some Brazilians with an axe to grind this week. I'll spare you the gory details; what caught my eye was the salutation: Take it away, George Michael Bluth:

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4DMPmoJkJQ[/embed]

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I don't mean to perpetuate the stereotype that all grad students are reduced to a social position where they're incapable of talking about anything except grad school and don't know how to interact in the company of people who aren't also grad students -- but this #whatshouldwecallgradschool thing is occasionally pretty great:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="287" caption="When I Aspirate The Pellet"][/caption]

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It's wintertime in 2060. Traffic is winding its way through the mountain passes somewhere outside Tahoe. It's been a legal mandate for decades, now, that motor vehicles are strictly computer-operated on public roads.

Inside the cars, the occupants are sleeping, or chatting, or watching a movie, or generally doing anything but paying attention to the road -- which is normal. SkyNet's doing all the work. Since the self-driving mandate was finally enacted after years of constitutional challenges and not a few firebombings, traffic fatalities took a sharp plunge from almost 34,000 in 2009 to only a few thousand. Maybe a few hundred. (How intrinsically dangerous is driving?)

But today, suddenly, disaster strikes. On a two-lane road, a car in the inner westbound lane loses a tire and spins around to block the width of the roadway, directly in front of a column of cars approaching in the outer eastbound lane. Imagine that each car has identical and perfect knowledge of the positions and speeds of all of the other cars, the road conditions, and models for how each car will respond to control inputs. The network quickly realizes that the car at the head of the column cannot avoid colliding with the disabled vehicle without leaving the roadway, colliding with the guardrail and risking a plunge into a ravine below -- but the maneuver would avert any additional collisions. If the lead car stays on the roadway, it will be struck from behind by the second and then third cars in the column, leading to serious damage to each car, with risks to the occupants.

What should the algorithm controlling the lead car do?

Or imagine a different scenario, where the certain loss of any one of a set of four cars would avert a certain serious collision involving all four vehicles. Should one of the cars sacrifice itself? And how do you choose? Randomly? With a voting algorithm? Does it matter how many people are in each car?

What might some mitigating factors be? What if these incidents are so rare but so gripping that the autodriver companies start selling transferrable lifetime life insurance policies with each unit, that kick a cool $10 million dollars to your survivors if your car loses an election? Could there be a "suicide switch" that would let you opt to lose an election (in advance -- presumably there's no time for reaction in the moment)? Who would activate it?

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I'm curious about nutrition.

What do you eat? It's a fraught question. My own friends run the gamut from militant carnivores to careful locavore vegans; some have strictly regimented diets and others make food strictly an afterthought. What you eat reflects your values and affects your health. Feelings about food run deep. So it's not surprising that there's a lot of conventional wisdom about nutrition -- or that a lot of it is contradictory.

It's hard to know who to trust. A lot of "experts" consulted by the popular press seem to base their advice more on intuition and fads than on any kind of empirical data. To be sure, a lot of these things are hard to study, for reasons that I hope to address in a future post. But the scientific and medical communities have built up a lot of solid research over the years that can answer a lot of questions and I'm curious to see what it can teach me.

I'm particularly interested in challenging my own assumptions. I have no particular qualification to talk about nutrition or health -- I want to use this series as a tool to develop my own understanding. My goals for this series are to:

• learn how my diet can help me avoid cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and cancer
• learn what I need to be doing in order to maintain a healthy weight, and
• to learn more about metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and interventions for them

by surveying the published literature. I’ll see you back here soon!</p>

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