Progress rolls on. There's this DARPA challenge for engineers and computer programmers to build a vehicle that can race 132 miles across a course in the mojave desert without human assistance. In last year's race, none of the vehicles made it to the end.

This year, four did.

Pretty cool. We're still a ways away from cars that can safely drive themselves, but progress is steady.

A new study announced this week reports stronger connections than ever before between particulates in air pollution and mortality. Among the surprises was a strong link between pollution and diabetes.

The study compared over twenty thousand people from different neightborhoods in Los Angeles.

In the last 24 hours, I have watched New Orleans go from "whew ... close call!" to "oh my god, our nation just lost an entire city".

New Orleans is gone. Really gone. I can barely begin to think what to do about a disaster of this scale. I hope an engineering project of vast magnitude is undertaken to build a safer city, preferably well above sea level.

But the humanitarian disaster in the meantime. Only ten hours ago, I said something along the lines of "this is a fairly small disaster, in terms of human life lost". Well, only 80 so far, but an entire city destroyed ... good god ...

Gene therapy has been an exciting proposition for some time, but the results have been equivocal and research has been slow. The idea is to treat genetic diseases by giving the patient some copies of the correct gene. Typical examples usually include injecting the patient with a modified virus ... one which does not contain any viral DNA, and thus cannot cause an infection, but instead which contains the DNA code for whatever is missing in the patient's own genome.

For example, patients with cystic fibrosis lack the correct form of the gene to produce a protein called CFTR, which is necessary for normal lung function. Instead, they have a damaged copy that is missing three nucleotides. Attempts at gene therapy traditionally use viral bodies to inject the patient's own cells with correct copies of the CFTR gene, from which lung cells can make the correct protein. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked to well so far. Some patients have even died when the virus body delivery system inadvertantly turned on a cancer gene... causing leukemia; this has slowed research drastically. Even if it did work well, patients would need to receive injections on a regular basis, because the free-floating genome segments injected would get broken down over time.

Today I read a report about a new process that is utterly different - and shows a lot of promise. It turns out our body has a rarely used but interesting repair mechanism called "homologous recombination". Occasionally, irreversible damage happens to a gene when a cell is preparing to divide. But we have two copies of every chromosome. Our body attempts to repair the damaged gene using the copy from the other chromosome as a template. This would leave the cell somewhat different from the others in our body (since it would have two identical copies), but may be better than missing a copy entirely.

Well, the report today is that scientists have used this mechanism of homologous recombination as part of gene therapy. They inject an enzyme that causes DNA damage very specifically to the broken part of the gene in question, like the CFTR gene for cystic fibrosis, or in the case of this study, the damaged IL-2R gene that causes severe immunodeficiency (boy-in-the-bubble disease). That damage triggers the body's homologous recombination mechanism. This would normally cause the gene to be repaired from the copy on the other chromosome. But in these kinds of patients, the other copy is also defective. So, the researchers simultaneously deliver a clean copy of the gene. As a result, some of the cells repair the gene using the clean copy as a template. In this first study, 6% to 7% of the cells fixed both copies (i.e. on both chromosomes) of the gene, and an additional 11% repaired the damage on one copy, sufficient for normal functioning.

This is fantastic, because it means the chromosomes themselves have been repaired. No further treatments of those cells would be necessary. If the cells divide, their offspring would both carry the corrected copy of the gene. Where it works, this is a permanent solution to a genetic deficiency.

Hard to describe how cool that is. This is a mechanism for permanently reprogramming the genes, even of adult human beings. While it will undoubtedly be used on diseases like immunodeficiency, this could ultimately be used to treat every genetic disease from Alzheimer's down to male-pattern baldness.

Cosmos 1, a spacecraft built by the Planetary Society to test solar sails, may be lost. Apparently an engine failure in the launch vehicle prevented the spacecraft from reaching its intended orbit. Now the search is on to try to figure out which orbit it is in, in hopes of reestablishing communications and perhaps accomlishing some of the original science goals.

This is pretty sad. I believe it is the first time the Planetary Society has funded its own space mission, and it is very cool that they managed to build a craft to test a whole new concept of space travel for under $4 million. Keep your fingers crossed, everyone, that all is not lost yet.

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about the GOP's current lockdown on the US government. In case you'd forgotten, they have control of two branches of the government, and are engaged in an all-out assault on the third (the judiciary) while attempting to weaken all the rules that protect the minority or limit their power in the other two (filibuster, ethics committee, etc.).

What occurs to me through this all is that they're still going to lose the battle on gay rights, and eventually even gay marriage. It seems to me that gay equality is one of those concepts whose time has come - as our culture has grown accepting of homosexuality, the laws cannot be far behind. In the face of GOP control, a second state (Connecticut) has now approved gay civil unions, this time without any pressure from the courts. The law was signed by a Republican governor. That makes two states allowing civil unions and one allowing marriage - all during the past two years of utter GOP dominance.

I'm sure the current GOP lockdown will ultimately delay the legalization of gay marriage, but it won't stop it, and a severe step backwards, like the recriminalization of sodomy, seems vanishingly remote. Even the passing of a dreaded marriage amendment to the constitution seems incredibly unlikely, after its' spectacular failure last year. (If it can't even make it through the senate, the chance of timely ratification by two-thirds of the states is ludicrously small.)

It's a nice reminder that Republican power is not infinite even in the current lockdown. In this case, the tides of culture are against them.

Google Maps is god-like. I swear.

It's so far ahead of mapquest and yahoo I can barely begin to describe it.

Start with maps that fill your whole browser window, not dinky little postage-stamp-sized squaes.

Now make them faster than the other map services.

Them make them draggable; they load apparently pre-rendered rectangles into the window on the fly. When you double-click to re-center, they scroll smoothly. I am not shitting you here, I saw it with my own eyes.

Then make the integrated location search truly functional, with reasonable parsing of english phrases including the word "near". Try "bookstores near Pasadena, CA".

Then add context-searching of text related to the names of places nearby, both from white pages entries and from the text of websites.

I mean, holy crap. Google is really turning the web into the tool it was meant to be.

UPDATE: The Bruins will not like this. Type "University of California Los Angeles" into the google maps search form.

Though most of my day was good and productive today, the morning started with a rather disturbing and discouraging experience.

I met my sister down in Los Angeles to work on our business plans, but when I arrived there was an injured woman in a wheelchair asking for help. She was pretty clearly in bad shape; bandages over her neck and shoulder, large amounts of skin visibly peeling off her hands, a piece of surgical tape covering an eye that was either missing or nearly hidden by a swollen eyesocket. She said her sister lived in the house she was sitting in front of, and was asking me to push her wheelchair down the street to her brother's house. It wasn't at all clear how she'd gotten to be where she was.

Her speech was very muddied and difficult to understand, but being the good compassionate man that I am I agreed to try to help her. So we tried contacting her family via a phone number she gave us (disconnected). She was asking for an ambulence, and for tissues and/or toilet paper.

We wheeled this woman down the block to the house she indicated; she was incredibly polite and gracious the whole time. Strangely, though, she kept emphasizing that her mother was caucasian -- trying to put my mind at ease or get on my good side, I guess? "I love you guys ... thank you ... my mom was caucasian" was repeated at least a dozen times. The scene was eerie, and her apparent assumption that her race (or her mother's) would matter to me was unsettling.

At the house she indicated, someone answered the door from behind a screen but just quickly said "Take her away ... she has no place here" and closed the door. I never even saw his face; it was too dark inside the house.

My sister had called 911 (though, disturbingly, she couldn't get through on my mobile phone. She was put on hold by a computer and had to run home to use her landline) and a firetruck showed up a couple of minutes later. The guys were pretty polite and non-aggressive as far as uniformed authority figures go, but the woman pretty much immediately freaked out. She started hurling nonstop obscenities and trying to spit at me and the firemen.

Ultimately her brother came out of the house (it was her brother), and gave the firemen his and his sister's names. He was pretty calm and cooperative, and just looked very tired; it seemed as if he'd been through this a number of times before.

The firemen said they would take her back to the station, and were probably going to have to "put a hood on her" because she was spitting. All I could think of was what her past interactions with authority must have been like to engender that reaction, and how forcibly tying a bag over head certainly wasn't going to help things on that front. At the same time, you could hardly blame the firemen - at that point she was definitely dangerous and belligerent. They thanked us and we went about our day at that point, with nothing much else we could do.

As I imagine what must have happened to her after that and where she'll end up - either back out on the street, to die there eventually, or in prison - I sit incredibly frustrated that we live in a country that still really has no compassionate route for helping people in situations like hers. The ER folks had clearly patched her up and pushed her wheelchair out onto the sidewalk; they have no resources to do anything more. In Los Angeles, its amazing that she made it into an ER at all. This woman's prognosis is not good.

She's clearly ill - physically and mentally - and needs help. She's beyond seeking it for herself, other than to seek out family who have already had enough. She needs to be in a care facility, preferably something more like a retirement home and less like a prison.

Most of the people who would fight against spending money to help people in her situation, social and economic conservatives, would simply justify the situation as one she deserves. That it's her responsibility to take care of herself. Though she is clearly in no position to improve her lot: even if she weren't mentally ill, she's homeless in a wheelchair with surgical wounds, in no shape to even get a basic foothold or do anything constructive about her life.

There's something fundamentally and morally wrong, I can't help but feel, about a wealthy society that will leave someone - anyone - on the street to die in the rain. There's something fundamentally evil about offhanded disregard of people as deserving such a situation .

Happy new year, everyone. We finally had the snow we wanted in Boise; here are some shots from my parents' house this morning.
two more below the fold.

So yesterday, i managed to get my mac back online. Hooray! Sadly, my cold has gotten worse, and yesterday and today were pretty miserable. I don't get sick very often, so I tend to be rather whiny and melodramatic about it. :)