Monocrotophos: A Deadly Insecticide

A recent incident in India has left 23 children dead as a result of cooking oil contaminated with monocrotophos. Being as this was a free meal by government, aimed to keep 120 million children well fed and nourished, this turns some heads.

This molecule has been used as an insecticide, but has since been banned in Canada and the US, along with a number of other countries. They have failed to keep a ban on such pesticides due to the issue of having to feed so many hungry mouths, and needing a high crop output. In the countries where it is still legally used as a pesticide it is required to dilute it to 16% by volume of water. But in this case there was no dilution, indicating that there was direct contact with the poison after the oil processing.

This then becomes a question of who is responsible for insuring this doesn't happen again? One option is to enforce the correct usage and safety for this material, but considering the large illiteracy of the population, and difficulty in setting up an enforcement task, this poses much difficulty.

My opinion in how to prevent something like this from happening again is to enforce limitations on the manufacturer of the insecticide, the ones who enticed the Indian government into lifting the ban with their low price point. To either enforce a ban on synthesizing the compound all together, or to impose a concentration restriction, making the manufacturer dilute before the product is sold

Should Search Engines Block Queries to The Anarchist's Cookbook?

This thought came to me when I decided to search for The Anarchist's Cookbook to calm my curiosity of how easy it is for anyone to get a hold of it. When I searched Google for it, the first page presented me a number of places where I could purchase the book, along with a full pdf file of the book. I was quite surprised when I found it so quickly, and quite disturbed at that as well. I am fully against internet censoring to the extent of websites being shut down (other than that of illegality issues), but I believe that search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo should take a step towards assuring that the average internet user cannot obtain information like this.

The problem that I have with The Anarchist's Cookbook is not the fact that it explains how to make explosives, I think it's good information for people who know what they are doing, such as chemists, but I have a problem with the fact that it is written for the average person, who has had no safety training in handling chemicals. It explains how to get certain chemicals from off the shelf products in order to construct bombs, and other such dangerous weapons, rather than having to get chemicals from a supplier such as Sigma-Aldrich, who makes it impossible for the average person to obtain. If someone really wanted to hurt someone, they should have to gain the knowledge first before jumping right to making the explosive from a set out procedure. In that time planning it out, they could very well change their mind. An example of this is the Drano Bomb, where kids can make a bomb out of common household items, which can cause serious damage, as reported here. Reports have been made of people loosing fingers while holding the water bottle, which is an unexpecting object to be a bomb since we see bottles littered all the time.

In the end, we have to ask ourselves if information like this should be free to the public, through being written in layman’s terms, rather than in academic terminology that could only be understood with four years of post secondary education, along with the understanding and appreciation of what we are dealing with.

Ponderings Of Where Science Education Should Go

Just as a forefront, I don't want to make myself out to be an expert in the educational studies; these are merely my observations and thoughts of where I believe we should be heading with our public elementary and high schools.

A step back from memorization

A key part in education right now is the preparation for standardized tests, to reshape a student to be able to answer predictive questions, selecting students who aren't well rounded, but excel solely in this category, while leaving their creativity behind. This method doesn't teach children to ask questions because they soon realize that there is only one right answer, where in the real world a person needs to ask themselves questions in order to problem solve, or to see a problem all together. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard an arts student say that they didn't like science because there was only one right answer, and that they preferred to have an objective look on their topics. But this here, is the beauty of science; anyone can disprove anything that is considered “true” with sufficient evidence, creating a paradox in how we test the subject. If education can step back from the emphasized learning of knowledge and spend more time exploring the beauty of the scientific method, people won't be as afraid of science. I'm not necessarily saying that I think everyone should go into the sciences because of this, but people who are in other fields shouldn't have a fear of it.

In line with this, there may also be a problem with this method for the upcoming generation who are surrounded with more and more electronic gadgets connected to all human information. With an increasing dependence on technology, the need of memorizing small details diminishes proportional to the easiness of accessing the information [1]. In fact, it has been proven that if the information is easily accessed, our mind will refrain from storing it in our long term memory. From this, we may see a change with our next generation in their ability to hold long term memories of small facts. Because of this, we need to push for a stronger investment in the creativity and imagination of students. It was Einstein who stated that "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”.

Consequences of the current education system

One key result of this is the fact that 3rd year genetics is considered to be one of the toughest courses for biology undergraduates, but for other majors such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry it seems easier because of their problem solving experience. Up to that point in university biology students are made to only know memorization as the medium of education. They aren't made to problem solve, create, or learn the scientific method until later in their degree; all they are doing is building up their knowledge to be able to problem solve later. As much as this method has worked for years and years, I believe that we can do better in educating students so that when they do get to their first genetics class, they have the problem solving skills to be able to excel in the course.

As have just finished my undergrad, i have witnessed a slew of grad students who eagerly boast in their academic excellence, while in their T.A. duties saying things such as "Wow, you don't know that", and refuse to teach an elemental concept. This power trip blocks the process of education; being in an employee of an academic institute, they are there to help educate and build the body of science, but instead think selfishly in looking at their academic achievements. They are the kind of people who were bred out of this academic competition that exists in a capitalistic society, a concept of every man/woman for themselves, only yielding the best of the best. But these people fail to see what science really is. They fail to see that it is a body of knowledge that is dependent of everyone working as a whole.

Ending Comments

It will be tough to be subjective through a land of no standardized tests, creating a lot of issues in how to test the mass number of students without multiple choice. The recourses to mark thousands of objective tests at a time are just not here unless we can find a testing method in the future that both appeases this method along with the practicality of marking.

I'm not necessarily saying that we should put all of our teaching into the creativity process because we will still need to have memorized a great deal to get anywhere in the scientific world. Our brains rely on connections to get anywhere, which requires us to have this knowledge in our memory. We need to see the comparisons that the computers are unable to see, this also being known as human intuition.

References
[1]Sparrow, Betsy, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner. "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips." Science333.6043 (2011): 776-778.

The Grounding Problem of Human Consumption

    The highest issue regarding how humans consume goods (take that as electronics, food, etc.) is that the wasted goods don't follow a pattern that exists in most biological and chemical systems: That being a cycle.  Life has harnessed the use of chemical cycles ever since there was life in the idea that a cycle exists as an efficient form, to reuse or remake from what has already been produced and used.  The point of a cycle is to expend the minimum amount of energy, and in the chemical world, this energy exists with chemical bonds.  For a chemical system, for example being that of the ATP cycle (adenosine triphosphate) our body breaks this down into ADP harnessing the energy of the phosphate-phosphate bond to power other chemical processis.  Now after the ADP is produced, the cell does not just toss this out of the cell into a landfill, but rather remakes ATP by adding another phosphate through the actions of oxidative phosphorylation (or by other biochemical systems) producing a cyclic existence of ADP and ATP.  If the cell were to throw out the ADP, the process would be extremely inefficient where it would have to use much for energy to produce more chemical bonds to synthesize a whole molecule of ATP.
     For starters this issue can be resolved greatly by our recycling system, but still manufactures still tend to use non recyclable plastics in many packagings.  Just last week I purchased a bag of candy, and it had a large non-recyclable packaging, but even more astonishing, I opened up the package to find that every miniature candy was unnecessarily individually packaged, in again, non-recyclable plastics.  This consumerism is always so evident during boxing day shopping, or anything of the sort, when people purchase just because it's on sale, where they have conquered the price, but really, have no need for the product.  I volunteer with a pre-teen youth group, and in hearing when they brag about what their parents buy them, I wonder how long it will take until those parents just toss those items to make room for more.  To overcome this hurdle, one must donate those toys to the less fortunate, something that many of the more fortunate parents don't do because they dont realize the importance.  A chemical analogy to this would be a cell in an ATP rich environment, where it would more rather use the ATP in the environment than to remake ATP out of the used up ADP.  This cell would adapt, and may have less mitochondrial systems to  make its own ATP, just as the parents create this non-cyclic system of consuming because they can take in products from the outside environment so easily.
     This idea also exists in our clothing.  Back when it was harder to get new clothes, people used to mend and edit their clothes themselves instead of throwing something away at the sign of degradation, keeping the clothing in a cycle.  And currently the quality of today's clothing is appalling, manufacturers produce these clothes in the philosophy that the consumers will buy more if they go through their products faster.  And if the consumers do get angry at the quality, the manufacturers wont necessarily have to deal with it.  If this was back in the day when consumers purchased local made clothing, if the consumer found something wrong, they could take it up with the tailor himself, resulting in the tailor wishing to produce a well made product.
     One of the biggest solution of this would be for governments to help out local companies so that it would be possible to compete with Chinese products sold in stores like Walmart and other enormous, money eating stores. My parents used to own a display fixtures company produced out of wood, and this company went down for this very reason.  Our customers ended up buying cheaply made fixtures from Chinese manufacturers, instead of purchasing our quality products.  I can still go into stores today, and see items we had made about ten years ago, where the cheaper Chinese products would get tossed very quickly.
    Discovery after discovery in the chemical world reveals endless amounts of cycles evident in our universe.  It is only common sense to infer that within a cyclic system, the laws of thermodynamics are most favorable.  Once this realisation sets in, one will see anything that doesn't adhere to this system and understand that a non-cyclic system is doomed for failure in the long run.  And for the cell in the ATP rich environment, once there is no more ATP supplied to it, it won't know what to do to produce any ATP for itself.