Thursday, April 30, 2015

A beeper-app for your cell phone

Suppose your cell phone has an app that sends out a shrill, recognizable whistle every hour for two seconds or something like that. It could be handy if you ever get caught under a lot of debris from a falling building. You would obviously like to be able to keep it turned off most of the time, but then you have to hope that if you get caught in an earthquake, you are able to reach for your phone and turn the app on!
Or perhaps, the app can be programmed to sense that signals from cell phone towers have stopped coming and turn the beeper-app on.  It would act as a kind of black box for the individual.
As an additional feature, you can make the whistle a frequency-modulated signal carrying your cell phone number or a contact number of someone who is to be contacted. If the rescue team carries a cell phone equipped with the same app, it could decode the signal from the buried phone and display it.
Skiers and hikers could also use this app. In addition to an audible whistle, the app could send text messages that can be picked up by some specialized equipment that rescue teams could carry. The design of such equipment is itself an interesting project; it would have to work in the absence of normal coverage by a cellular network. Can one use microcell equipment for this purpose? It is worth investigating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcell

The European Commission has co-funded a project for cell-phone assisted rescue work: 

You may also find the following item interesting: 

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Possible cancer risks associated with eating food cooked over a flame

Is it risky to eat phulkas or rotis that are cooked on the open flame of a gas or charcoal stove? Is this made worse by the chemicals present in gas flames? I started reading up about this because published literature shows a link between cooking food by grilling and the incidence of cancer. Possibly cancer causing substances such as Heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are formed when meat, including beef, pork, fish, or poultry, is cooked using high-temperature methods, such as pan frying or grilling directly over an open flame.
A research paper reports a finding that those with higher consumption of hamburgers were 79% more likely to get prostate cancer. 

Are there similar risks to vegetarians? A substance named acrylamide has been found to cause cancer in rats, and could therefore be possibly harmful to humans as well. High-temperature cooking such as frying, baking, or broiling produces acrylamide. Boiling and microwaving are less likely to do so:

The document linked to the URL below quotes Dr Paul Brent, the chief scientist of Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) on the topic of acrylamide and cancer. It also says that acrylamide is found in burnt toast.

I could not find any peer-reviewed publication reporting on possible links between cooking flat bread such as phulkas, rotis and naans in contact with a flame. If you wish to investigate the existence of any such link, there seem to be at least two different projects that are attractive. One is to use the Ames test to verify if the burnt spots in flame-cooked foods contain any mutagenic chemicals, possibly followed by carcinogen assays on mice and rats. The other project would be to do a questionnaire based survey of cancer patients from India, or in some other country in South Asia, to look for statistical evidence of a link between fairly frequent consumption of flame-cooked food and the occurrence of specific types of cancer. It would be significant if the test is conducted over a population of cancer patients having different types of cancer and if the statistics point to a link with a specific type of cancer, say cancer of the digestive system. 

Questionnaire based surveys do not usually establish any causative link, but provide significant information that may lead to further research. An investigation covering both the projects mentioned above could lead to very significant conclusions.
Only a fraction of Indians smoke cigarettes or its local version, beedies, while a much larger fraction probably consumes flame-cooked food. The number of deaths due to smoking in India is said to have been estimated by the World Health Organization to be 900,000/year in 2009.
Crisis in India: Smoking Expected to Kill 1 Million People Annually by 2010
Information presented above gives us a clue that the scientific investigations proposed could be of considerable value to Indians as a whole. I hope that epidemiologists would look into this question soon.

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